Monsters?
Fear?
INDEPENDENCE DAY
In the movie Independence Day, a 1996 American science fiction disaster film co-written and directed by Roland Emmerich, the producer arouses the fear by showing the aliens’ intelligence and people’s sense of uncertainty. People generally use ‘monster’ to describe the unnatural dangerous agents that they find loathsome or terrifying.
Monsters: Evil beings, mythical beasts, and all manner of imaginary terrors. The made-up monsters could be mythical, supernatural and magical, such as werewolves, zombies, vampires and ghosts. In the movie, people view aliens as a type of monsters that invade and bring harm to them.
Americans are deeply horrified when an enormous alien mothership enters orbit around Earth and positions 36 spacecrafts over Earth's major cities in 1996. People somehow amplify their own fear and act accordingly, White House’s decision for full mobilization. According to Karl Albrecht (click to read more), fear is ‘an anxious feeling, caused by our anticipation of some imagined event or experience’. Fear comes from things people worry about happening, not things that are actually happening. Simply, fear’s primary presence is in one’s own head. The sense of powerlessness contributes to the people's exaggerated fears.
The producers create a sense of uncertainty as human beings have limited knowledge about the aliens. Aliens are from outer space and they are believed to be having relatively advanced technology including spaceships, nuclear weapons and computer virus. They do not scare people by their physical strength but their intelligence. Alien’ s capability becomes the biggest fear of the human race, even they have not started an attack.
