Few authors shaped the sci-fi genre as much as Ray Bradbury, and he wasn’t exclusively a sci-fi author. I first came across the author as a wee lad, thumbing through my parents’ old copy of “The Martian Chronicles.” While the bustle of humans and Martians remains in my mind, I recall most sharply the short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which details a high-tech, super-advanced automated home that keeps on running, even though it has long since been abandoned, its previous occupants wiped out by war. Ray Bradbury was proud of that story, it so happens, and wrote about it in the Christian Science Monitor, calling it the one story that best represents his ethos as an author. He was less fond of the 1980s TV adaptation of the book.
When it comes to film adaptations of Ray Bradbury stories, though, they are more scant than one might think. Bradbury was an arch, idea-forward author whose stories are not necessarily given to traditionally cinematic action. It’s also possible that filmmakers stayed away from his work because his prose was so powerful and his ideas so forthright that they are already just fine in printed form. I certainly encourage everyone to read “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451,” and watch Jack Arnold’s “It Came from Outer Space,” which was extrapolated from a film treatment that Bradbury wrote.
Although the author was known for sci-fi, only two of the films below are 100% sci-fi stories. Two of them are horror movies, and another is an anthology film. They’re varied, unique, and all worth a look. More than anything, they are all idea-forward, and lock into our sense of myth, or our intellect. Here are the five best movies based on the words of Ray Bradbury.
5. The Electric Grandmother (1982)
The 1982 TV movie “The Electric Grandmother” began its life as an episode of “The Twilight Zone” that Ray Bradbury penned in 1960. The episode, called “I Sing the Body Electric,” is set in the near future and follows a widower and his three children as they order a robotic grandma from a futuristic factory. He needs more help around the house, and a robotic, matronly housemaid would do the trick. Two of the children immediately love their new robot grandma, but the eldest is suspicious. It’s not until Robot Grandma saves the eldest daughter from a runaway vehicle that she is trusted.
Bradbury wasn’t too fond of the “Twilight Zone” episode, but nonetheless, he adapted that screenplay into a 1969 short story, which was, in turn, adapted into “The Electric Grandmother” in 1982. The TV movie stars Maureen Stapleton as the grandmother, and Edward Herrmann as the widower. The narrative for “Grandmother” is largely the same as the “Twilight Zone” episode and the short story, following a widower and his three kids as they accept a gynoid grandma into their home. The tone is sweet, so the audience waits patiently to see how this scheme will fail.
But it never does. Indeed, the plot of “Grandmother” extends further than it does in the short story. In the 1982 version, Grandma is sent back to the robot factory because she is no longer needed. The kids have grown up, and have nothing but fond memories of their grandma servant. Decades later, when the children are elderly, the robot Grandma is called back into their service.
There is no ironic twist. Robots, Bradbury posits, might just become a beloved part of our lives. Familial togetherness can be manufactured. Whether that’s good or bad, the viewer will have to decide.
4. The Illustrated Man (1969)
Ray Bradbury’s 1951 collection of short stories called “The Illustrated Man” has an unusual linking device. An unhoused former carnival worker has a body completely covered with tattoos. On the side of the road, he tells a young boy about the origins of some of them, explaining that they were given to him by a time-traveling tattooist. The tattoos are animated and alive, and each one tells a story. The unrelated 18 tales in the book are essentially viewed on his skin.
That premise was retained for the 1969 film adaptation of “The Illustrated Man,” which stars Rod Steiger as the tattooed vagabond and Robert Drivas as his young listener. The movie only adapts three of the stories from Bradbury’s anthology, “The Veldt,” “The Long Rain,” and “The Last Night of the World.” Weirdly, two of those stories are high-concept sci-fi tales that seem quite a long ways away from the campfire quality of the bookend material.
“The Veldt,” the best of the three, is sort of an anti-“Electric Grandmother” story about a future holodeck-like technology that parents use to raise their young children. The kids are put into a simulated African veldt, where they witness lions eating prey. This will, in a dark twist, turn the kids into predators. “The Long Rain,” the worst of the three, is about an astronaut lost on Venus looking for shelter. “Last Night,” the most poignant story, is about a mass vision of the end of the world, which all of Earth’s adults are convinced will come on a specific date. Many agree to poison their children to spare them from the conflagration. One might see the twist coming.
It’s a bleak movie, and quite uneven (like all anthology movies), but certainly thought-provoking. Zack Snyder once wanted to do a remake, but that project seems to have fallen apart.
3. The Halloween Tree (1993)
Mario Piluso’s 1993 animated film “The Halloween Tree,” for which Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay, might be the ultimate Halloween special. This is not a sci-fi story, but a thrilling magical adventure through time to explain where Halloween iconography comes from. The titular tree is a massive magical monstrosity that is festooned with jack-o’-lanterns. Halloween-loving kids will love this one.
The film follows a group of four trick-or-treaters on Halloween night, dressed as a skeleton, a mummy, a witch, and a monster, respectively. They are concerned about a fifth member of their crew, who was just rushed to the hospital to get an emergency appendectomy. While chasing his ambulance, the trick-or-treaters cross the lawn of a creepy mansion belonging to a Cryptkeeper-like caretaker named Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud (Leonard Nimoy). Moundshroud is, we learn, some sort of Halloween spirit, and brings the kids to the Halloween Tree, where the ghost of their ailing friend is seen playing. They are taken on a fun trip through history, each one learning about the significance of their costumes. For the mummy, they go to ancient Egypt. For the monster, they head to France and the invention of gargoyles. For the skeleton, they travel to Mexico for the invention of the Day of the Dead. For the witch, they visit Celtic druids near Stonehenge.
“The Halloween Tree” is both spooky and nerdy, full of both fun Halloween images and history lessons. I was one of those kids who loved both Halloween and history, so this movie was right up my alley. The animation is on the level of ’90s TV, which is slick enough for a low budget. Time will tell if the live-action feature film version of “The Halloween Tree,” reported on in 2012, will ever come into being.
2. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)
With Jack Clayton’s 1983 film version of “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” Ray Bradbury’s interests in the past and in nostalgia are laid bare. Although known for sci-fi, Ray Bradbury loved to dabble in memories of the past, and our relationship to both history and our own halcyon memories of better times. Bradbury was clearly very ambivalent about nostalgia, seeing it as both a blessing and a curse. In “Something Wicked,” Jason Robards plays an aging librarian who goes to a local carnival that clearly has magical qualities. The ringmaster of the carnival, Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce), has a magical carousel that can essentially grant wishes, and the adults in the town begin giving their souls over to Mr. Dark in exchange for the ability to be children again.
Two local boys are the main characters of the movie, and they witness everything with wonderment and fear, but it’s the Robards character who carries the film’s moral heft. He has to refuse his greatest wish in order to keep Mr. Dark at bay. There is a lot of foreboding, and a lot of classical horror imagery in “Something Wicked.” It feels literary, and it’s actually scary. The film bombed at the box office, giving it a bad reputation for decades, but make no mistake, it’s quite good.
“Something Wicked” was released by Disney in that brief window in the 1980s when it looked like it might shutter its animation department and have a go at being a more conventionally diverse studio. This was its crack at a proper horror movie. Disney is always more artistically interesting when it’s suffering financially. “Something Wicked” is proof of that.
1. Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
It was a pleasure to burn.
Ray Bradbury’s most celebrated novel, 1953’s “Fahrenheit 451,” also made for the best movie. Weirdly enough, the 1966 film adaptation was co-written and directed by French New Wave luminary François Truffaut, a commercial effect coming in between more ambitious films like “Jules and Jim” (1962) and “Stolen Kisses” (1968). Rather than feeling like a “sell-out” moment, though, “Fahrenheit 451” was just proof that Truffaut could work capably in a commercial (and non-French language) milieu. It was not only Truffaut’s first film in English, but also his first film in color, and his first film with a studio budget. (Nicolas Roeg shot it.)
The movie tanked, and Truffaut never made another movie outside of France. But it’s still a hypnotic film, and it has its admirers, myself included. Bradbury himself liked the movie, even though he took issue with the casting. Oscar Werner plays Guy Montag, the firefighter of the future whose job it is to burn books. Books have been made illegal in the future, and society, represented largely by the Julie Christie character, is dispassionately hooked on TV screens. (It’s a good thing that could never happen.) After a pointed confrontation with a book owner, Guy finds himself drawn to literature and begins reading books in secret.
Bradbury’s story ends in a community of intellectuals who have memorized one book each, a living library that is keeping literature alive. Truffaut reframes that ending to be somewhat sad. Literature may live on, but the actual understanding of the books in question seems to be less of a priority. Books may survive, but we can only be vessels of their content until we come to a time when book burning is no longer practiced.
