8. Forbidden Planet (1956)
The innovation of the Schüfftan process fell out of favor with filmmakers who instead turned to matte paintings to provide their films with fantastic landscapes that sets could not create. The next entry in our list set the gold standard for this technique and perfected a few more in the process. 1956's Forbidden Planet would provide a template for a slew of sci-fi properties to follow and Gene Roddenberry even cited it as a major inspiration for Star Trek. This cutting edge film uses matte paintings, animation and models to rework Shakespeare's the tempest into a tale of danger and alien menace on a distant planet. Forbidden Planet's special effects artists utilized split screen and traveling mattes to make objects disappear and reappear. Disney also provided animation to produce the alien creature that menaces the crew, animating the creature over top of the live action. To create the effect of the flying saucer traveling toward the camera, two models were constructed, one small and one larger one to create the sense of movement. Prior to Forbidden Planet, studios considered sci-fi films B grade material and usually gave them meager budgets. Forbidden Planet's success created a template for how to do big budget sci-fi right; the genre had been given legitimacy, which empowered a cinematic genius to delivery a sci-fi film with revolutionary special effects a decade later...