The War of the Worlds (1953)

In director Byron Haskin's and producer George Pal's science-fiction cult classic - an updating of H.G. Wells' 1898 science-fiction novel and an Oscar winner for Special Effects; remade as Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005) with a post-9/11 mentality:

• the scene in which the aliens invaded a farmhouse and one of them placed its creepy, tentacled hand on Sylvia Van Buren's (Ann Robinson) shoulder
• the scenes in which Los Angeles was set ablaze by Martian invaders
• the images of eerie green flying saucers with deadly heat rays
• the conclusion in which the aliens - attacking a church - were decimated by simple bacteria - as explained by narrator Cedric Hardwicke: ("The end came swiftly. All over the world, their machines began to stop and fall. After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things, which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this Earth")