What The Mole People Reveals About Society Beneath the Surface

by Tara Adams
The Creature Beat

When Universal Pictures released “The Mole People” in 1956, most critics treated it as disposable science fiction. 

Reviewers at the time focused on the rubber masks, stiff performances, and bargain-basement effects. “Variety” called it routine genre fare. “The New York Times” dismissed it as another underground-monster picture built to fill the bottom half of a double bill.

What those reviews largely missed was the point.

Like much of 1950s science fiction, “The Mole People” used sensationalist, cliché-driven elements to talk about power, fear, and social control. 

Beneath the Earth, archaeologists discover a hidden Sumerian civilization ruled by a priestly elite. Below them live the mole people, mute laborers treated as expendable tools. 

The structure is simple and deliberate. One class speaks, rules, and interprets the gods; the other digs, obeys, and dies.

The film offers no subtlety about how this system works. 

Religion is used to justify violence. History is controlled to preserve authority. The mole people are labeled subhuman, making their suffering acceptable. For a postwar audience living through McCarthyism and the lingering trauma of World War II, the allegory would have been familiar, even if critics chose to ignore it.

What makes “The Mole People” effective is its refusal to turn the oppressed into villains. The mole people do not revolt out of malice but out of necessity. Their uprising is portrayed as the natural outcome of exploitation. The ruling class collapses not because of an external threat, but because it built its civilization on cruelty. That idea, oppression as a self-destructive force, runs counter to the era’s usual monster-as-menace formula.

The Sumerian elite also reflect Cold War anxieties about authority and knowledge. Inquiry is dangerous. Science threatens faith. Power rests with those who control belief rather than truth. In a decade defined by loyalty tests and ideological conformity, the film’s message is clear: A society that suppresses questioning will eventually bury itself.

Critics in 1956 judged “The Mole People” by its production values, not its intent. That was common for the genre, which was rarely granted the benefit of serious analysis. Yet time has been kinder to the film’s ideas than to its makeup effects. 

Viewed today, its social commentary feels unmistakable.

“The Mole People” suggests that civilization is not measured by ancient lineage or elaborate ritual, but by how it treats those forced to live at the bottom. When a society decides some lives matter less than others, it doesn’t descend into darkness. It’s already there.