Director: Val Guest
Writers: Richard H. Landau
Stars: Brian Donlevy, Jack Warner, Margia Dean
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Also known as “The Creeping Unknown.”
A couple is making out on the farm, when a strange thing comes down from the sky and damages the house. The old man grabs his shotgun and goes outside. That’s no meteor, it’s a rocketship, and it crashed down on the farm! The firetrucks, police, and ambulances show up, along with a crowd of hundreds of spectators.
A crowd of experts, led by Dr. Quatermass, head to the rocket (in their VW Bus). It’s Quatermass’s “Q-1 Project,” and he doesn’t know why it crashed. They lost radio contact for over 57 hours before the rocket returned. He launched the rocket before getting permission, and his career is on the line.
After a great deal of debate, they open the door. Three men went up in the rocket, but only one, Victor, came down, and he’s in shock. He’s gaunt, his skin is rubbery, and he’s very unhealthy looking. He’s not only catatonic, his fingerprints don’t match the ones taken before his flight. They find some kind of jelly in the cracks of the ship, and the medical doctor thinks it’s the remains of the missing crew members.
They develop the film from the rocket and watch to see what happened. They watch the two astronauts die, but there’s no explanation for the missing bodies.
One man comes to break Victor our of the hospital, and dies when Victor touches him. He runs into his girlfriend, who finds him, but he gets away from her. Quatermass suggests that maybe the rocket passed through some kind of energy creature that took over Victor. Victor then kills a pharmacist by draining the life force out of him.
The next morning, Victor wakes up near a little girl playing with dolls. He runs off rather than kill the girl. That night, he shows up at the zoo. He doesn’t look quite so human any more, and he kills several of the big cats, draining off their life force.
“What do we look for now?” The inspector asks. “You’ll know it when you see it,” Quatermass says. A homeless woman reports seeing “An enormous creepy crawly thing crawling on a wall.” It starts leaving a trail behind it like a giant slug would.
It eventually kills a man at Westminster Abbey, and everyone converges on the spot, at exactly the same time that the BBC is broadcasting a show there. It’s twenty feet across and ready to reproduce. They divert all the electrical power from London to zap the thing. They destroy it, and Quatermass says he’s going to start again, with a new rocket.
Commentary
This was the first sci-fi based horror film that was hugely successful, and launched the sci-fi/horror craze of the 50s and 60s. It was also Hammer’s first big hit and their first real horror movie. We’ll be looking at a lot of Hammer’s work in the coming year.
This is a cult classic, and I can see the appeal. It’s a sort of scientific detective story, with a mystery, a monster, and even some action. The monster is pretty cheesy, but you can see where they tried a lot of new things, like the astronauts walking around on the walls of their spaceship.