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[Bud Brewster]

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This is the most elaborate and skillfully composed posts that All Sci-Fi member Phantom has contributed. He told me once that the reason he did make more post was because it was so time consuming.

I've been friends with Phantom since well before the first version of All Sci-Fi was created in 2006. And he's been a member of every version I've created since then.


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Quatermass Xperiment

The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

Based on a British teleplay that riveted audiences to their seats for several nights, this is the movie that put Hammer Films on the map as the heirs to Universal’s horror cycle of the nineteen thirties and forties.

Author Nigel Kneale, writer of the tv series, objected to several elements of this adaptation, especially the casting of American actor Brian Donlevy in the role of Prof. Quatermass and Margia Dean as the wife of Victor Carroon, sole survivor of the expedition into space. American film distributor Robert L. Lippert has suggested them to increase appeal for US audiences, not to mention that he and Dean were having an affair.



While most of the criticism is aimed at Donlevy as an American Quatermass who bulldozes his way through the movie, I find his characterization compelling. This is a man who has engineered the first manned trek into space in what appears to be an operation independent of the British government. It may have required just such an abrasive scientist to pull it off. “Well that’s something to say. Quatermass sent it up and he brought it back down.”



The sole survivor of the flight crawls out of the crashed ship. Note the upside down door. If the nose of the ship is pointing down, shouldn’t the door be in the opposite direction?



Many of the lines in the script justify Donlevy’s brusque performance. “There’s no room for personal feelings in science, Judith.”, “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.”



Richard Wordsworth as Victor Carroon delivers a savage performance as a man slowly being consumed by an internal alien force, fully cognizant of what is happening to him, yet rendered mute and able to communicate only through the horror and pain in his eyes and one hand which clenches and unclenches with violent fury.





In the mid nineteen seventies I was watching a documentary on television about infamous psychopaths when a shot of Richard Speck sitting in a chair and looking totally demented appeared. It raised the hair on my head. Speck murdered eight student nurses in 1966 and went to jail for life. The resemblance was uncanny. I found this photo on the internet, although it is not as good as the one I saw in the documentary.





Val Guest, who shares a co-credit on the screenplay, directs the proceedings in semi-documentary style and increases the pace with each succeeding incident. Location shots of the crashed rocket and the police cars and ambulance arriving while crowds rubberneck to see what is happening establish an atmosphere of film noir, in which darkness prevails and even the light of day looks filtered and somber.



A table and microphone and you have a radio station. There is a similar spare radio broadcast in The Incredible Shrinking Man.





Carroon’s encounter with a cactus as he is about to be secreted out of the hospital by a paid helper of his wife



In return for the man’s help, or greed, Carroon offs him in the elevator.



A shocking image for audiences of the 1950’s. There is a similar shot in X, the Unknown and in 1958 they reduced Dracula to dust in The Horror of Dracula.



Carroon’s wife is about to learn that you don’t offer a cigarette to a man who is turning into a violent alien.



Dean is entirely dubbed in the movie, either an indication of her acting abilities or director Val Guest getting back at Lippert for forcing the actress on him. To her credit, she does a great scream.





The movie now kicks into high gear. As the alien seeds within him increase the rapidity of his physical transformation, Carroon becomes more frantic, eventually killing a compassionate pharmacist who tries to help him. This is our first look at Carroon’s mutated hand.



His encounter with a little girl (Jane Asher) at a boat dock is reminiscent of the scene in Frankenstein where Boris Karloff inadvertently drowns a child. Sir Paul probably saw this movie in 1956 and never dreamed that he was looking at his future girlfriend.



Guest wisely refrains from showing us the various phases of Wordsworth’s final transformation, most likely for reasons of budget and the technical difficulties of creating a makeup for each succeeding step. There is a tantalizing glimpse of something nasty in the bushes at the zoo and an appendage leaving a slimy trail along the ground, the kind of creepy stuff that causes audiences to sit up straight and wish they could see more.



How do you trail an alien? Follow the slime.



A bit of comedy to release the tension. That’s Thora Hird as Rosie, local lush, who’s seen something terrible and want’s the police to do something about it.

Policeman: How was it walking, Rosie? Fast or slow?
Rosie: Walking? It was kind of crawling up the wall. (Realizing it isn’t the usual dt’s.) You mean I really saw it this time? (As she faints dead away.)





Two of the atmospheric images in the movie that combines science fiction with a modern detective thriller, as Scotland Yard attempts to track down the monster.

Yard Inspector: What manner of thing do we look for now?
Quatermass: You’ll know it when you see it.



The completely transformed alien has reached Westminster Abbey (don’t ask how) during a television broadcast.



Unfortunately, the revelation of the creature is a disappointment and looks more like the fake vomit that used to be advertised on the back page of comic books. Here it is being cooked with about a zillion volts siphoned from the London electrical grid.



The last image of the scientist who, after all the mayhem, has learned nothing about conscience or compassion.

Quatermass’s assistant: What will you do now?

Quatermass: I’m going to start again.

Over the years there have been reports of people actually dying of fright while watching a horror movie, one man in England supposedly croaking while seeing Lon Chaney in London After Midnight. None of them have proven true.

However…

According to the IMDb trivia page:

The film achieved a degree of notoriety Stateside when in 1956 the parents of Stewart Cohen attempted to sue the Lake Theater and distributors United Artists for negligence after their nine-year-old son died of a ruptured artery in the cinema lobby at a double-bill of this and The Black Sleep (1956). Cohen entered the Guinness Book of Records as the only known case of someone literally dying of fright at a horror film.

Apparently, to get the full effect of The Quatermass Xperiment, you had to see it when you were a child.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)