Streaming Availability: N/A (but you'll find it if you know where to look)
1955 is still two years away from the Sputnik launch, marking the beginning of the Space Age. This should be an exciting, triumphal moments of humanity conquering the heavens. For many in places of power in the West though, it is a moment of panic. The US is so terrified of any Communist victory, even a mostly symbolic one such as a single tiny satellite, that the full might of its global wealth and resources will ensure the capitalism solidly beats communism to the Moon within just a decade and change. There can never be a doubt as to who is in the lead in this Cold War again. In Britain, meanwhile, Sputnik is another reminder that they are now a third-rate power - fittingly the metaphor we use for such nations is "satellite".
What we miss in these petty political squabbles is that outer space is terrifying. This is a realm where humans were not meant to exist. Eighty years of exploration later and the space age has still truly not begun, with only tiny structures floating around, doomed by inevitability of physics and government deficits. Space is a dead emptiness, stretching for unimaginable vastness all around us, the few bits of matter we see being the rare exception. The idea we're all alone in a cold uncaring universe is even more disturbing than the idea that conquering races are waiting for us just a few planets away.
Scientists had a very good guesses as to what would happen when Yuri Gagarin became the first person to leave Earth in 1961. But there was no real way to know until it happened. The math says Yuri will be fine, merely passing through a vacuum before he can fall back to Earth 108 minutes later. But what if that math is wrong? What if our arrogant hubris comes back to haunt us? What if being alone in the universe were better than the alternative?
The Quatermass Xperiment (released in the US as "The Creeping Unknown) is a 1955 British SciFi horror movie based on a Nigel Kneale's BBC serial of the same name. Unfortunately, that original TV version is now mostly lost, like much of the old BBC output, - thankfully I planned to only review the theatrical versions anyway. Xperiment was one of the first big successes for Hammer Film Productions, who would go on make dozens of horror films, notably Dracula ones. The misspelling in the title was meant to harken to the British "X"-rating, showing that this would be a darker, nastier horror movie than what we've seen so far. Gorehounds, get ready, we have some gross things to see in black and white.
These old black and white British horror movies have a few advantages over their American rivals. There's a more cynicism on display here, they exist in a world of bureaucrats and the inertia of people covering their own ass first before heroics. Val Guest is a much better director looking for a larger scope for his movie. Xperiment is a not crummy productions shot on sound stages or in stretches of California deserts, its shot all across London, with a climax at Westminster Abbey, in the very heart of English culture. The aliens of our previous two films could only annoy small groups of isolated Americans. Here, this invasion nearly destroys what's left of the British Empire. People die horribly, painfully. Animals too.
The Quatermass Xperiment was the first of three films starring Kneale's character of Professor Bernard Quatermass, a rocket scientists and foe of all alien attacks here on Earth. Quatermass (played the American Brian Donlevy) is an interesting kind of hero for the space age: he's an older man, a brilliant scientist, but also arrogant and even cruel. Donlevy plays him as an early Hollywood tough, a gangster with a PhD that can shout down the Red Tape and bully the ministries. He's a project manager, an Oppenheimer, not a superhero. Xperiment depicts him at his very worst. He seems to be another Dr. Carrington, so dogmatic about his science that's he's willing to sacrifice anybody and anything for its own sake. We'll see better versions of the Professor in the next two films. Eventually this character would inspire the BBC's greatest hero, the Doctor of Doctor Who, but it is a long journey from Brian Donlevy to Ncuti Gatwa.
When Quatermass' first rocket launch crash lands, he's cool and unconcerned about the fate of his astronauts, accepting the grim reality that his men are all dead. That is until the lone survivor, Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth), begins tapping to escape. Carroon can only say "help me", while twitching his right hand. Meanwhile, his two crewmen have disappeared entirely, leaving nothing but empty suits and bits of dust - which might be their disintegrated remains. Quatermass keep Carroon out of the hospital as long as he can, keeps the media quiet, and bickers with Scotland Yard. Rocketry is his only concern, until he realizes what his ship has brought back with it.
Right from the start of The Quatermass Xperiment we're steeped in still-fresh horrors of the war. We open on a small country home suddenly erupting to the noise of buzzing in the air, then a terrible crash. This noise would be familiar to many in the audience having survived Hitler's V-1 and V-2 attacks in the war. It is a legitimately scary opening, and the movie to follow holds up well to this tone.
Nobody can explain what has happened to the two missing men - or what is still happening to Carroon, slowly changing and transforming. He is less and less human as the film goes on, and the movie is chilling enough to never explain where the human ends and the alien begins. One can only hope for Carroon's sake that what's left of him dies well before The Quatermass Xperiment becomes one of the very first body horror films. But Wordsworth plays the role with a great deal of pain and sympathy, a man struggling to stay himself as long as he can until the unearthly possession fully takes hold. The final form we see is not human at all, instead a mass of tentacles, about to undergo yet another stage in its life cycle.
It really is surprising how much we get to see in this early Hammer horror film. Head are smashed in, eyes are missing from their sockets, Carroon's hand is an awful lump of flesh, half fused with a cactus and other things, - we get to see it. The horror is effective all through the production. Prof Quatermass and his team finally wrestle some footage from the craft from the slow development lab, and what they see is a very early example of Found Footage horror. "Play it again", barks Quatermass, determined to solve the mystery no matter how terrible the implications.
There is a night scene of the alien creature (now perhaps no longer Carroon at all) attacking a zoo from behind bushes. And while you do not see one animal eaten, it is a masterpiece of building suspense with economy. The horror is built with slow pans into the bushes, then the alien's silhouette in shadow lumbering towards its prey, sold finally with the zoo creature's terrified reactions. If somebody forced me to teach a class on how to film a horror scene, The Quatermass Xperiment would be on the curriculum.
This rules. Movies in 1955 could kick ass, apparently.
The Quatermass Xperiment ends with the world saved - if only barely. The Professor organizes a last-minute Operation Yashima to use all the power in London to electrocute the creature. All of England watches as BBC cameras are trained on the tentacles that once were a human astronaut. The American movies we've seen all end in triumph. Here, we only have tragedy. There's a line of corpses leading right back to our hero, Prof Quatermass. He does not leave Westminster Abbey a conquering hero, instead he walks out as if in shock, ignoring questions from reporters.
"I'm going to start again." he tells us, humbled slightly, but not defeated. He's as stuck on this urge towards science as Carroon was towards his transformation. Science is not a rational urge in the Quatermass universe, it's a cruel inevitability.
Next Time! Well, we have to do Quatermass II. I'm as driven by my urges as anybody else, I cannot stop.
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