#745: The Crawling Eye

The Crawling Eye

Quentin Lawrence

Initial release: July 7, 1958 (USA)
Alternative title: The Trollenberg Terror (UK)

Not too long ago, Jordan Peele released NOPE, arguably his best film so far (it's certainly my favorite.) Leaving aside the film's core themes of race, show business and family legacy, NOPE's premise, that of a mysterious, even unknowable monster lurking in a cloud, swooping in like a living thunderstorm and eating people, is a compelling concept in a media landscape full of more mundane monsters. Like all the best kinds of cosmic horror, there's just no explanation for it; it's just there, a weird animal lurking above the California desert. Peele wears his influences on his sleeve (there's a lot of John Frankenheimer in Get Out) and while he doesn't cite it directly, the DNA of Quentin Lawrence's The Crawling Eye (known in the UK by its original title The Trollenberg Terror) almost certainly exists in NOPE.

Three people arrive by train to the mountain town of Trollenberg, Switzerland. One is a UN troubleshooter by the name of Brooks; the others are the sisters Anna and Sarah, a traveling clairvoyance act. Anna is the psychic of the pair, Sarah being her assistant and agent. Having a premonition, Anna insists they get off the train at Trollenberg, rather than continue on to Geneva like the sisters had planned. Brooks, for his part, intends to meet with a scientist friend who has been observing a mysterious cloud on the mountain in the aftermath of a series of deaths. After more deaths, and a mountaineer attempting to murder Anna before being revealed as having been physically dead for 24 hours, Brooks and his scientist friend come to the same conclusion: whatever force they're facing is the same one behind some deaths in the Andes a few years prior. And it seems determined to kill anyone with psychic potential, viewing people like Anna as a threat.

The Crawling Eye is about 2/3rds of a good movie and 1/3rds goofy schlock. The first few acts are entertaining, with little concrete explanation for whatever is lurking within the radioactive cloud atop the mountain. It's just there, gradually descending lower and lower with each new attempt to reach the village. It's the kind of stuff the best old-school cosmic horror is made of, especially when you throw in the psychic subplot and a little spy-movie intrigue as Brooks works directly for the UN tracking down supernatural threats to the international order. The final third, however, is where the movie gets its B-movie reputation, as the monsters are revealed and they're so very unconvincing. If Peele has ever seen this film, it's probably because it gained immortality in Mystery Science Theater 3000, the classic cable access show that basically invented making fun of movies (or other media) for an audience. The Crawling Eye was the first film chosen to get dunked on when the show graduated from local TV to national phenomenon.

And yet it's such an earnest film; there's a lot of it that doesn't work, and yet what does work manages to tie the whole package together. Terrible special effects and a cheap editing job don't really get in the way of what's actually a fairly original idea. The popular image of 1950s science fiction tends to look more like Mars Attacks! than anything else; but the truth is many of these films draw from older, darker sources. There's only so much they could get away with due to the social mores of the time, and yet there's a reason these films — good and bad, famous and infamous — still attract audiences today. It's not just that they're hokey, or cheesy, or goofy; they embody the split mood of the 1950s, an era of great post-war optimism (especially in the US) and yet also an era of great cynicism and paranoia.

Writing this in 2026, it seems that cynicism has won out; but we're a resilient species, and even after all the terrible things that have happened in the last few years, I feel like we're all due for a new kind of movie... maybe we can call it HOPE. 

-june❤