#783: The Quatermass Trilogy

The Quatermass Xperiment

Val Guest
Initial release: August 25, 1955 (UK)
Also known as: The Creeping Unknown (North America)

Quatermass 2

Val Guest
Initial release: May 10, 1957 (NL)
Also known as: Enemy from Space (North America)

Quatermass and the Pit

Roy Ward Baker
Initial release: September 29, 1967 (UK)
Also known as: Five Million Years to Earth (USA)

The Quatermass Xperiment

While the origins of cosmic horror are quite old, we typically tend to think of it in terms of the times and aesthetics of Howard Philips Lovecraft: 1920s-1930s, crawling horrors and sinister cults in dark basements and remote forests, protagonists powerless to do anything about it but often driven to madness, and if they're lucky, they don't have any sinister ancestral connection to whatever's happening. By the time the 1950s rolled around, cosmic horror had evolved somewhat; the coming of the Atomic Age, and the lessons learned (and unlearned) from World War II, had reintroduced the 19th century idea of the science hero. In stark contrast to the more negative views of scientists brought on by the atomic bombing of Japan and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the 1950s science hero wielded his knowledge as a weapon as new technology opened new doors to the unknown. One of the best known examples is Professor Bernard Quatermass, a British aerospace engineer and (fictional) founding member of the British space program. Created by Nigel Kneale (a screenwriter who wrote a lot of science fiction and horror stuff) for BBC television serials in the 1950s, Quatermass was depicted as an older man whose day job was not fighting weird things from beyond the stars, but fighting the politicians of Whitehall for funding for his space projects — but it's his scientific knowledge and modicum of political power that helps him save Earth from alien threats.

Quatermass first appeared in a six-episode TV miniseries called The Quatermass Experiment; most of this show is now lost, because the show was in fact performed live and nobody bothered to record four out of the six episodes. (The early days of TV were weird like that.) It was a smash hit, leading to a film adaptation. For the cinemas, it was retitled The Quatermass Xperiment, the new spelling an explicit acknowledgment, even advertisement, of the film's inevitable reception of an X certification, a then-new film rating roughly equivalent to the modern American R rating.

Directed by Hammer Studios veteran Val Guest (you may recognize him as the director of the 1961 anti-nuke eco-flick The Day the Earth Caught Fire) and starring American actor Brian Donlevy as Quatermass, The Quatermass Xperiment has something of a slow start, with a lengthy opening sequence surrounding a crashed manned rocketship (here still a complete rocket, sleek and chrome, as opposed to the multi-phase modular vehicles used in real space travel) being too hot from re-entry to approach. Of the three astronauts who went up, only one was alive, and he's largely delirious and unresponsive. Something about him seems almost unearthly, and he gradually begins to mutate. When he's transferred to a hospital in London, they soon lose track of him as he escapes and begins to leave a trail of death and destruction around the city, prompting a manhunt. Parallels to Universal's 1931 Frankenstein adaptation can easily be drawn; Richard Wordsworth as the unfortunate spaceman Caroon drew several comparisons to Boris Karloff, with his ability to emote wordlessly. In the end, however, the film goes full Resident Evil-style body horror, as the mutating Caroon retreats to the rafters of a church as he undergoes his final form, a grotesque blob of tentacles and plant-like flesh. It's not hard to see the legacy of Caroon in William Birkin. As these things go, The Quatermass Xperiment is good, classic 1950s sci-fi, at a glance campy and stagebound but surprisingly innovative of concepts we might have thought much more recent, such as a disturbing found footage sequence about midway through the film.

Quatermass 2

Quatermass 2 has the dubious distinction of being the first film sequel to number itself; based on a TV serial appropriately called Quatermass II (this one being complete, you can probably find it on YouTube if you looked) it is essentially a direct followup to the previous film: same director, same lead, same black and white. This time around, Quatermass, frustrated that the government cut funding to his moonbase project, happens to stumble upon a massive industrial complex, not marked on any map, occupying a village that was mysteriously torn down a couple of years before. He soon uncovers an alien conspiracy that goes all the way to the top.

Altogether more action-oriented than the previous film, Quatermass 2's finale involves a full-scale assault on the facility, though Quatermass is less a man of action and more a man of science, and it's his engineering knowledge that saves the day. The theme of mysterious alien meteors — possessing colours from out of space, perhaps? — crashing down to take over a small village evokes Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though I can also sense this film's DNA in the likes of Half-Life 2 and Atomfall. While I think I preferred the first outing, Quatermass 2 is nonetheless good fun.

Ten years passed. Another TV serial, Quatermass and the Pit, was released in the late 1950s, but Hammer's adaptation of it wouldn't release until 1967. Val Guest is gone; at the helm is Roy Ward Baker, probably best known for The Vampire Lovers (1970.) Brian Donlevy was replaced by Andrew Keir, who was a regular guest on TV shows like Doctor Who and Danger Man as well as a fixture in Hammer Horror. While Quatermass and the Pit shares some things in common with its predecessors, it's different enough, and distant enough, that calling the films a "trilogy" feels a bit misleading. Tonally, it's significantly darker, a more traditionally-minded cosmic horror in the classic Lovecraftian mode (indeed, references are repeatedly made to an incident in the 1920s.)

Diggers for a new subway line in the London Underground uncover a series of mysteriously inhuman skeletons; further digging reveals what is initially thought to be an unexploded bomb from the Blitz, but is eventually revealed to be a five-million-year-old alien ship, sunken in the clay through some ancient accident. The neighborhood is mostly-abandoned and rumored to be haunted; local records are suffuse with cases of mass hysteria and ghost sightings going back centuries. Quatermass and friends eventually develop the hypothesis that the dead aliens buried within the ship might have left some kind of racial memory in early humans that has persisted in the form of myths like ghosts and devils, and even a propensity for violence and xenophobia. The film's finale involves a mass possession of sorts, with much of London (if not the world) driven into a frenzy of violence as the spirits inhabiting the ancient ship project their will onto the populace; even Quatermass is caught up in it, with only his archaeologist friend immune to the effects and quickly surmising that old legends of the Devil being repulsed by iron might serve as a solution. Quatermass and the Pit is darkly sinister, a grim entry into the rush of cosmic horror films released in the 1960s. The goofy looking props of the alien corpses (which look like three-legged crickets) do little to take away from the pervasive sense of dread that permeates the whole film. It's one of the true greats of the Hammer Horror canon, and if I had to pick one Quatermass film, it would be this one. It can be argued that Tobe Hooper's cult 1985 flick Lifeforce is essentially a remake of this film; I can also see DNA of Quatermass and the Pit in everything from Doom 3 to In The Mouth of Madness.

Aside from the original three TV serials and their film remakes, there was also a distant conclusion in the 1970s, titled simply Quatermass for television but recut into a film called The Quatermass Conclusion; set in a then-near future dystopia, it involves people joining a cult called the Planet People, with only the aged Quatermass realizing that the cult is actually how a malevolent alien race intends to gather humans together for easy harvesting. There was also a TV remake of the original serial, again broadcast live in 2005; while it was largely successful, the first live television drama on the BBC in two decades, it mostly serves as a dry run for David Tennant's tenure on Doctor Who.

Quatermass and the Pit

I like the Quatermass movies. Nigel Kneale had a talent for the disturbing, bringing cosmic horror to the masses via his television stories. We can see that talent in later work like The Stone Tape and Halloween III: Season of the Witch (yeah that was him.) While all three films have their dated parts for one reason or another, I think they all have something to offer to modern horror fans. Quatermass and the Pit in particular really stands out for its atmosphere and special effects; watching all three movies in one go was really an excuse to watch the third one. If you like your cosmic horror with a touch of scientific heroism, there are worse options than Quatermass.

-june❤