Dying of Fright from The Creeping Unknown (1956)

One of the ten best horror movies I ever saw was The Creeping Unknown (1956), also known to many as The Quatermass Experiment. The film concerns three astronauts who have been launched into space aboard a single stage to orbit in a rocket designed by Professor Quatermass. It crash lands with only one of its original crew, Victor Carroon, still aboard. No one knows whatever became of the rest of the crew, so Professor Quatermass begins investigating. The survivor, however, has a strange fungus under his fingernails, which slowly spreads on his hand, then his arm. It does not take long for the good professor to figure out the survivor is mutating into an alien organism, which, if it spawns, will engulf the Earth and destroy humanity. The survivor, driven mad from the ordeal, escapes the hospital and flees the British countryside where the manhunt involved Inspector Lomax of Scotland Yard. The finale, obviously, involves a fully-developed creature of true horror and an ending that ranks up there in popularity as the destruction of the Washington Monument (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers) and the destruction of the San Francisco Bridge (It Came From Beneath the Sea).

 

The Quatermass Experiment was originally a six-part TV serial telecast live over the BBC in 1953. Regrettably, preservation was not applied over the years and only the first two chapters of the television serial exist in recorded form. Written by Nigel Kneale, the television serial was an enormous success with critics and audiences alike, later described by film historian Robert Simpson as “event television, emptying the streets and pubs.” Among its viewers was Hammer Films producer Anthony Hinds, who was immediately keen to buy the rights for a film version. Incorporated in 1934, Hammer had developed a niche for itself making second features, many of which were adaptations of successful BBC Radio productions. Hammer contacted the BBC on August 24, 1953, two days after the transmission of the final episode, to inquire about the film rights and a motion-picture was produced with American actor Brian Donlevy playing Professor Quatermass.

 

Timed to coincide with the broadcast of the television sequel, Quatermass II, the motion-picture went on general release in movie theaters in the United Kingdom on November 20, 1955. In the United States, Robert L. Lippert attempted to interest Columbia Pictures in distributing the film but they felt it would be competition for their own production, It Came from Beneath the Sea, which was on release at the time. Because The Quatermass Experiment was unknown in the United States, Lippert renamed the motion-picture Shock!  

 

Unable to secure a sale, Lippert retitled it again, this time to The Creeping Unknown. United Artists eventually acquired the distribution rights in March of 1956 for a fee of $125,000, and the movie was packaged in a double bill with another horror movie called The Black Sleep, starring Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr. Four minutes, mainly of expository material, were cut from the runtime of the film, which means there are two versions of the movie, each with a different title and four minutes difference in length. Whichever version you watch today, however, does not affect the impact of the film’s emotional pull. 

 

The Creeping Unknown opened in theatres in the United States in June of 1956 and was so successful that United Artists offered to part-fund a sequel based on the second television series. Ultimately the Quartermass series became a franchise with additional sequels (including a big screen movie starring Barbara Shelley titled Quatermass and the Pit). 

 

This film easily ranks as one of my top ten favorite horror/science fiction classics and is a must-see. The film also includes a bit of trivia: The Guinness Book of World Records subsequently recorded this movie as the only known case of an audience member dying of fright while watching a horror film.

 

Variety magazine, November 7, 1956