It! The Terror from Beyond Space

The director Edward L. Cahn made 51 theatrical films between 1950 and his death in 1963, which averages out to a finished release every four months. None may be classics, but fantasy fans surely had a good time at  Creature with the Atom Brain,  The She-Creature,  Zombies of Mora Tau,  Invasion of the Saucer Men,  The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake and  Curse of the Faceless Man. Some of these look as if the money ran out on a three-picture deal, leaving Cahn’s project as the one that had to be shot for half its projected cost.

1958’s  It! The Terror from Beyond Space  didn’t get short-changed in the thrill department. It’s a ‘men vs. monster in confined setting’ revisit of Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World. It reportedly had the kids at the edge of their seats. It benefits from an organized, tight suspense script and an impressive spacecraft interior set. Several generations of fans point to it as one of the key inspirations for Ridley Scott’s blockbuster hit Alien, 21 years later.

Career writer Robert E. Kent got the nod to produce ultra-cheap pictures for United Artists in 1957, some of them in connection with the established producer Edward Small, who had been in business since the silent days. It! The Terror has the distinction of a script by an established Science Fiction writer, Jerome Bixby. For perhaps the first time in Sci-fi filmdom, a technical detail like an airlock chamber is presented without stopping for a full explanation.

The year is 1973. United States Space Command’s Mars ship Challenge 141 crashed on impact, and it’s taken rescue ship Challenge 142 six months to arrive. The only survivor Col. Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), famed as the first man into space, is now in big legal trouble. Ed says that all nine of his colleagues were killed by a monster he never clearly saw. Finding a human skull with a bullet hole, relief ship commander Col. Van Heusen (Kim Spalding) charges Ed with mass murder and places him under house arrest for the flight home.

Ed is soon proven innocent, in the worst of ways. A brutal, intelligent creature slips aboard just before launch, and crew members start dying left and right, drained of blood. ‘It’ is impervious to .45 caliber bullets, poison gas, grenades, and high-voltage electricity. It is initially locked away on the lower decks, but it has the strength to tear through the ships’ metal doors. Two crewmembers are killed outright and two more are wounded, including Col. Van Heusen. Van develops an unknown infection and goes off his head. During a tricky maneuver to outsmart the monster, Van jeopardizes everyone by un-shielding the reactor to expose ‘It’ to deadly radiation.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space yields maximum Sci-fi thrills for its modest budget. It may be small change next to the lavish color epics  Forbidden Planet and  This Island Earth, but box office accounting had proved that small-scale Sci-fi was the better investment, leaving outer space futurism open to independents and discount monster makers.

Everything in It! The Terror takes place on the Challenge spaceship save for two short press meetings. That conference set is pathetic, a windowless, featureless room. But the elaborate, multilevel spaceship set is a winner. We’re shown a diagram displaying its six vertical levels: Control (with airlock), Quarters, Laboratory, 1st Storage, 2nd Storage, Motor (with airlock). An airtight center hatch with a metal staircase connects each level. A commentary on this disc finally answers a key question. To save money, only one spaceship level built, and its décor rearranged to represent the different floors. We spotted no telltale signs of redressing — the same stain on a wall, etc.. The shoot had to be organized to film completely out of script continuity.

Star Marshall Thompson gives a low-key performance. His accused Ed Carruthers maintains an even strain, and when he’s vindicated he doesn’t whine, “I told you so.”  As covered in the recent review of the TV show  World of Giants, former MGM contractee Thompson had become heavily associated with fantasy and science fiction in  Cult of the Cobra and  Fiend Without a Face; after this show he starred in  First Man into Space.

The relief ship has two woman astronauts. Doctor Mary Royce (Ann Doran, James Dean’s mother in  Rebel without a Cause) is married to crewmember Eric Royce (Dabbs Greer). Scientist Ann Anderson is played by the glamorous Shirley Patterson, who started opting to be billed as ‘Shawn Smith’ on  The Long Wait four years before. Ms. Patterson was about to leave acting; she’d starred in two other Sci-fi pix,  World Without End and  The Land Unknown.

We first meet the women astronauts when they are serving a meal … but we are assured that they are professionals and not present just to scream at the proper moments. Neither is a prospective Ripley, fighting back tooth and nail, but Anderson does add her two cents to the ‘how to kill a monster’ debate. Ann is unfortunately the butt of a mildly sexist remark, when one of the male astronauts jokes that “she’s military property.”

Some of these elite military spacemen seem more like plumbers, but the script gives them reasonably logical dialogue. Veteran Dabbs Greer is fine as the senior member of the crew. Bob Finelli (Richard Benedict of Ace in the Hole) becomes emotional when the monster drags his brother Gino (Richard Hervey) into a duct and stashes him there for a later snack. The ducts on this ship are really spacious, by the way.

The other solid cast member is Paul Langton. His Lt. James Calder joins with Ed in a risky flanking maneuver against the monster. Ed and James don space suits, and use two airlocks to walk down the outside of the ship and re-enter on the bottom level. After all that effort Jim gets stuck in a corner with a broken leg and a smashed helmet, and is forced to hold ‘It’ at bay with an acetylene torch. Langton’s good acting heightens the credibility factor; the effort to rescue Calder leads to more and riskier hide-and-seek games up and down the levels, building to a novel and exciting conclusion.

Pauline Kael once noted that Hollywood space films always made space exploration a military venture. She must have been thinking of It! The Terror, for the Challenge is packed with weapons one would think would be suicide to fire off on a spaceship. Everybody carries sidearms. Besides an unlimited supply of cigarettes, the storeroom floor is packed with boxes of rifles, grenades, and a bazooka. Are they explorers, or invaders?

We like the ‘It’ monster even though it’s mediocre at best. It was designed and built by Paul Blaisdell, who appears to be trying to move on from the sculpted foam rubber used for Cahn’s She-Creature and Roger Corman’s earlier Day the World Ended. The ‘It’ thing needs to be seen in half-light or silhouette, as its various parts overlap haphazardly, with ill-fitting sections for pants, and a tunic that hangs from shoulder pads. When front-lit it looks more like a scaly-textured leisure suit. The head mask would be scary were it not for an unconvincing mouth with flat teeth.

Paul Blaisdell made the suit to fit himself, but the much bigger ex-cowboy star and gorilla suit actor Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan was hired instead. The dimpled ‘tongue’ we see is Ray Corrigan’s actual chin: his head was too big for the mask as well. The monster is supposed to be smart and quick, but Corrigan ignored direction and played him much the same way he played gorillas in at least nine jungle monster movies.

‘It’ looks acceptable when kept mostly in the dark, as in the photos selected for this article. Kids loved the silhouette shot of the monster bending a rifle in two. Edward L. Cahn put more into It! The Terror than most of his lesser pictures: handsome compositions, good blocking and effective camera moves. He must have been inspired by Bixby’s screenplay and the elaborate set.

The final scene is a fateful Last Stand for the Space Command as ‘It’ batters its way through the last center hatch, and the astronauts fight back as best they can. One of them gets mangled completely off-screen, as if the censors demanded a cut. That’s odd, because an earlier foot-mangling shows ‘It’s’ happy claws gouging away at a shredded ankle. More shots may have been censored, because a close-up confuses which astronaut throws a crucial lever. That’s a minor quibble, about a scene that concludes in such High Jeopardy and excitement.

Online boards still debate the idea that Ridley Scott’s Alien ‘stole’ equal parts from It! The Terror and Mario Bava’s later Planet of the Vampires It! The Terror scribe Jerome Bixby nixed that idea, with the assertion that the events depicted in all three space movies were common to any number of Sci-fi novels and short stories.

The copycat arguments can go both ways. Screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, when writing Monte Hellman’s Beast from Haunted Cave, may have borrowed It!’s habit of stashing barely-living victims here and there, to feed on later. That ‘stolen’ idea shows up in the Alien franchise, too. If we want to get picky, the key Alien notion of human bodies being used as surrogate incubators for baby space monsters, is fully present in the tawdry 1959 cheapie Night of the Blood Beast.

To its credit, It! The Terror is mostly free of unintentionally funny dialogue. The few awkward lines involve Kim Spalding’s feverish, deranged Van Heusen. The performance could have used some closer direction, as Van Heusen comes off as a real dumbbell. He writhes in pain from his infected foot, while Ed and Ann are cooing sweet nothings to each other just a few feet away. Van, unhappy: “Looks like it’s you and Ed now?” Ann, mildly disinterested: “Let’s talk about it later.”

Another unwanted laugh pops up in the aftermath of an astronaut slaughter caused by Van: “Hey, what about Bob?”  And then there’s a real gem of bad line delivery: Van looks jealously at Ed Carruthers being tended by Ann and whines: “How come you always get away without a scratch?” The camera immediately cuts to Ed, who has a big nasty scratch on his forehead.