The Quatermass Experiment

In The Beginning, writer-director Val Guest accepted the job of transforming the BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment into a feature film for Hammer, with the stipulation that he could do it his way, as a ‘reality’ show, not a conventional haunted house monster movie. The big success The Quatermass Xperiment doesn’t look like a handheld documentary movie, but it also isn’t studio-bound or decorated with visuals previously associated with fantasy. Val Guest’s idea of ‘reality’ was simply to film in ordinary locations, without glamorous actors. An effort was made to treat the fantastic content — a crashed space ship, various slimy appearances of an outerspace organism in metamorphosis — as if they were ‘just there’ and a camera was trained on them.

Nigel Kneale’s brilliant concept and Val Guest’s pragmatic approach created the first English Sci-fi classic of the 1950s, and arguably the most influential. The idea of an organic invasion from outer space using us as its point of infection was already out there, but Xperiment makes it very personal. A luckless astronaut becomes the organic raw material for a species from beyond the stars. Hammer would quickly follow with  a variation on the idea, while exploitative blob-monsters appeared across the globe, in  Japan,  the U.S., and  Italy. The fate of that astronaut gave a preview of David Cronenberg’s ‘body horror’ films made two decades later, with visions of bizarre tumors and organic transformations. The idea isn’t magic — as every Monarch butterfly knows well.

Forget bug-eyed monsters and death rays: Nigel Kneale’s invasion from space is as simple as a biological contamination. If a ship from the tropics can bring a deadly virus to Europe, why can’t a rocket carry a new alien contagion back from outer space?  Hammer cleverly exploited the BBFC’s ‘X’ certificate as a marketing factor, by giving Kneale’s title an alternate spelling. Co-writer and director Val Guest distilled the BBC’s multi-part teleplay down to eighty suspenseful minutes. United Artists’ import version hit American screens in June of 1956, nine months after the London debut, with the title The Creeping Unknown. It was slightly abridged, as explained in the Extras.

England has a ‘Rocket Group.’

It’s the space age: even if a financial slump is stunting the UK’s aerospace industry, the Boffins have established a ‘group’ for space exploration. Professor Bernard Quatermass (Donlevy) rushes to the crash site of his rocket group’s first manned spaceship. Astronaut Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) stumbles alone from the sealed cockpit; his two companions are inexplicably missing from the tightly sealed ship. Victor is in a sickly trance and is unable to speak. Doctor Briscoe (David King-Wood) discovers that his tissues are undergoing disturbing changes. Convinced that the abrupt, stubborn Quatermass has quarantined her husband for his own interests, Judith Carroon (Margia Dean) hires private detective Christie (Harold Lang of Hammer’s Cloudburst) to spirit the sick astronaut from the hospital. The now deranged Carroon instead kills Christie and escapes into the streets, leaving Quatermass with no choice but to help Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lomax (popular English actor Jack Warner) track him down.

What happened in space?  The Professor has the answer: an unknown living entity entered the spaceship in flight, consumed the other two astronauts and took up residence in Carroon’s body. The space ‘thing’ collects and incorporates living organic matter into its biology. No longer himself, Victor absorbs other organisms (a cactus plant, zoo animals, unlucky humans) for raw materials. By the time Quatermass corners Carroon in Westminster Abbey, the astronaut has become a mollusk-like mass of protoplasm.

In Nigel Kneale’s view, Demonic Posession has been replaced by Parasitic Infestation. The ‘space contagion’ may not even be intelligent. Unlike American Sci-fi scripts compelled to kowtow to the Production Code regarding religion, this English show dispenses with the notion that the unknown is God’s domain, and that scientists are trespassers. The unflattering truth about man’s place in the cosmos is that the difference between a human being and crawling vermin is apparently just a few hundred switch-throws on a helix of DNA.

The courageous space pioneer Carroon was fully aware of the risks when he dared to test the ‘waters’ of outer space. It’s the same progress vs. humanism problem seen in David Lean’s The Sound Barrier. Kneale’s Quatermass character assumes that space is man’s future, and that risking the lives of Carroon and other brave astronauts is a necessary expense.

Part of Victor Carroon’s volunteer duty is to be treated like a test subject in a research clinic. Nobody seems to understand the concept of tight security. They put Victor in a lax quarantine, not realizing that Victor is himself the disease. An interesting test: find the exact point where Quatermass and Lomax stop regarding Carroon as human to be rescued, and start thinking of him as a monster to be exterminated. When does the change in attitude take place?

Inspector Lomax is the film’s voice of humanism, a decent fellow who finds himself taxed with saving London from alien monsters. The Bernard Quatermass from Nigel Kneale’s TV serials was a similar fellow, a kindly and responsible gentleman. Given the American actor Brian Donlevy, Val Guest reinterprets the Professor as a human blunt object, continually shouting his colleagues down while bashing through bureaucratic obstacles. Some Hammerphiles equate Donlevy’s Quatermass with the studio’s interpretation of the Baron Frankenstein character. Bernard doesn’t brood over his hard decisions, as did his American predecessor Dr. Fleming (Morris Ankrum) in co-producer Robert Lippert’s earlier Rocketship X-M. Quatermass wastes no time in mourning. The failure of the first space mission only puts more urgency on the next.

Why Brian Donlevy?  When American producing partner Lippert nominated the name actor Donlevy for the role, he was likely thinking of Donlevy’s part nine years earlier in MGM’s highly propagandistic whitewash of the Manhattan Project, The Beginning or the End. It’s a great movie to see, in the wake of last year’s blockbuster Oppenheimer. Brian Donlevy’s bullish Atom Project chief General Leslie Groves is a humor-challenged martinet, an obsessive who treats his mission just as seriously as does Donlevy’s Quatermass.

The Quatermass Xperiment betters most monster thrillers of its day because its creature is more than a man in a scary costume. Growing inside the pathetic Carroon, the cosmic parasite is a disturbing thing to contemplate. It rearranges Victor’s internal structure as it absorbs more living things. The creature grows differently depending on what organic matter it absorbs, an idea that echoes the shape-shifting creature in the famous science fiction story Who Goes There? The parasite’s possession-control capability is made shockingly clear when Carroon is compelled to painfully smash his hand into a cactus plant. The resulting grotesque arm sprouts plant-like thorns; its swollen appearance also reminds us of photos of nuclear accident victims, returning once again to the Atom age dangers expressed in The Beginning or the End. By the time the Carroon-creature is killing and absorbing zoo animals, we see only its staring eye, and hear its bulk dragging along the ground. The only hint of Carroon’s final form is the snail-like slime trail he leaves on wet cobblestone streets.

An early ‘Found Footage’ experiment.

Xperiment’s realistic approach adopts the urban-dull look of realistic British crime films. Ten years after the war, the London we see is still economically depressed. Carroon makes contact with various working-folk including Thora Hird’s alcoholic street vagrant. Is the show a debut for “found footage” filmmaking?  The rocket’s on-board automatic camera recorded time-lapse images of the flight, just as had been done on WW2 bombing missions. Instead of flashbacks to the space flight,  we see Quatermass and his Rocket Project assistant Marsh (Maurice Kaufmann, unbilled) look for clues to the mystery by viewing the film recovered from the crashed rocket.

Xperiment was a medium to low-budget production, and the resourceful Guest filmed accordingly. Hammer’s local Bray Fire Brigade was enlisted for the opening with the crashed rocket, which sticks out of the ground like a dart. Because London’s Westminster Abbey denied admission to Hammer’s film crews, special effects man Les Bowie used static mattes to insert live action into still photos of the famous church. A nighttime dragnet scene economizes by incorporating some stock shots from an earlier atom extortion thriller, the highly recommended Seven Days to Noon. It has the exact same semi-documentary approach employed by Val Guest.

In addition to supplying additional financing and actor Brian Donlevy, the American producer Lippert nominated his actress-girlfriend Margia Dean for the film’s only substantial female role. Dean receives star billing on American posters but is poorly dubbed and does not come off well. Also in the cast are favorites Gordon Jackson as a TV director, and Lionel Jeffries as a harried Rocket Establishment bureaucrat.

Alien life always “finds a way” too.

Nobody forgets Richard Wordsworth’s haunted-looking astronaut. The actor’s mime neatly balances sympathy and menace, projecting the idea that a malevolent ‘other’ is in control. As sympathetic as Frankenstein’s monster, Carroon has a beautifully acted and directed Karloff-like encounter with a little slum girl, who doesn’t know how lucky she is. The child is played by a very young Jane Asher, who only wants to play Tea with her favorite dolly. Ms. Asher was later to become an accomplished actress (The Masque of the Red Death,  Alfie) but for a long time was more famous as the girlfriend of Paul McCartney.

The Quatermass Xperiment is acknowledged as a major step forward in filmed Science fiction. Sci-fi thrillers of the ’50s offered violent threats and distressing sermons about the consequences of irresponsible technology. Part of the unease behind Xperiment is its suggestion that, where Life in the Universe is concerned, Earth may be little more than an orbiting Petrie Dish waiting to be colonized by whatever alien organisms might drift by. In other words, the cosmos is more likely ruled by cruel competitive biology, than a benevolent God.

Hammer Films would acquire all three of the Nigel Kneale’s BBC Quatermass serials for adaptation to the big screen. The company followed up quickly with the even more exciting Quatermass 2, also starring Brian Donlevy. The third installment was delayed by seven years while the studio pursued its lucrative gothic horror subjects. Packed with imaginative and intellectually stimulating ideas, Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy is now considered a high point of classic British science fiction filmmaking.