Quatermass II

Finally, we are rounding out Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy, three alien-heavy Sci-Fi films whose impact on the genre in the UK and beyond cannot be understated (maybe don’t expect to see coverage of the much-belated Quatermass/Quatermass Conclusion, which was made when Kneale was in full “Old Man Yells At Cloud” phase.) As with The Quatermass Xperiment, Quatermass II was originally written by Kneale as a six-part BBC television serial, which aired 1955 (commissioned partly to give the BBC a high profile answer to their first privately-owned competitor, ITV), and then adapted into film form by Hammer in 1957 under the slightly altered title Quatermass 2 (or Enemy From Space in other countries.) With Kneale demanding new terms following his displeasure with Hammer’s adaptation of the first Quatermass serial (that argument led to the creation of X the Unknown as a substitute for a second Quatermass in film in 1956), he was given a chance to write the first draft of Quatermass 2 himself, which was then revised by director Val Guest, who had directed both Xperiment and the other 1957 Nigel Kneale adaptation, The Abominable Snowman. Kneale was so pleased with the resulting movie that, when he gained controlling rights to it, he proceeded to remove it from circulation.

Watching both versions of this, it’s difficult to really agree with Kneale’s position—Hammer’s version of Quatermass II is a thoughtfully condensed version of the serial, and even Brian Donlevy returning to play Quatermass (which one of the things that Kneale disagreed with most vociferously) fits better here than he did in The Quatermass Xperiment. While the movie version of Quatermass and the Pit made over a decade later is a generally good adaptation where you can still feel the missing depth and detail of the extended TV serial, the Quatermass II film captures all the atmosphere and deliberate storytelling without much compromise, and in some ways the story is even enhanced thanks to the upped budget. Importantly, the themes that Kneale imbued in that story are fully maintained, and with Guest’s direction, often intensified.

All of the Quatermass stories deal with a loss of human agency due to the machinations of cosmic horrors—the first one featured a near-mindless extraterrestrial organism that altered a man inside and out, and Quatermass and the Pit showed human evolution manipulated by a self-destructive alien civilization in the distant past. By comparison, Quatermass II feels almost normal, as a variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers paranoia; the TV serial came after Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers but preceded the film version, a case of parallel thought reflecting the fears in the air in the mid-1950s of secret subversive plots and the battle between free will and conformity. What this version of that story emphasizes is the terrifying speed in which the outside influence seeds itself into positions of power, and how the machinations of our higher offices seem almost tailor-made to shield this invasion from the public eye. There is a specific set of very British observations and ironies animating Kneale’s writing, leading to something that is relatively more grounded than the other two Quatermass stories and their broader existential anxieties, while still suggesting that a malignant, inhuman universe can suddenly assert control over us.

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

In the spirit of fellow 1965 release Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, which didn’t have Frankenstein in it but DID have a Space Monster, Planet of the Vampires features no vampires but does include at least one planet—its Italian title, Terrore nel Spazio, aka “Terror in Space”, is more non-specific but probably more accurate. It also features a great meeting of some of the minds discussed in previous posts: an international production headed by American International Pictures (who put its North American debut on a double bill with previous subject Die, Monster, Die!), directed and co-written by influential Italian horror auteur Mario Bava (several years after his work on Caltiki – The Immortal Monster), with an English language script written by Ib Melchior of Angry Red Planet and Journey to the Seventh Planet (alongside Louis M. Heyward, who was a producer of many other horror productions of the era like the Vincent Price classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes.) On a conceptual level, it feels very close to Melchior’s previous tales of astronauts terrorized by mysterious alien life forms on other planets, but with Bava’s visual sense, it goes from a mere suggestion of interplanetary Gothic horror to a pure representation of it—its alien planet feels truly menacing and not just inhuman, but anti-human. It’s likely for this reason that this movie became as unexpectedly influential as it has, very likely serving as another one of the inspirations for the Alien, which offered an updated conception of a space exploration haunted by inexplicable monstrosity over a decade later.

The Faculty (1998)

Consider this a back-to-school special.

The potential pitfall of all those self-aware, meta-referencing pieces of genre entertainment—a particular specialty of the nineties—is a sense of having your cake and eating it: they point out all the tropes and cliches while actively using them, without necessarily demonstrating any original or truly subversive ideas of their own. The Faculty aims for that style of storytelling, but has at least one new-ish angle up its sleeve: it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers set in a high school, leading to all sorts of new metaphorical possibilities for a well-worn concept. Of course, because of the style of writing, it’s a version of that concept where characters directly talk about Jack Finney’s original Body Snatchers story as well as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, signposting all of those metaphorical possibilities before you even get a chance to really take them in. That part of the movie was, not surprisingly, the contribution of Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who was assigned by the supervillains at Miramax to revamp a script by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, with the directorial role given to Robert Rodriguez, coming off of From Dusk Till Dawn and his support work on Mimic. As aggressively 1998 as any movie could be, this does make some honest attempts to straddle the snarky hipness of the meta dialogue with a nominally serious Sci-Fi horror take on teenage alienation.

“The Things”

Illustration by Olli Hihnala. All images in this post were collected on Peter Watts personal website.

There are certainly Sci-Fi/creature feature/horror movies made throughout the ages where it may not be unjustified to question why an alien that is apparently intelligent enough to build a spacecraft capable of interstellar travel would land on Earth and immediately start acting like a violent, mindless animal. It’s a recurring logic hole generally papered over, thinly, in order to justify traditional genre entertainment. Even The Thing From Another World, the starting point for many of these extraterrestrial thrillers, only provides a vague sort of justification for its monster’s behaviour, and it actually does more plot logic legwork than many of the films that followed it. In general, the alien’s perspective is not always given a lot of thought in these things, although it’s an area where even an otherwise rote story can really distinguish itself…when there’s the motivation to do so.

Speaking of The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake is another one of those movies where the question applies, probably even more than the original. It features one of the most inventively-portrayed alien creatures in film history, but its true form is so incomprehensible that it seems almost impossible to imagine it piloting a spaceship—but it not only does that, it also has the knowledge to build another one from scrap parts. I’ve always thought of the titular Thing as being like an intelligent communicable disease, seeking only to propagate itself and absorbing whatever knowledge and technical skill it needs to do so. Other people have their own theories about this, but only Sci-Fi writer/marine biologist Peter Watts, author of the evocative first contact novel Blindsight, managed to get his version published in Clarkesworld, one of the leading English language SF publications. “The Things”, his re-interpretation of the dynamics of John Carpenter’s version of the story, focuses entirely on the alien’s perspective, giving us a surprisingly benevolent take on the shapeshifting flesh beast that infects everything around it—as it turns out, such a thing is possible.

I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958)

I’m happy to have finally written something about The Thing From Another World, in part because it contextualizes many of the other Sci-Fi creature features of the fifties I have and will continue to write about, showing how each of them is a variation on a theme established at the beginning of the decade. The histrionically-titled I Married a Monster From Outer Space is another one of those variations, and much like The Thing, you can very easily read a lot of specifically Cold War paranoia into its story of unfeeling foreign agents taking over the lives of average Americans to further some secret agenda (it was shown on a double bill with The Blob, another one of those anxiety-drenched thrillers.) In that way it more specifically borrows from another fifties Sci-Fi mainstay, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, showing that you can’t even trust the people closest to you.

With all that said, this movie is not as straightforward as you might think, a light but fascinating deviation from the formula. For one, it has a specific vision of paranoia that goes beyond just looking for Communist subversives in the community. Most importantly, it makes a narrative choice that alters its tone compared to The Thing or Body Snatchers: it allows us to understand the motivation of the titular monster, and maybe even feel bad for it.

Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968)

The Japanese studio Shochiku, one of the oldest of all of the country’s major movie makers, went on a bit of a Sci-Fi/horror streak in the late sixties—last year, I wrote about their giant monster movie The X From Outer Space, which was the first in that loosely related group of films. Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell followed the next year, and while The X is a clear attempt to emulate Toho’s Godzilla movies (with its own idiosyncrasies, to be fair), part me wonders if this movie is taking some cues from another Toho creature feature: Matango. Much like that movie, Goke focuses on a group of stranded survivors, pulled from all over modern Japanese (and international) society, whose cooperation frays at the seams while a supernatural threat looms in the background—it’s also filled with psychedelic imagery and an overwhelming sense of bleakness and despair, reflected in the unnatural colour choices used for the environments. Unfortunately for Goke, very little in it is as visually interesting as Matango’s lushly unnerving sets—but, thankfully, it makes up for it in the sheer brazen energy of its themes and its extremely harsh condemnation of the State of Things in the late sixties. Subtlety of any kind has no place here, and what is created is a uniquely feverish fusion of alien vampire terror and utter cynicism.