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.

Quatermass and the Pit

The original Quatermass Experiment TV serial in 1953 was followed up by two sequels that aired on the BBC throughout the 1950s, all of them written by series creator Nigel Kneale, and all of them eventually adapted into film by Hammer Film Productions (unlike the original, though, both sequel TV serials have been fully preserved, meaning I can actually provide a proper examination of them.) Quatermass and the Pit was the third serial (I’m sure we will eventually return to the second one, the aptly titled Quatermass II), originally airing in six parts from December 1958 to January 1959, near the tail end of the fifties Sci-Fi boom; studio disagreements kept the movie version, also written by Kneale and eventually directed by Roy Ward Baker, in limbo until 1967, when it was released in North America under the title Five Million Years to Earth. There was a different atmosphere for this kind of genre work in the late sixties (2001 would be released a year after this)—but while the time difference led to this being the only Quatermass movie in colour, the story remained intact.

As he did in the original Quatermass serial, Kneale uses the fantastical elements to posit some deeply unnerving questions about the universe we inhabit and the relationship we have with it—what makes us what we are, and can it be altered by forces beyond our control. The extraterrestrial body horror of Experiment is rendered less physical but all the more existential in The Pit, where our understanding of human history, both in cultural and evolutionary terms, is essentially unravelled. Rather than the encroaching aliens seen in the other Quatermass stories, the aliens here have already encroached—an invasion that took place in the distant past, its presence secretly looming over all mankind, until the day when it isn’t secret any more, and we are forced to confront what seems to be a monstrous part of our own nature.

The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

It is 1953—the space race hasn’t even started yet, and no one has ever been sent into orbit. In Britain, you turn on the telly and see the first humans ever to visit space, put there by an independent science group. That group loses contact with their astronauts, and then learns that they will crash down in the middle of the country. Three men were in that rocket when it launched; only one is there when it returns to earth, and he has been irrevocably changed.

I’ve written about the work of Nigel Kneale before, sometimes directly and sometimes only in regards to other things, and while he is known primarily as a UK television writer, he was also one that had a profound impact on science fiction—and horror fiction—in the fifties and beyond. This began with his 1953 BBC serial teleplay The Quatermass Experiment, which introduced his self-possessed, problem-solving scientist hero Bernard Quatermass. Considered singularly thought-provoking and terrifying when it originally aired, it gave Kneale the clout to continue to produce more more well-regarded Quatermass serials, as well as other relevant-to-me subjects like The Creature (aka The Abominable Snowman), among a plethora of television projects. It also got the attention of a little-known movie studio called Hammer Films, who bought the rights to make a film adaptation of the story in 1955, and in the process changed its name to The Quatermass Xperiment (except in North America, where it was called The Creeping Unknown), a nod to the fact that its horror content would certainly lead to an X rating from British content regulators (they would repeat that joke a year later for X the Unknown, a movie that they initially hoped would feature Quatermass, before Kneale refused the rights.) The film was also a success, and it gave Hammer the idea that maybe science fiction and horror movies were a business they’d like to get into.

Famously, Kneale hated the fact that Hammer recast his very British vision of Bernard Quatermass, played by veteran actor Reginald Tate in the TV serial, as a gruff American scientist, played by film noir regular Brian Donlevy. He had other issues with the way they changed the script, but mostly he was bitter about the BBC owning the rights to the original serial and not paying him for the adaptation. As it turned out, the only real consequences of those disagreements was that Kneale would write or co-write all the other adaptations himself—including the two Quatermass sequels and The Abominable Snowman—which led to consistently good films. Unfortunately for Kneale, despite viewing his own version of Experiment as the definitive one, the BBC’s decision not to keep recordings of four of the six episodes of the serial (this was back in the days when teleplays were broadcast live, and the original airing even suffered from some technical issues) means that the only complete filmed version of the story is Hammer’s Xperiment.