The Quatermass Xperiment

For the last few years, I have used October to give myself a viewing assignment: a different horror film each day. Now that I have escaped the real life horror of New Zealand’s public service, I intend to write a piece inspired by each film.

My twenty-eighth film is Val Guest’s The Quatermass Xperiment (1955).

A couple of years prior to the space race hitting its stride with the launch of Sputnik, Hammer Films anticipated the next seven decades of world events by asking “what if a rocket ship fell out of the sky?” In The Quatermass Xperiment, the spacecraft crash-lands in the English countryside carrying just one passenger, Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) despite having taken off with three.

Nowadays, it’s a regular occurence for the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Beck to have their work blow up in their face but in the `50s, a downed spacecraft was still a potent image. Like today’s bumbling STEM-lords, the man behind the failed mission Professsor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy), believes in a ill-defined notion of science at all costs. He’s a world away from the more honourable scientists of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms which may speak to different dynamics in the US and UK between their respective film industries, science and the military industrial complex at the time.

In both films, the scientists butt heads with troops but here, the military represents the more humane side of the equation. While Quatermass tries to cover-up the detail of what came back in that ship, Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner) pushes back but eventually relents saying “Now look sir, nobody ever wins a cold war. One of us must come over to the other side. You don't want to come over to mine. I'm not proud, I'll come over to yours.” This is a deeply cynical film.

It turns out that there’s something unusual about Carroon and that he may not be the same man that left earth. Most of the film takes a procedural approach focused on the role played by different stakeholders (military, law enforcement, science, medicine, media etc) in covering up this fact. It is compelling even when there’s nothing horrific onscreen. I’ve talked before about how so much of the sci-fi horror of the `50s contained the seeds of later body horror but when this film gets going, the imagery is extremely well-developed. Carroon’s alien transformation and the eventual monster are some of the best gross-out effects of the era.

I’ve loved all the films from the `50s I’ve watched this month but Quatermass may be the most darkly hilarious in terms of its prescience of the future direction of both film and science.