70 years of Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment: a very British alien invasion movie
Bringing claustrophobic dread and gory practical effects to an English village, The Quatermass Xperiment is the movie that put Hammer Films on the map and has proved an enduring inspiration to the likes of Stephen King and John Carpenter.
An experimental space rocket has returned to earth, crash-landing outside an English village. Rescuers soon realise there’s something very wrong with its three-man crew: two of them are no longer in the capsule, and the sole survivor Victor Caroon (Richard Wordsworth) is behaving strangely. Before long it becomes clear that Caroon has brought back something not of this world – something that has designs on taking it over.
It’s a sci-fi plot that we’ve seen play out in countless shapes on screen, from vintage X-Files episodes to recent Russian monster-horror Sputnik (2020). But seven decades ago the concept was groundbreaking, so much so that its realisation via Hammer Film’s The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) put the studio on the international map. The film is about to be re-released in deluxe 4K UHD and Blu-ray ahead of its 70th anniversary.
Quatermass’s eponymous hero first appeared in a 1953 BBC series played by character actor Reginald Tate. When the fledgling Hammer Films secured the rights for their adaption of the story, they altered the title to emphasise the then-rare X certificate they were confident the picture would receive.
It was a PR gamble that paid off: Quatermass set the template for swathes of future sci-fi horror, its story rich in the claustrophobic dread and gory practical effects that would become the hallmark of genre favourites such as The Thing (1982) and The Fly (1986).
Professor Quatermass – here played by Ohio actor Brian Donlevy and who is now head of the British American Rocket Group – is pitted in a race against time as he tracks the infected Caroon across London. In a haunting nonverbal performance, Richard Wordsworth portrays a man whose fingerprints are dissolving, whose bone structure is altering and whose conscience is being slowly consumed by a hostile lifeform. Donlevy, meanwhile, tries to convince the authorities that their stellar pilot has evolved into a spore-spreading parasite.
By the time of the film’s release, hostile aliens had been attacking England for over half a century. In 1898’s The War of the Worlds, novelist H.G. Wells imagined Martians armed with heat rays and chemical weapons descending on Horsell Common, set on wiping humankind from the earth. The story was written to reflect our own inhumanity: Wells opened his tale with a reference to native Tasmanians being massacred by European settlers, asking “Are we such apostles of mercy to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”
Post-Quatermass and its big-screen sequels – Quatermass II (1957) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967) – British alien invasion films became a little less philosophical. MGM gave us a memorable adaption of John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos in Village of the Damned (1960), but in its wake there followed Night Caller from Outer Space (1965), a B-movie in which a creature from Jupiter attempts to impregnate kidnapped earth teenagers. Spaced Out (1979) aimed to be even saucier in its depiction of intergalactic nymphettes trying to seduce four sexually-frustrated Englishmen.
One exception was The Glitterball (1977), a Children’s Film Foundation adventure in which two boys try to help a sentient metal sphere get back to its home planet. Despite the modest budget, the effects with miniatures as showcased in Quatermass were impressive enough to earn director Harley Cokeliss second unit duties on The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
Not all extraterrestrials in England landed so smoothly. Shot at Pinewood Studios, James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) was an infamously rocky production: the director felt the British crew were treating him as a novice despite screening his breakthrough hit The Terminator (1984) to assure them their craft would be in safe hands. When shooting wrapped, Cameron told the assembled Brits he was satisfied to “drive out of the gate of Pinewood and never come back, and that you sorry bastards would still be here.”
Despite operating on a distinctly non-Hollywood budget, it’s testament to Quatermass director Val Guest that his monster seems as hideous as the xenomorphs of the Alien franchise. Constructed from tripe and rubber, the alien’s unearthly movements as it slithers along Westminster Abbey are pure nightmare fuel: think King Kong if he were a giant coconut crab instead of a gorilla.
The effects and high tension made Quatermass a hit, rescuing Hammer from a run of lacklustre comedies and pivoting the studio in a fantastic new direction – and into the minds of some future creatives.
The name ‘Victor Caroon’ would be adapted to Victor Carune in Stephen King’s story ‘The Jaunt’. James Bernard’s relentless three-note soundtrack is an ancestor to the simplicity of the Jaws (1975) and Psycho (1960) themes.
But perhaps the biggest influence was on filmmaker John Carpenter, who claimed Quatermass “blew his mind” when he first saw it. He’d later collaborate with creator Nigel Kneale on Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), and when selecting a pseudonym while writing Prince of Darkness (1987), there was only one choice for the so-called Master of Horror: Martin Quatermass.