The Quatermass Xperiment (released as The Creeping Unknown in the United States) is a 1955 British science-fiction horror film from Hammer Film Productions, based on the 1953 BBC Television serial The Quatermass Experiment written by Nigel Kneale. The film was directed and co-written by Val Guest, produced by Anthony Hinds, and stars Brian Donlevy as the titular Professor Bernard Quatermass and Richard Wordsworth as the tormented astronaut Carroon. Jack Warner, David King-Wood, and Margia Dean appear in co-starring roles.Johnson, Tom (1996). Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography. North Carolina: McFarland. p. 108. ISBN 0-7864-0034-X.
The film concerns three astronauts who have been launched into space aboard a single-stage-to-orbit rocket designed by Professor Quatermass. It crashlands with only one of its original crew, Victor Carroon (Wordsworth), still aboard. He begins mutating into an alien organism, which, if it spawns, will engulf the Earth and destroy humanity. After Carroon escapes from custody Quatermass and Inspector Lomax (Warner) of Scotland Yard have just hours to track him/it down and prevent a catastrophe.
Like its source TV serial, the film was a major success, especially in the UK. It also brought public attention to Hammer Film Productions around the world. A sequel, Quatermass 2, followed in 1957.
Plot
The British-American Rocket Group, headed by Professor Bernard Quatermass, launches its first crewed rocket into outer space. All contact is soon lost with the rocket and its three-man crew: Carroon, Reichenheim and Green. The rocket later returns to Earth, crashing into an English country field. Quatermass and his assistant Marsh arrive at the scene. With them are the local emergency services, Carroon's wife Judith, Rocket Group physician Dr. Briscoe and Blake, a Ministry official who chides Quatermass for launching the rocket without official permission. When the rocket's hatch is opened, Carroon stumbles out in shock, only able to say the words, "Help me". Inside the rocket, Quatermass and Marsh find only the fastened but empty spacesuits of Reichenheim and Green.
Carroon is taken to Briscoe's laboratory facility on the grounds that conventional hospitals would have no idea how to treat Carroon, now suffering from an adverse outer space event. Under Briscoe's care, Carroon remains mute, generally immobile, but alert. Briscoe discovers a disfigured area on Carroon's shoulder and notices changes in his face, suggesting a mutation of the underlying bone structure. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard Inspector Lomax undertakes investigation of Reichenheim and Green's disappearance and, having fingerprinted Carroon as a suspect, alerts Quatermass that the prints are nothing human.
Judith thinks that Briscoe is not helping her husband, so Quatermass agrees to have Carroon transferred to a regular hospital, under guard. Marsh, meanwhile, develops the film from the rocket's camera, and Quatermass, Lomax and Briscoe watch it. The crew are seen at their duties, until something seems to buffet the ship. After that, there is a wavering distortion of the cabin's atmosphere, and the men react as if something invisible is there with them. One by one they collapse, Carroon being the last.
Something living in outer space entered the spaceship, dissolved Reichenheim and Green in their spacesuits, and entered Carroon, who is being transformed by this entity. Not knowing any of this, Judith hires private investigator Christie to break Carroon out of the hospital. Meanwhile, Carroon smashes a potted cactus in his hospital room, which fuses to his flesh. In the lift, he kills Christie and absorbs the latter's life force, leaving a shrivelled husk. Judith discovers what is happening to Carroon, who disappears into the night, leaving her unharmed, but traumatized.
Inspector Lomax initiates a manhunt for Carroon, who goes to a nearby pharmacy and kills its chemist, using his cactus-thorn-riddled hand and arm as a cudgel and leaving a twisted, empty man-husk to be found by the police. Quatermass theorizes that Carroon has taken select chemicals to "speed up a change going on inside of him". After hiding on a river barge, Carroon encounters a little girl, but leaves her unharmed. That night, he hides in the zoo, now with less of his human form remaining. In the morning, scattered animal carcasses are found, their life forces having been absorbed, with a slime trail leading away from the zoo. Among the bushes, Quatermass and Briscoe find a small but living remnant of Carroon and take it back to their laboratory. Following an examination, Quatermass concludes that some kind of predatory alien life has taken over and will release reproduction spores, endangering the planet.
The remnant, having now grown much larger, breaks out of its glass cage, but dies of starvation on the floor. On a police tip from a vagrant, Lomax and his men track the Carroon mutation to Westminster Abbey, where it has crawled up to the topmost platform of a metal scaffolding tower. It is now a gigantic mass of combined animal and plant tissue with eyes, distended nodules, and tentacle-like fronds filled with spores. Quatermass orders London's electrical power centres be combined and the generated power diverted to the Abbey. Heavy duty electrical cable is run and attached to the bottom of the metal scaffolding. The creature is incinerated in the electrocution before it can release its spores.
The threat eliminated, Quatermass walks out of the Abbey, ignoring all who ask questions. Marsh eventually approaches and asks "What are you going to do?" Quatermass replies, "I'm going to start again." He leaves Marsh behind, walking off into the dark. Later, a second rocketship roars into outer space.
Cast
Uncredited members of the cast include Maurice Kaufmann as Quatermass' assistant Marsh (a character played by Bryan Forbes in the sequel), Arthur Lovegrove as police Sergeant Bromley, Basil Dignam as Sir Lionel Dean, Jane Asher as the little girl Caroon menaces, Toke Townley as the chemist Caroon kills, Bartlett Mullins as a zookeeper, Marianne Stone as a Central Clinic nurse, Henry Longhurst as George, and Ernest Hare as the crash site fire chief. Real-life BBC announcer Frank R. Phillips appears as himself.
Production Development The Quatermass Experiment was originally a six-part TV serial broadcast by BBC Television in 1953. Written by Nigel Kneale, it was an enormous success with critics and audiences alike, later described by film historian Robert Simpson as "event television, emptying the streets and pubs". Among its viewers was Hammer Films producer Anthony Hinds, who was immediately keen to buy the rights for a film version. Incorporated in 1934, Hammer had developed a niche for itself making second features, many of which were adaptations of successful BBC Radio productions. Hammer contacted the BBC on 24 August 1953, two days after the transmission of the final episode, to inquire about the film rights. Nigel Kneale also saw the potential for a film adaptation and, at his urging, the BBC touted the scripts around a number of producers, including the Boulting Brothers and Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. Kneale met with Sidney Gilliat to discuss the scripts but Gilliat was reluctant to buy the rights as he felt any film adaptation would inevitably receive an 'X' Certificate from the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), restricting admission to persons over the age of sixteen. Hammer was not so reticent, deciding from the outset that they would deliberately pursue an 'X' Certificate. Hammer's offer met some resistance within the BBC, with one executive expressing reservations that The Quatermass Experiment was not suitable material for the company, but the rights were nevertheless sold for an advance of £500.
Nigel Kneale was a BBC employee at the time, which meant that his scripts were owned entirely by the BBC. He received no extra payment for the sale of the film rights. This became a matter of some resentment on Kneale's part, and when his BBC contract came up for renewal he demanded and secured control over any future film rights for his work. Despite this, Kneale remained bitter over the affair until the BBC made an ex-gratia payment of £3,000 to him in 1967, in recognition of his creation of Quatermass.
The film was co-produced by Robert L. Lippert, an American film producer and distributor. Hammer had entered into an arrangement with Lippert in 1951 under which Lippert provided finance and supplied American stars for Hammer's films and distributed them in the United States. In return Hammer's distribution arm, Exclusive Films, distributed Lippert's own films in the United Kingdom. Quota laws in the UK meant that US films had to have a British supporting feature, so it was in the American studios' interests to fund these features to recover a greater proportion of the box office receipts.
Writing The first draft of the screenplay was written by Richard Landau, an American provided by Lippert who had worked on six previous Lippert-Hammer productions, including Spaceways (1953), one of the company's first forays into science fiction. Landau made significant changes in condensing the action to less than half the length of the original teleplay. The opening 30 minutes of the television version are covered in just two minutes in the Hammer film. In the process Landau played up the horror elements of Kneale's original teleplay. Aware that the film would be co-funded by American backers, Landau added a transatlantic dimension to the script: Quatermass's "British Rocket Group" became the "British-American Rocket Group" and the character of his assistant, Briscoe, was rewritten as a US Air Force flight surgeon. Quatermass himself was demoted to a doctor and written much more as an action hero than the thoughtful scientist created by Nigel Kneale. Some characters from the television version, such as the journalist James Fullalove, are omitted altogether. Judith Carroon's role in the film version is reduced to little more than that of the stricken astronaut's anxious wife, whereas in the television version she is also a prominent member of Quatermass's Rocket Group. A subplot involving an extramarital affair between her and Briscoe is also left out of the film version. Kneale was particularly aggravated by the dropping from his original teleplay the notion that Carroon has absorbed not only the bodies but also the memories and the personalities of his two fellow astronauts. This change leads to the most significant difference between the two versions: in the television version, Quatermass makes a personal appeal to the last vestiges that remain of the three absorbed astronauts to make the creature commit suicide before it can spore, whereas in the film version Quatermass kills the creature by electrocution. Director Val Guest defended this change believing it was "filmically a better end to the story". He also felt it unlikely that Brian Donlevy's gruff interpretation of Quatermass would lend itself to talking the creature into submission.
Having fallen foul of the censors with some of their earlier films, Hammer had an informal agreement to submit scripts in advance of shooting for comment by the BBFC. When the draft script for The Quatermass Xperiment was submitted, Board Secretary Arthur Watkins replied: "I must warn you at this stage that, while we accept this story in principle for the 'X' category, we could not certificate, even in that category, a film treatment in which the horrific element was so exaggerated as to be nauseating and revolting to adult audiences". The BBFC were particularly concerned with the violence in the scenes where Carroon escapes from hospital and with how graphic the depiction would be of Caroon's transformation into the alien creature.