A very sad day

Today, we learned of the deaths of two legends of the acting world. Neither was a surprise; they were both old men, at the end of long, varied and remarkable careers. Both, however, will be sorely missed.

Sir Christopher Lee was born in London in 1922; he died on June 7th. He was 93 years old. He began acting on film in 1947, and continued acting up until he died (his intended final film, The 11th, will be released next year). His list of credits gives tell to an astonishingly prolific career. He was Saruman, Count Dooku, Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, Fu Manchu, Lord Summerisle, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, le Comte du Rochefort, Death and Scaramanga (and he was supposed to be Dr. No, but events conspired against him). His Hammer horror credits alone are impressive: the Monster, the Mummy, Sir Henry Baskerville and, most famously, Count Dracula, in several productions. His friendship with frequent co-star Peter Cushing was legendary, and he never really got over his friend's death in 1994.

Lee's life outside of acting was even more remarkable than his roles. He played Rasputin? So what, he'd met the man's assassin. He volunteered for the Finnish Army and fought in the RAF, and was assigned to the effort to track Nazi war criminals at the end of WWII. He led a distinguished career in the Special Forces, about which he remained very secretive throughout his life. When asked by a director to imagine what sound a man would make as his throat was cut, Lee quietly replied that he didn't need to imagine it. He was fluent in five languages and proficient in three more. His final years were marked by a burgeoning career in metal music. He meshed heavy metal with opera to great acclaim. He was a Knight Bachelor, a Commander of the British Empire, and a Commander of the Venerable Order of St. John, and bore the arms of the Holy Roman Empire. The man was, simply, a legend.

Ron Moody was born Ron Moodnick in 1924. He died today, the 11th of June, aged 91. It's easy to feel sorry for him, as the announcement of his death has been somewhat overshadowed by that of his fellow actor, but Moody was a prolific and talented actor himself. He will always be best known for his role as Fagin in the musical Oliver!, a role he reprised several times, but he had many other charismatic performances. He was the wizard Merlin in Disney's A Kid in King Arthur's Court, Sir Isaac Newton in Revelation, and Uriah Heep in the 1977 adaptation of David Copperfield. He appeared in many television series, both on screen and through voice acting. He was, notoriously, offered the role of the Doctor by the Doctor Who production team in 1969, to take over from Patrick Troughton. He always regretted turning it down, although he did play a Time Lord-like alien in the children's series Mike and Angelo, in which he had a memorable turn as Angelo's father. (I have an elaborate and ridiculous theory that he was, in fact, the second incarnation of the Doctor's enemy, the Meddling Monk.) He eventually made an appearance in Doctor Who in the 2005 audioplay Other Lives, as the Duke of Wellington.

Two mighty lords of acting, taken from us. Great men.

Hammerama: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

There have been over twenty screen adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Hound of the Baskervilles made since 1914. Of all these, Hammer's 1959 version remains one of the most popular and well-regarded. It marks several firsts for Holmes on film: it is the first of the many Baskervilles adaptations to be made in colour, and also marks the first time that the great Peter Cushing played the sleuth. He would go on to play Holmes for the BBC nine years later, in which time he would get another attempt to adapt the story. Cushing's love of the source material is well known, and he brought much of his knowledge of Sherlock Holmes to the production, from his performance to advice on the set dressing. Famously, he suggested Holmes should affix his correspondence to the mantlepiece with a jackknife, as in the original stories.

As a gothic mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles was eminently suited to the Hammer treatment. It's a perfect marriage of studio, director and material, Terence Fisher's gothic horror stylings bringing out the spookier aspects of the story, while the rationalist nature of the story keeps him from indulging too much in his excesses. That said, plenty of Hammer's excesses are on display here, right from the extended prologue, taking a macabre glee in Hugo Baskerville's (David Oxley) deplorable actions. What little blood we see is glowing crimson, there's a ritual sacrifice, an underground mine sequence, and a gratuitous tarantula thrown in for good measure. For all this, and sundry little tweaks to the story, it remains mostly faithful to the plot. The strangest change is to Miss Stapleton, Mr. Stapleton's vicitmised wife in the novel, transformed into his vengeful lunatic daughter (Marla Landi) for the Hammer translation.

The real draw, though, is the cast. As well as Cushing giving perhaps a career great performance as Sherlock Holmes, his great friend as co-star Christopher Lee plays Sir Henry Baskerville with brooding class. The chemistry between Lee and Cushing is as strong as ever, even if this does have the consequence of making it appear that Holmes and Sir Henry are more familiar than they should be (excepting the classic scene of their misunderstood first encounter). Then there is Andre Morell, in my opinion, one of the great Watsons, erudite and resourceful, exactly what is needed for a story in which he shoulders so much of the action. It's a fantastic central trio, raising the production above its challengers. Plus, Cushing and Morell together make it almost like the Doctor and Quatermass working as consulting detectives. There are some excellent turns by other cast members, particularly mighty Francis de Wolff as Dr. Mortimer and John le Mesurier as the servant Barrymore. Still, they're just support for that classy core group.

The only thing that lets this film down is the rushed and anticlimactic ending, but that's true of every version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. A classic.

Happy birthday to Mssrs. Cushing and Lee!

HAMMERAMA: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

You can't have Hallowe'en without a bit of Hammer, and despite the unseasonal blazing sunshine this gone Hallows Eve, I turned to the film that put Hammer Horror on the map. Hammer had, of course, been around for many years before The Curse of Frankenstein, and had dabbled in sci-fi and horror with such titles as The Quatermass X-Periment. Yet it was Curse that would kick off their reputation as the masters of British horror. Full colour X-certificate gothic horror with just enough gruesomeness and gore to shock and entice the British public in equal measure. While tame by the standards of today's gut-drenched horror films, Hammer's chillers were scandalous by the standards of the time. Critics savaged Curse as debased and depraved as much they applauded its acting and production techniques.


There have been dozens of films based on Shelley's novel Frankenstein, already almost 140 years old when Hammer produced its own version. There were already numerous such films by 1957, the most famous and well-regarded being Universal's 1931 film. The success of this was jealously guarded by the company, and Universal did everything they could to ensure that Hammer could not replicate any elements of the monochrome classic. Every adaptation of the novel has played fast and loose with the source material, and Hammer's is no different. Indeed, the need to differentiate their version from Universal's perhaps led to the very different plot used in Curse, which bears little resemblance to that of the novel. Bookended by the possibly insane Baron Frankenstein telling his story while awaiting the hangman's noose, the storyline retains the fundamentals of the scientist stitching together a creature from human corpses and bringing it to life with electricity, but little else. Notably, one element to make it through was the Creature's encounter with a poor blind man, albeit playing out quite differently than in the book. It's a scene notably absent from Universal's version, although it was worked into its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein. However, while in the novel and Bride it is used to develop sympathy for the Creature by providing someone who does not see his terrible visage, Curse uses it to ramp up the horror and danger posed by the Creature.


This is, of course, the first outing for Hammer's classic double act, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, although not the first ever film to feature them both (that was a 1948 production of Hamlet, although Lee was uncredited). The duo would star in a number of films together for Hammer, often as opposing characters, and struck up a deep and famous friendship. Cushing is absolutely fantastic as Victor Frankenstein; idealistic, engaging, yet chillingly amoral and oozing with hubris. In spite of his great intellect, he is a borderline sadist, taking very little time to progress from drowning puppies to murdering old friends in cold blood. Not to mention his cold-hearted affair with his own housemaid, little more than a sex object used by the Baron to sate his baser impulses. Lee, however, is rather wasted here, with little opportunity to show the skill that later made him so renowned. Cast primarily for his height (his role almost went to Carry On... star and future Ice Warrior Bernard Bresslaw), he has no lines and surprisingly little screentime. Nonetheless, Lee manages to bring both fearsome power and an injured vulnerability to the part of the Creature.


Part of the agreement of terms with Universal was that Hammer's version of the Creature could not look like the infamous flat-topped version played by Boris Karloff. Make-up artist Jack Pierce created a unique new look for the Creature, and while it will never be as widely recognised as the Universal version, it has its own distinct quality. It's a particularly unpleasant version of Frankenstein's creation, with rotten, pallid flesh boasting very visible stitching. One eye is white with cataract, while the other is piercingly intelligent. It's a deeply unsettling image.

The film has a small cast, with the bulk of scenes going to Frankenstein and his teacher, accomplice and eventual enemy, Paul Krempe, played with conviction by Robert Urquhart. Melvyn Hayes is impressive, and convincingly Cushing-like, as Victor's younger self. Hazel Court is also very good as Elizabeth, the potential Mrs Frankenstein. But it's Cushing who owns this film, his every scene bristling with charm and threat in equal measure. He is, quite appropriately, electrifying.



The success of The Curse of Frankenstein would lead to the production of six sequels, all but one featuring Cushing as the mad Baron. More significant is that Curse launched Hammer into focusing almost solely on Horror until the mid-seventies. Hammer immediately went into production on Dracula, which reunited Cushing and Lee and allowed the latter to show just what he was capable of. Dracula, its own follow-ups, and the 1959 release The Mummy, cemented Cushing, Lee and Hammer as the new faces of horror.  

HAMMERAMA: The Quiet Ones (2014)

Hammer's big movie for 2014, this was actually filmed in 2012 and held back, so it's perhaps appropriate that I missed it in the cinema and only got to see it once it was released on DVD. Hammer's modern films are struggling to make a huge impact, falling uncomfortably between two stools. One the one hand they want to provide the traditional scares and atmosphere of Hammer's classic productions, while on the other they need to do some new and more modern. The Quiet Ones certainly feels like Hammer, with a slow set-up, a manic set piece and an uncomfortable atmosphere. As for the other side of things, there is very little to mark this out as anything new. Even the 1974 setting seems to have been chosen to make this feel like good, old-fashioned Hammer.


The central idea is a tried and tested one. Jane, a disturbed young woman, is manifesting poltergeist activity, and after years of being shunted between foster families and asylums she is now in the care of Professor Joseph Coupland, who is determined to purge her of the psychological damage that he believes is causing the manifestations. Not to actually help her, mind you, but because he sees himself as a scientific pioneer. “Cure one, and we cure the world.” He has two students assisting him, Krissi and Harry, and recruits young cameraman Brian to record his experiments. It becomes apparent very quickly that Joseph is blind to anything but his own hypothesis, and that his treatment of Jane comes to little more than abuse.


The whole production has a nasty undercurrent to it, drawing attention to the abuse that the most vulnerable suffer behind closed doors. It does, to its credit, avoid sensationalising this for the most part. The core cast are all very good, although Rory Fleck-Byrne hasn't much to do with Harry, who's just there to be a third party in the seedy love triangle with Krissi and Joseph. Both Erin Richards and Sam Claflin are very good as Krissi and Brian, but their characters are pretty cliched. Brian is gauche and nervous, but grows some balls in the end. Krissi puts it about and gets jealous when she's not the centre of attention. So far, so off-the-peg. In fairness, Joseph isn't the most original creation either, but at least he has some depth to him, and Jared Harris is absolutely magnetic in the role. An actor with gravitas to spare, his performance makes you understand why people would be following him even after his dismissal by his peers. Even as his seedier, selfish side becomes apparent, and his self-assurance turns to desperation, he maintains his position as the head of the household.


Best is Olivia Cooke as Jane, who really sells her character's fear, anger and internal torment. Manifesting her problems as an alter ego called Evie, Jane is the source of all the paranormal activity in the film. The question that hangs over the film is whether Evie is nothing more than the personification of Jane's trauma, as Joseph believes, a possessing spirit, or something altogether stranger. There's a theme of the abuse of power, and with it, the blindness of belief, be it in the supernatural or a supposed scientific truth.


However, John Pogue's direction leads a lot to be desired. The film switches between Brian's home footage and standard cinematography. Picking one or the other would have worked, but by mixing the two Pogue creates a film that simply feels disjointed. The switched to Brian's footage also signpost that something spooky is going to happen, making otherwise shocking events seem predictable. That's not to deny that the film is effectively creepy, but it's the build-up, though slow, that is most effective. Once Jane's “possession” begins to fully manifest, events deteriorate rapidly, but are less powerful for all their shock value. The first major manifestation, a bizarre “teleplasmic” tentacle that reaches from Jane's throat, is a shocker, but looks ropey as hell. (And anyway, shouldn't that be “psychoplasmic?” Or did they not want it to sound too much like The Brood?)



The climactic sequence is undeniably powerful and distressing, as Joseph's attempt to cure Jane becomes increasingly desperate and Evie's power becomes more destructive. However, the final ending is crushingly predictable and frankly badly realised, and a poor ending can destroy the good work that went before it. Altogether, creepy and very well acted, but let down by an unambitious premise and lacklustre direction.

HAMMERAMA: Demons of the Mind (1972)

Well, this is a peculiar one. A muddle of insanity, terror, murder and incest, it's a faintly sickening thriller. Directed by Peter Sykes in an erratic, free-form fashion, it's quite difficult to make sense of for much of its ninety minute runtime. At times I wondered if the revelation would be that all the characters were mad, which might well be true. It's all fairly hysterical, with every member of the cast overacting for maximum effect. Robert Hardy plays Count Zorn, a twisted landowner who keeps his two full-grown children imprisoned in his mansion home. His sister-in-law Hilda (Yvonne Mitchell) keeps the two youngsters under lock and key. Emil (Shane Briant) is a sickly, pale thing, yet still has the strength to repeatedly escape into the village and murder young women, while his sister, Elizabeth (Gillian Hills), with whom he has an incestuous relationship, manages a proper escape before being reapprehended and subjected to questionable medical treatment. 

The question of just who is insane and why the murders are being committed runs through the film. Patrick Magee gives his usual bizarrely mannered performance as Dr. Falkenberg, a theoretical psychologist who has developed a controversial treatment based on magnetic fields that supposedly permeate the universe. This Mesmer-inspired method seemingly allows him to probe into Zorn's disturbed psyche and reveal the truth of his madness. It's something of a flipside Fear in the Night, a psychological thriller posing as something supernatural. Demons of the Mind at first appears as a purely psychological case, but is revealed to have a supernormal element. 

There are some very striking moments in the film. The scattering of rose petals onto the bodies of the murdered girls is a striking motif, while various moments of female nudity aren't played for titillation the same way as in most Hammer films. Scenes of bloodletting the prone Elizabeth or watching the next victim get changed give an unpleasantly voyeuristic sensation. It makes the whole thing very disturbing. Overall, though, Sykes's direction is over the top and hard to follow. There's also a pretty unnecessary subplot with Michael Horden as a raving priest. It's a remarkable film, but ultimately too incoherent to really work.

HAMMERAMA The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Nigel Kneale's best known contribution to science fiction is, of course, Quatermass. However, he also scripted several other tall tales, one of the best of which, The Creature, was aired as a ninety-minute television play by the BBC in 1955. As with The Quatermass Experiment two years earlier, The Creature was well-enough received to catch the eye of Hammer Film Productions, and was remade as a feature film for in release in 1957.


Like many such early productions, The Creature was not recorded, so we can be very thankful that Hammer chose to buy the rights and develop a cinematic version. The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, to give it its full US title, could like quite clichéd to a modern viewer. Indeed, the English scientist on the trail of a legendary beast wasn't a new story even in the fifties. Professor Challenger was up to this sort of stuff in 1912, and that was a holdover of the classic Victorian explorer trope. Yes, this is all very Boy's Own Adventure stuff, but it's a solid, well-written and well-made example of that genre.


The film is bound to score points with me because it stars Peter Cushing, who reprises his role as Dr. John Rollason from the original. This is still early in Cushing's movie career, only his second film for Hammer, after his big break earlier in the year, The Curse of Frankenstein. The sturdy, gentle and terribly English naturalist Dr. Rollason is a standard Cushing performance, subtly physical and perfectly proper. He outclasses everyone else in the film. He's in a different league to Forrest Tucker, who plays the brash American entrepreneur Dr. Friend. The only reason he's even in this film is to get the film to sell in America. In return for providing an American name actor, co-producer Robert Lippert received the US distribution rights. It's the same reason we got the woefully miscast Brian Donlevy as Quatermass. Still, he might not be the greatest actor, but Tucker fits the arrogant yeti hunter part well.


Keeping the British end up is Richard Wattis, a well-known face in comedy from the fifties and sixties, as Rollason's fretful sidekick Peter Fox. Maureen Connell gets little to do as Helen, Rollason's wife, except exclaim her worries about her husband, until the revised final act, wherein she and Fox mount a rescue. These characters were not in the television version, and while they are a little surplus to requirements for the early part of the film, they allow for a more rounded cast and more complex relationships than otherwise. Arnold Marle is reasonably dignified as the Tibetan lhama, and there are at least some actors of Asian descent in smaller roles. As an aside, I think it's pretty clear that Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln saw either this or the original. Their Doctor Who story The Abominable Snowmen has almost exactly the same set-up and plot beats as this. They added in the alien intelligence and made the yeti robots, but take that away and they're practically the same story.


Very little alteration was made to the script for the movie version, thanks to its already compact running time, although director Val Guest made some uncredited rewrites to speed things up a little. Guest, who had collaborated with Kneale on the two Quatermass adaptations for Hammer, made a good call. While the film is pretty snappy for one of its vintage, it slows down abominably (sorry) in the middle section. Once the premise and location are set-up, the actual hunt for the yeti goes slowly until the final thirty-five minutes, when the Creature itself finally makes itself known.



Wisely, Guest keeps the yeti in the shadows for most of the film, with the explorers only on the cusp of its discovery. This serves the central theme of the story, that of rapacious humans being the true beasts rather than the noble snowmen, and saves them from the impossible task of making a realistic and budget-friendly monster. We receive only glimpses of the Creature, the most significant for much of the film being the huge, hairy hand that rips through the canvas of a tent. Once Rollason finally comes face to face with the beings, a theorised sideline of hominid evolution, we are treated to a glimpse of a face. It's a subtle design and a powerful moment, selling the strength and intelligence of the apelike beings. It's a strong outing for early Hammer, enough of a chill factor to be recognisably theirs but clearly before they had elected which direction they would be following.

HAMMERAMA: The Reptile (1966)

Hmmm, The Reptile... I'd expected good things from this one. It's supposedly a bit of a fan favourite. To be honest though, it was a little boring. By 1966, Hammer already had the “two strangers come to an isolated village” format down pat, but even so, this feels pretty formulaic and takes an age to get going. The Edwardian setting doesn't really add anything; this could take place at pretty much anytime with little change to the story. A great deal of the story takes place in the daytime, which is eminently sensible from a filming and logistics point of view but does rob the film of atmosphere. This is crying out to be filmed at night! The best scene is undoubtedly where the protagonist, Spalding (Ray Barrett) and his publican ally Bailey (Tom Ripper) exhume Spalding's brother from the cemetery in the middle of the night and the pissing rain. It's creepy as hell, with the sort of atmospherics that the bulk of the movie lacks.


The film only really gets going once Private Frazer – I mean, John Laurie – turns up at Mad Peter, an excitable vagrant, but they kill off this most enjoyable character quite early on. Jennifer Daniel is pretty good as Mrs Spalding, a more proactive heroine than most films of this genre tend to have, although she inevitably needs rescuing in the climactic scenes. The misguided antagonist, Dr. Franklyn – given great presence by Noel William – is a treat. Sinister at all times, he completely loses his shit with his daughter in one disturbing scene, leading Spalding to protest in the most English way possible. “I know it's not my place to interfere, but -” He's pretty useless for most of the film, even if he does man up when the Reptile bites him. Bailey from the pub is the real hero.


The Reptile itself is a great concept, but doesn't come off too well on screen. It's gimmick – a bite that injects a necrotic venom – is brilliant. The victims of the “Black Death” - more of a bluey-green death, really – die in a truly horrible fashion, their flesh putrefying as they foam at the mouth and collapse. Once we see the Reptile in all its glory though, it's disappointing. I realise the monster is an iconic Hammer image, but it's a frankly terrible make-up job, poorly designed and clearly impossible to see out of.



Jacqueline Pearce is wonderful as Anna, Dr. Franklyn's cursed daughter. She's sexual and innocent at the same time, terrified of her father yet doting on him, with an undercurrent of inappropriate attraction between them. Marne Maitland has little to do as her Malay keeper – he mostly just stands around, looking shifty and foreign. Pearce is excellent as Anna, but clearly suffering under the Reptile make-up once her character transforms. It's a shame that her experience under the make-up was so bad that it put her off this sort of role permanently. 

HAMMERAMA: Fear in the Night (1972)

This is the first in an occasional series of reviews as I go through my Hammer Horror collection in no particular order. New 'I Was Raised by Spacemen' on the way too!

Fear in the Night (1972)


Fear in the Night is one of the later films of Hammer's great movie period. It's one of those lesser known films that most people have never heard of, fewer still have seen. I had never seen it before, so I picked it out of the box set to begin my Hammerama. It's easy to see why it's less well-known; it lacks the gothic horror trappings that Hammer are most famous for, and it's terribly slow and light on action for the vast majority of its runtime. It takes an absolute age to get going. The opening titles run over completely incident-free establishing footage. I can't imagine a film starting like this today. Audiences would get up and leave before the characters were even introduced.


It's a slow burn psychological horror, the sort of thing Hammer did less often and to less acclaim, but were nonetheless very good at. Although posters billed Joan Collins as the big star – and very good she is too, a real vicious bitch – the main protagonist is Judy Geeson as Peggy. Geeson is gorgeous, boyish and wide-eyed, convincing perfectly as a naïve young woman in over her head in a situation she doesn't understand. There's an uncomfortable atmosphere throughout the film, a sense that nothing is under Peggy's control. It's revealed early on that Peggy has recently been institutionalised due to a nervous breakdown, and while she is cared for, nobody lends her claims of assault any credence. Of course, the fact that her new husband Robert, played by a marvellously sinister Ralph Bates, is clearly up to something adds to the unsettling feel.


Stealing every scene he's in is Peter Cushing, always the man to turn to if your horror film needed a boost and a touch of class. He plays the wonderfully named Michael Carmichael, a one-armed, psychologically damaged headmaster, and is horribly creepy throughout. He's far, far too tactile and overly friendly, in a disquietingly false way. He just makes your skin crawl. He comes out with lines like, “Do you like tying knots in things?” Wisely, director and writer Jimmy Sangster follows the edict that, if you reveal a noose in the first act, you must use it in the third.



The setting of a seemingly empty boys' school adds a touch of Hammer's gothic ethos to the proceedings, and the exact nature of the plot remains a mystery until the final act, when the pace rapidly increases. For a short time, it looks like this might be a ghost story, but it's far more mundane and cruel than that. It's a slow, strange film, but worth giving time.

I wish Bernard were here...

Who was Quatermass? A genius? A scientist, qualified in half a dozen disciplines? An explorer, on a quest to know the unknown? A pacifist, ruing the inevitability of war? A family man, trying to protect his own? A broken man, burdened by guilt? An idealist? An iconoclast? Or was he simply the avatar of Nigel Kneale, the man who created him? He was all these things.

Andrew Keir, as Prof. Quatermass, examines a Martian

On the 18th of July, 1953, episode one of The Quatermass Experiment aired on BBC television. Sixty years later, its influence on television drama in general, and science fiction in particular, is still being felt. These were the early days of television; previous forays into the still niche genre of science fiction has been adaptations of respected novels and short stories, or frothy adventures intended for children. With its horrific, scientifically-minded tone, Quatermass changed all this. This was serious science fiction for adults, written as thought-provoking, disturbing drama.

Nigel Kneale wrote The Quatermass Experiment as part of a long and hugely influential screenwriting career. He is known for his seminal 1954 adaptation of Orwell’s 1984, his early work adapting classic texts and his later career creating original science fiction and horror material for both the big and small screens. Quatermass cemented his reputation as a screenwriter and will forever be his greatest legacy. With his longtime collaborator Rudolph Cartier directing, Kneale created a unique piece of television history.

Bring Something Back

Reginald Tate as Prof. Quatermass

These were the days when space travel remained a theoretical possibility only, the forefront of rocket technology that had been the product of the arms race of WWII. Experiment exists in a lost future; an unspecified time at some point after 1953 in which the fear of the bomb is still with the British public but the march of progress is firmly going forward. The Experiment itself is the vision of Professor Bernard Quatermass: the first manned mission to space. Britain, on the forefront of science, although in cooperation with Australia. The three man crew includes a Briton, and Australian, and a German, quite forward thinking in those postwar years when international tensions were still high. A manned space mission offered a dream of inexorable progress in the face of postwar austerity. Yet it also reflected Kneale’s fears of the future. The possibility that science would yet do humanity great harm was clearly an element in the story of Experiment, as the mission loses control, the spacecraft drifting off course and finally crashing down to Earth with an unexpected content.

Three men went up in the spacecraft, yet only one returned: Victor Caroon. Shocked, unable to communicate, and somehow changed. He does not recognise his wife, Judith, a member of Quatermass’s team of specialists. Caroon’s tissue has been somehow altered. Shreds of information escape from his lips, but not in his own tongue. Slowly, Quatermass and his team realise the truth: the three astronauts have been altered merged, into one being, by some unknown force. A new life form has been born. Following an encounter with a cactus, Caroon absorbs plant matter into his system, mutating and escaping into the outside world, threatening England and all life on Earth with his relentless absorption. For 1950s audiences this was groundbreaking, frightening stuff, an astonishing glimpse of the unknown. Who could know what exists in the depths of space? Not Quatermass, who, driven by his own part in this catastrophe, risks his life to end the abomination.

The Quatermass Experiment starred Reginald Tate as Professor Quatermass, in my opinion a performance that has not been bettered. Although not Kneale’s first choice for the role – that was Andre Morell, who would play the character later – Tate was a veteran actor who brought a steely resolve to the part, couple with a troubled, human element that made Quatermass such a powerful character. Sadly, Tate died before production could begin on a sequel serial. What’s more, only the first two of the six episodes of Experiment exist; television in this period was still transmitted live, and only the first two instalments were even committed to film.

The Destroyers

John Robinson as Quatermass

Quatermass II featured John Robinson as the eponymous Professor. Robinson was a last minute replacement for Tate, and lacks the charisma that made Quatermass such an arresting character. His austere, almost callous performance is nonetheless powerful. The harder edge to his version of Quatermass is in character; we meet Quatermass here as a failure, his new rocket design having exploded catastrophically upon launch at Woomera, Australia. Robinson’s best scene comes early on, as he admits defeat to his colleagues and Paula, his daughter, aware that he shall never get funding to try his experiment again after such a tragedy.

Where the first Quatermass serial was an exploration of the hopes and fears of the new scientific age, Quatermass II is about the prospect of invasion and war. A mere ten years after the conclusion of WWII, the fear of invasion was not far from the minds of the British public. Both Cartier and Kneale’s wife, the author Judith Kerr, had fled the Nazis’ appalling treatment of the Jews in Germanic Europe. Fear of the unlike features prominently throughout the Quatermass serials, as does the fear of invasion, and conquest. Combine this with the increasing fear of Communist infiltration in the mid-fifties, the increasing industrialisation of Britain and the ongoing militarisation, and the origins of Quatermass II become clear.

When Quatermass is called on by his prospective son-in-law to investigate a secret base, seemingly linked, somehow, to a shower of meteorites that have landed in southern England, he is drawn into a conspiracy that reaches to the highest echelons of government. The meteorites are nothing but vessels for an invading force of ammonia-based life forms, a collective intelligence that can infiltrate the bodies and minds of their victims and turn them to the invaders’ cause. As the terrifying scale of the infiltration becomes apparent, Quatermass and his few remaining allies are forced to fight the ‘ammonids’ themselves, taking the offensive in Quatermass II – the Professor’s own rocket design.

Mars, the Bringer of War

Andre Morell as Quatermass

The third serial, Quatermass and the Pit, is commonly considered the finest of Quatermass’s tales. It’s a far more sophisticated piece of television, with the cautious steps towards a more filmic process in Quatermass II having come to a head in 1958 with this gripping, atmospheric piece. Andre Morell finally gets his turn as Quatermass. His version of the Professor is a somewhat posh, but with little arrogance. He’s a touch eccentric, less straight-laced than earlier versions, but unmistakeably intelligent, forthright, creative and highly moral. Quatermass and the Pit is outright criticism of war, with the British Experimental Rocket Group being wrenched from the Professor’s hands and into those of his military counterpart, Colonel Breen. Space technology is being corrupted into weaponry, the growing nuclear threat hanging over the viewers’ heads making its way onto screen.

Kneale’s misanthropic streak begins to rear its ugly head in Pit. When proto-human remains are discovered beneath the earth during the building works in process at Hobb’s Lane, in London. The unprecedented finds threaten to rock science’s understanding of humanity’s evolution, but no one is prepared for just how much. For buried with those fossils is the remains of an alien spacecraft. Quatermass becomes involved in the investigation, and slowly pieces together the truth of the matter. The truth behind the centuries of hauntings at Hobb’s Lane. The truth behind all things supernatural. The truth of the influence of alien life on our own development.

Uncovering the remains of the craft’s occupants – insectoid creatures with devilish horned faces – Quatermass comes to the astonishing conclusion that, millions of years previously, alien life came to Earth. The Martians arrived, and moulded us in their image. Their intelligence, their power, their capacity to advance… and also their hatred, their fear of the unlike, their capacity for war and monstrous cruelty. Quatermass and the Pit is a frightening mix of science fiction and the supernatural, building to a terrifying climax that rips open the secrets of the human soul. Kneale uses these Martian devils as a fictional exploration for what he saw in the heart of humanity: a deep, disturbing darkness.

Richard Wordsworth as Victor Carroon

Enemy from Space

Quatermass didn’t only change the face of television; he influenced the course of cinema as well. Hammer Films bought the rights to create a movie adaptation of Experiment. With an eye on the American market, they cast Brian Donlevy, an actor known for tough guy and noir roles. Disliked greatly by Kneale, he does bring a certain steely authority to the part, but his bullish arrogance is miles from any of the television Professors. Nonetheless, 1955’s The Quatermass Xperiment – respelled to emphasises its mature ‘X’ certificate – was Hammer’s greatest success to date, and spurred the studio’s production of further sci-fi and horror films. The Quatermass Xperiment – marketed in the US as The Creeping Unknown – is the very first Hammer Horror.

Hammer planned to follow Xperiment with a wholly original Quatermass movie, but were denied the character rights by Kneale. They released X the Unknown, starring Dean Jagger as Doctor Adam Royston, a sort of simplified version of Quatermass. An atomic physicist, Dr Royston is given good character by Jagger’s performance, and he would have made a better Quatermass than Donlevy. Unlike the extraterrestrial threats faced by Quatermass, the ‘X’ is a molten being from the magma beneath the Earth’s crust. A product of our own world, still as full of mysteries as the depths of space. Hammer then acquired the rights to adapt the second Quatermass serial, and released Quatermass 2 in 1957. Titled Enemy from Space in the US, it again starred Brian Donlevy, making him the first actor to play Quatermass twice.

For reasons unclear, Hammer chose not to exercise their right to produce a film version of Quatermass and the Pit until 1967. The movie version, retaining its original title in the UK but going by the evocative Five Million Years to Earth in the US, made some tweaks to the storyline and streamlined it, but it was essentially the same. For the first time in colour, Quatermass returned to critical acclaim and this remains one of Hammer’s most popular films. Although Andre Morell was approached to reprise his role, Quatermass was played in the event by Andrew Keir. Keir’s Quatermass is gruff and no nonsense, but with a keen intelligence and a powerful screen presence, a vast improvement on Donlevy.

An Endangered Species

John Mills as Prof. Quatermass

In spite of numerous attempts by the BBC to coax a new Quatermass serial out of Kneale during the 1960s, the Hammer version of Pit remained the only outing for the character during this decade. However, Kneale's career in television soared, and included such notable science fiction productions as The Year of the Sex Olympics and Beasts. By the 1970s, Kneale had a new Quatermass story to tell, and the success of his BBC-produced ghost story, The Stone Tape, led to the commissioning of a new, four-part serial. Goodwill of the part of the BBC faltered, however, and in the event, the final serial was produced by Verity Lambert and Ted Childs for Thames Television and Euston Films, for broadcast on ITV.

The 1979 serial was entitled simply Quatermass, although fans often refer to it as Quatermass 4 to distinguish it from its predecessors. Euston Films also released a cinematic cut of the production under the title The Quatermass Conclusion, another title sometimes attributed to the serial. For his final outing, Quatermass was played by respected actor John Mills. Now an old man, Quatermass has lost much of his spark and vitality, but none of his intelligence and keen observation. While he comes across fairly weak during the opening scenes of the story, his involvement in the latest astronautical mission galvanises him. Mills's Quatermass is a weary old man, lacking in faith in humanity and its endeavours, but one who is revitalised by intellectual curiosity and causes he believes in. While the threat in Quatermass 4 comes in the nebulous form of an unknowable intelligence, harvested the youth of mankind through pagan rites, the driving force for the Professor himself is simply a need to find his missing granddaughter - Paula's daughter.

Quatermass 4 is the most pessimistic of all the serials, blatantly displaying Kneale's contempt for the direction in which culture developed through the twentieth century. Quatermass is a moutpiece for Kneale, horrified by the violent, anarchic society around him. While Quatermass struggles to survive in the dystopian final years of the twentieth century, Kneale's issue was with the sixties and seventies, in which he saw a violent descent of humanity. While the final Quatermass serial is a chilling, evocative and lavishly produced piece of science fiction-horror, it is also a deeply cynical work that betrays an author terrified of youth and vitality. Kneale's own novelisation of the serial adds a great deal of depth to both plot and character, but fails to save the story.

An Uncertain Future

The remains of a Martian

Due to the far-reaching reputation of Kneale and the original Quatermass serials, interest in the Quatermass character remained strong through to the 1990s. Numerous attempts to produce a new cinematic version of Experiment faltered due to complex rights issues, while Kneale's pitch of a prequel serial, privisionally entitled Quatermass and the Third Reich, was met with little interest at the BBC. The ongoing story of Professor Quatermass ended in 1996, with a BBC radio production. The Quatermass Memoirs was a mix of archive material, interviews with Kneale and a new fiction strand in which we caught up with Quatermass, played once again by Andrew Keir, just prior to the events of Quatermass 4. This was Keir's last acting role; he died just a year later.

Nigel Kneale died in 2006, but he lived long enough to see his first, seminal script reach the screens once more. In 2005, digital channel BBC4 produced a low-budget remake of The Quatermass Experiment starring Jason Flemyng as the eponymous Professor. The one-off production was broadcast live, and featured a number of actors who were, or would become, well-recognised faces for genre television fans, including Mark Gatiss, Indira Varma and David Tennant. Richard Fell adapted the script, with Kneale acting as consultant. The production was generally quite effective, yet seemed slow, despite the greatly curtailed running time that seriously underran. Perhaps the fault was with not sufficiently updating the scripts; indeed, this version of the story exists in an even more vaguely defined time period than any of the original serials. While the live broadcast was seen as daringly experimental, the production came across as considerably less ambitious than the original serial, which went out live as necessity.

While the rights situation surrounding Quatermass remains complex, efforts continue to revive the character in some format. The latest such attempt is by the old stalwarts Hammer, recently returned from beyond the grave and producing movies once more. A year ago, a forthcoming cinematic remake of The Quatermass Experiment was announced. There has been no news since. Nonetheless, it can only be a matter of time before Professor Bernard Quatermass returns, in an updated production. For while times have changed and society has moved on, there is still a vast universe out there, full of unknown dangers. We need someone with intellect, curiosity, unshakable faith in science and a dogged bloody-mindedness to see us through. When the unknowable forces arrive from beyond, we need Quatermass.

Reviews are available at Television Heaven for The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit. A review for Quatermass 4 is forthcoming.