Quatermass Experiments – the Val Guest movies (The Quatermass Xperiment 1955, Quatermass 2 1957)

In an age where numerous digital and pay-per-view channels have divided viewers into smaller groups, it is harder to understand the enthusiasm that Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass teleseries engendered in early audiences. With only a couple of television channels to choose from, the BBC had a captive audience, and the audience loved the Quatermass shows.

It is certainly comforting to reflect that something as intelligently-written as the Quatermass stories were once very popular. The series put television sci-fi on the map by showing TV executives that episodic sci-fi could be exciting and stir the imagination. A few years later, Dr Who was made, which also featured a kindly, mature scientist as a hero who fends off alien attacks. While Kneale did not like Dr Who himself, it was the Quatermass shows that created the space for its creation.

This represented part of a growing movement in sci-fi to turn the scientists into the heroes. Often in 1950s sci-fi it is the scientist who creates the problem, and the military who clear up the mess. Increasingly the military would become impotent in the face of the unknown threat, and the scientists would solve the problem.

While Quatermass creates the problem in the first story, he also manages to resolve it. In later Quatermass stories, the Professor solved problems that were not of his own creation. Often the stories read like mysteries, with the scientists sifting through the clues to work out what is happening.

In the circumstances, it was only a matter of time before the popular teleseries was turned into a movie. In 1955, Val Guest made The Quatermass Xperiment, an adaptation of the first Quatermass story. Despite the film’s cheap budget, this unexpectedly proved to be the greatest success to date for Hammer Film Productions, a film company that had been around since the 1930s without really establishing itself.

The success of this film resulted in Val Guest being asked to direct Quatermass 2 in 1957, based on the second teleseries, Quatermass II. While this movie was also a financial success, Hammer realised that horror movies were more lucrative. It would be a decade before Hammer agreed to film the third Quatermass story, and this would be made by a different director and with a different lead actor.

These early Quatermass movies were not loved by the creator of the original teleseries. The movie needed to drastically shorten the television show, which comprised six half-hour episodes (most of which overran their time schedules). In the circumstances, this meant losing some of the intelligent and interesting ideas that underlay the original series.

Kneale’s biggest concern was the decision to ask American actor Brian Donlevy to take on the role of Professor Quatermass in an attempt to boost sales in America. Donlevy has the distinction of being the only actor to play the role twice on-screen, though many would say that he was the worst Quatermass.

In place of Kneale’s wise and rational scientist hero, the film makers had chosen an actor who brought a very different personality to the role. Donlevy behaved more like a hard-bitten action hero than an intelligent scientist, brusquely barking out orders to his colleagues, abrupt towards his critics, and careless of the feelings of others. Notably he is never referred to as a Professor in either film. While Donlevy was a decent enough actor, he was not Kneale’s Quatermass.

In line with this emphasis on a hero who is a man of action, there is an unfortunate diminution of the roles of the female characters. In Kneale’s stories, there is always a female member of the scientist team, albeit not a senior one. Val Guest’s movies did away with the women.

Judith Carroon is demoted from scientist to astronaut’s wife in The Quatermass Xperiment (in the teleseries, she is both). Far from being an intelligent woman as in the mini-series, she is a foolishly fond wife whose attempts to take her husband out of the hospital result in disaster.

I’m not sure if the fate of Paula Quatermass (the Professor’s daughter, who appears in Quatermass II) is better or worse. She is simply left out of the movie altogether. Women in Guest’s movies are silly or servile. We see them ignoring scientific advice and causing havoc, except when they are serving drinks or making meals.

The two movies are certainly not for the Quatermass purist, but there is something so powerful about the stories that it is hard to ruin them completely. In any case, while Val Guest may have found it necessary to leave many things out of the movie, he did bring many good things to them too.

Guest had one eye on making the films commercial, so he jettisoned long passages of talkative script in favour of a more rapid and exciting pace of action. He also made the fantastic events in the stories seem more credible by applying a semi-documentary cinéma vérité approach.

This was achieved with the use of hand-held cameras to give immediacy to the action. The dialogue is rapidly delivered and overlapping to add further realism and pace to the film. The monsters are kept off the screen until the end so that the audience needs to use their imagination until then.

The story includes scenes of the experts considering the evidence and planning strategies. We follow media coverage of the events captured on television, radio and news headlines. We get to hear the vox populi, the voice of the ordinary people – firefighters, police officers, journalists and hospital staff – offering a wide variety of perspectives on what is happening.

Such an approach was not new, and had been used in American sci-fi movies such as Them! for many years. However the style was often used badly in later imitations of Them!, often intended as filler to limit the time on screen of the risible monsters. Guest was able to include enough of Kneale’s absorbing speculations to keep us interested, even when no monster is on screen.

Val Guest also relied on shock value, a point emphasised by the shrill and shuddering music score used in the films. Both films contain scenes that seemed horrifying at the time, and were deemed unsuitable for children. This was capitalised on in the title of the first movie which drops the ‘E’ from ‘Experiment’ to emphasise its X-rating. Several scenes were removed from each movie to make them acceptable for wider audiences.

Nonetheless a double bill of The Quatermass Xperiment and another film, The Black Sleep, gained notoriety when a 9-year-old boy from Illinois died of a ruptured artery while watching them. The Guinness Book of Records has this listed as the only example of someone dying from fright while watching a horror movie.

Such is my summary of the two movies collectively, but it is worth looking at the distinctive features of the films individually.

The Quatermass Xperiment

For 60 years, Val Guest’s movie version was the only full version of Nigel Kneale’s first story that was available for posterity. This is unfortunate because Kneale had little creative control over this first movie, and the result was a story that differed greatly in many essential points from the original TV show.

The BBC who broadcast the original serial had deleted all but the first two episodes from their archives. We were therefore obliged to wait until 2005 when the BBC produced a new version of the story that was closer to the original teleseries.

Of course there is nothing wrong with changing the original TV series to accommodate the production values of a film, and Guest had the unenviable task of condensing over 3 hours of storyline into considerably less than half that running time.

One unhappy result of this pressure was that several ideas that were key to the story were removed, thereby changing the storyline’s entire premise. The fate of the other astronauts was changed, and so was the ending. Where Kneale’s Quatermass overcame the creature with a rational argument, Guest’s Quatermass used the more conventional and cinematic means of electrocuting the monster.

The story is as follows. Quatermass is the head of the British Rocket Group. He has sent a rocket into space with three astronauts. On its return, the rocket crashes into a field, and the scientists wait anxiously to open the rocket and rescue the astronauts. However when they do get inside the rocket, they discover that there is only one dazed astronaut in the craft, and the other two men have gone missing, even though the rocket and their space suits are sealed shut, indicating that they cannot have left either.

The sole survivor is Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth), but he is unable to talk. While the scientists keep the sickly astronaut under observation, they notice physiological changes in Carroon. His fingerprints have altered, and his skin is different. After he is sent to hospital, his wife tries to steal him so that she can look after him.

However Carroon is no longer the same man that she knew. He has been taken over by an alien entity that passed through the rocket, and he now has the power to absorb other life forms into him. This leads to a number of ghastly deaths among humans, animals and even plants. There is a memorable scene where Carroon thrusts his hand into a cactus. By the end, Carroon has been turned into a formless creature that has to be destroyed.

I have spoken already about Donlevy’s portrayal of Quatermass, but there is another important difference in the Quatermass of this movie in particular. Here Quatermass is an utterly ruthless scientist who is pursuing the quest for knowledge and possibly his own self-aggrandisement at the expense of everything and everyone else. He has launched the rockets without official permission, and he does not seem to care about the consequences.

While Kneale’s Quatermass wrings his hands in anguish at the fate of the astronauts whom he regards as friends, this Quatermass is dismissive about their deaths. To him their fates are an acceptable risk in the name of science. He shrugs and says that they will be heroes for dying in this way. Later he argues that “There’s no room for personal feelings in science…”. He is chastised by Judith Carroon (Margia Dean) for his insistence that his work will benefit the world. “Whose world?” she protests, “Your world? The world of Quatermass?”

To soften the story we have other figures with whom we can identify. Jack Warner brings a homely charm to the role of Inspector Lomax, the “plain, simple Bible man” with the domesticated wife, who insists that, “One world at a time is good enough for me.”

There is also pathos to be found in the figure of Victor Carroon, a haunted man who is losing his personality and becoming a danger to the world. Richard Wordsworth’s face shows a frozen horror that draws our fascinated attention. In one scene reminiscent of James Whale’s Frankenstein, a little girl (a young Jane Asher) tries to befriend him, only to have him push her away and break her doll as he struggles not to harm her.

All of the Quatermass stories deal with possession in some way, and this is an old horror/sci-fi theme that can be found in stories as diverse as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, The Wolf Man and The Exorcist. There is something uniquely horrifying in the idea that our bodies can be possessed by an external force that makes us do things that we do not want to do, but which we cannot help.

The story also taps into the fears of the 1950s. It begins with the landing of a rocket so near to a house that it shakes it to the foundations, and threatens a pair of young lovers and a father. In the original series, the rocket landed in the actual house, making it an even more striking symbol of the atomic age – the bomb in the living room. Ordinary citizens were no longer safe from wars started many miles away. Of course this is not a bomb, but that is what they believe when it first lands.

There was also the fear that if we developed space travel this might lead to contamination or the spread of diseases. Nobody had been into space before, and we did not know what to expect from up there. Could people come back infected like Carroon? If we found extra-terrestrial life in space, perhaps it would pose a threat to our entire way of life. Hence the film ends with Westminster Abbey, that great emblem of religion, culture and civilisation, under threat from unknown forces.

Or perhaps the movie does not end there. The monster is destroyed, but the film ends on a worrying note. Quatermass walks rapidly away from the sight of the dead creature, ignoring queries from others involved in the action. He has already chosen to disregard the lessons learned here.

When he steps outside, he tells a colleague, “I’m going to start again,” and walks away into the dark shadows. The last image we see is a second rocket taking off, raising the fear that soon we may have to contend with more unprecedented dangers. Perhaps next time we might not be so lucky.

Quatermass 2

The title of Quatermass 2 may seem unremarkable now, but it was rare to have sequels that tacked the word ‘2’ onto them at the time. There is a double meaning here, as Quatermass 2 is actually the name of the rocket that Quatermass is working on.

Whereas the rocket in The Quatermass Xperiment nearly brings about the extinction of the earth, this one will save the earth instead. This is not clear due to changes in the film script which have the rocket going into space unmanned, allowing the rocket’s mission and the fight at Winnerden Flats to take place simultaneously. However this joint venture does make for a more satisfying ending than the one offered in the teleseries.

This time the movie was much closer to the original teleseries because Nigel Kneale had more input into the film’s making. It tells the basic story, and is slightly longer than The Quatermass Xperiment, so less of the original story is removed. Nonetheless much of it does have to go in the interests of keeping the film down to a suitable length, and a few of Kneale’s ideas are lost.

Many of them remain, and what dark ideas they are too! The story once more deals with the dangers of alien invasion and aliens possessing the minds of human beings. Only this time the invasion has already begun some months or years before Quatermass finds out about it, and a larger number of people have their minds taken over.

In the next Quatermass story, Quatermass and the Pit, the invasion begins even earlier – five million years ago – and the number of possessed people is greater, potentially most of the population. However that is a story for another time.

This time the film opens with a pre-credits teaser – a car spinning out of control, and nearly hitting that of Quatermass, and a man who is behaving oddly after an accident at a small village called Winnerden Flats.

When Quatermass finally returns to his scientific research unit, he brings the bad news that his rocket project has been cancelled, ending his hopes of building a lunar colony. After learning that peculiar meteorites have been falling in the Winnerden Flats area, where the man seen earlier was injured, Quatermass goes to investigate.

To his horror, Quatermass discovers that while he has been planning colonies on the moon, someone has been using the same colonies on earth in a secret establishment at Winnerden Flats. A visit to the local community shows an establishment who are secretive about this institution, and the wider authorities refuse to help him too.

Quatermass again teams up with Lomax (played this time as a stern-faced professional by John Longden). The reluctant Lomax tells him that the plant is growing synthetic food. Quatermass visits the plant with a sceptical politician called Vincent Broadhead (Tom Chatto). However the synthetic food is ammonia-based and toxic to humans, as Broadhead finds out to his cost. He dies in a memorably terrifying scene, his clothes covered in dark smoking tar that burns him.

In fact the substance is synthetic food, but the food is being used to nourish aliens living inside the domes at the plant at Winnerden Flats. They have infected a large number of people who now serve them, and they are supported by the local workforce, innocent of the real intention of their employer.

While the running time and censorship removed a few of the darker ideas found in the original teleseries, an astonishing number remain – the reproduction of Quatermass’s moon project on earth by aliens with similar colonial intentions, the toxic synthetic food, the workers forcibly or innocently helping the invaders, an infected employee of Quatermass who returns later in the story to kill a colleague, and the bodies of workmen stuffed into pipes as human pulp in a bid to block the flow of oxygen in the pipes.

This time Quatermass is a more mellow figure. There are a few hints of his earlier persona when he is rude to a colleague, and when he runs over a guard without flinching, even though the victim goes under his wheels. However he does apologise to his colleague, and we can put the latter event down to the pressure of time to prevent the alien invasion. This time he is purely a force for good, and not part of the problem.

The film has been compared to Don Siegel’s film, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, which was released the year before. The comparison is misleading for a couple of reasons. Kneale’s original series was televised a year earlier than Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. Also whilst there are similarities in the idea of humans being taken over by aliens, the underlying meaning is different.

In Don Siegel’s movie, the invasion has been seen as a metaphor for communism or the enemy within, although Siegel might dispute this interpretation. Certainly it fits into the Cold War mentality of America at the time.

Quatermass 2 fits into the different Cold War mentality of Britain. The threat here is not subversives within society, but officialdom itself. This was an age where old villages such as Winnerden Flats were being swept away in favour of New Towns, and government secrecy led to large parts of the countryside being sealed off and turned into secret establishments where people did not know what was going on inside.

As a result, freedom of movement and thought was being encroached upon by the state, and this is what Kneale was concerned about, a point made more explicitly in the teleseries. Hence the danger here lies in the establishment – politicians, police chiefs, and the like. The people who should be protecting society are now the people who are threatening it.

Late in the movie, the workers march on Winnerden Flats, seeking explanations for what is happening at their plant after they see a journalist being shot. Some people have unkindly compared the scene to Universal’s Frankenstein movies that often feature panicky villagers brandishing torches at the end.

It would be more accurate to view the events as a worker’s uprising against a sinister, faceless establishment. In this way, the movie anticipated some of the revolutions that would take place in Eastern Europe and be quashed by the communist establishment.

For the movie, the workers’ movement is successful, but as with the first movie there is a worrying tinge to the final victory. This invasion has been repelled, but there may be more to come. “You know what worries me?” asks Lomax. “How am I going to make a final report about all this?” “What worries me,” responds Quatermass, “is how final can it be?”