State of Decay

DOCTOR WHO - HORROR OF FANG ROCK (1977)
DOCTOR WHO - IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL (1977)

A fan favourite, HORROR OF FANG ROCK contains many elements from the poem Flannan Isle by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, which the Doctor quotes from at the end of the story (the poem draws on the real-life mystery of disappearances in 1900). Here is the cover to the 1978 Target novelisation.

PHILIP Hinchcliffe's three seasons as DOCTOR WHO producer registered unparalleled violence and complaints. Incoming producer Graham Williams was under pressure from BBC brass to tone down the horror elements with his premier block of serials - Season Fifteen - which would screen between September 1977 and March 1978. But from the start Williams was embroidered in a number of behind-the-scenes tussles. His first intended serial, Terence Dicks' THE WITCH LORDS/THE VAMPIRE MUTATION, was vetoed late on by Head of Serials Graeme McDonald, because it would undermine the lavish BBC production of Bram Stoker's Dracula then under preparation; Louise Jameson quit as Leela; and in an attempt to re-connect as a children's show and up the comedy, robot dog K9 became a regular companion - much to Tom Baker's chagrin. 

Against this backdrop, it is amazing that Williams' initial broadcast - HORROR OF FANG ROCK - is a triumph. One of the last genuinely scary Classic-era adventures, HORROR OF FANG ROCK sees a shape-changing amorphous jelly (a Rutan scout) crash-land near a desolate Edwardian lighthouse. Initially only populated by a crew of three, soon The Doctor (Baker) and Leela (Jameson) arrive, and survivors from a shipwreck swell the numbers. The alien - one of the race engaged in a perennial war with the Sontarans - is killing its occupants in a quest for life-giving electricity, and The Doctor has been battling to keep it out. But as the death toll rises, realisation hits the Time Lord: "Leela, I've made a terrible mistake, I thought I'd locked the enemy out. Instead I've locked it in - with us." Eventually, The Doctor turns the lighthouse into a laser, knocking out the anti-gravity of the incoming Rutan Mothership.

At the end of Part Two of IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL, the Doctor asks the Fendahl skull if it would like a jelly baby, but actually offers it a liquorice allsort. This was commented on in the 'Watchdog' segment of NATIONWIDE; the DOCTOR WHO production office replied by saying that this was one of the ways the Doctor liked to confuse his enemy.

The realistically cramped lighthouse scenes were shot at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, the only time the series had ever ventured from its London studio base. Strong on atmosphere, this is a tense, claustrophobic tale that makes the most of its small cast and tiny location, but lacks the intensity of the Hinchcliffe Gothic era. Perhaps feeding off their tensions off screen, Baker and Jameson are both outstanding, The Doctor at his unpredictable, arrogant best, and Leela - without her trademark leather outfit - fearless against the threat. The loose background to this teleplay refers to the true mysterious events surrounding the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from the Flannan Isles lighthouse around 1900. Built approximately twenty miles from the Outer Hebrides, this legend is a mixed bag of allegedly hoax log entries and sea monsters, and even a long-boat of ghosts heading to the Isle on the night the lights went out.

IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL acts as a last stab of gothic horror for the show. In contemporary England, Professor Fendelman (Denis Lill) subjects a twelve million-year-old skull to the effects of his Time Scanner, providing a channel for the malevolent Fendahl to once more terrorise the Earth. The skull is also infiltrating fellow scientist Thea Ransome (Wanda Ventham), who is eventually transformed into the Fendahl core, mutating colleagues into snake-like monsters. The theme of mankind manipulated by an ancient alien again draws from DOCTOR WHO's favourite reference point - the works of Nigel Kneale - but the story is let down by the Fendahl itself; an attractive women with eyes painted on her closed eyelids doesn't really justify a terrifying entity that feeds on death; nor does the climax, where a creature that can teleport itself across space is killed by a handful of rock salt.

Primal Disorder

QUATERMASS (1979)
THE QUATERMASS CONCLUSION (1979)

Sir John Mills is the fragile face of dystopian Britain in ITV's QUATERMASS serial, here making the cover of Time Out. Mills' performance has largely been underappreciated over the years, but as Tim Lucas points out in his Video Watchdog review (#106, April 2004), the actor is "steeped in the irony of a visionary whose ideas have been perverted and abused by the less visionary corporations he served."

NIGEL Kneale's long awaited fourth Quatermass television serial - directed by Piers Haggard - finally arrived on ITV in 1979, four years after the BBC's option had expired. Suffering from a long gestation period, and a fanfare that was quashed by a technicians strike which delayed the broadcast, QUATERMASS is doom-laden and lethargic. In a decaying near future, an elderly Professor Quatermass (a stoic John Mills, persuaded into the role by his wife) longs to be reunited with his runaway granddaughter. During a joint United States/Soviet space venture, the hardware is struck by an unearthly beam of light; it soon transpires that this ray is also striking ancestral gathering points around the globe - including stone circles and Wembley Stadium - and harvesting the Planet People, disillusioned youth of Earth who long for their misguided paradise in the stars. With the help of a radio telescope centre barely run by Joe Kapp (Simon MacCorkindale), and latterly a group of Pensioners, the rocket scientist succeeds in repelling the alien intrusion, but only at the cost of his and his granddaughter's life (thanks to a big nuclear "red button.")

Originally written in 1973, Kneale's exploration of youth alienation and the space race were relevant, but by 1979 are too distant topics to act as a successful hook. Kneale's often prophetic reading of society is limited to the Planet People being forerunners to New Age travellers, yet the writer had intended them to be proto-punks. In fact, QUATERMASS is more a wearying of life story, where youth and the elderly are warring species (and complete with internal frictions; even the usually sedate Planet People have their Kickalong (Ralph Arliss), apparently modelled on Charles Manson). The writer was usually lukewarm at best about the performers of his work, here labelling Mills as not having the authority of Quatermass, and questioned the casting of MacCorkindale as a rational and intelligent man; he also dismisses Barbara Kellerman, who play's Kapp's wife Clare, for her bouts of smiling. But Kneale himself must shoulder a great portion of the blame for a story that never permeates past its core idea.

Ashen-faced Simon MacCorkindale, Barbara Kellerman and John Mills in the TV Times listing of the second episode 'Lovely Lightning' (31st October 1979).

Haggard, who had provided a blueprint for folk horror with BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW, firmly places the Planet People within their spiritual, sexual landscape, but this is no longer a world for myth and legend, only one that reflects a Nazi concentration camp iconography: once harvested, ashes hang thick in the air and powdered flesh and bone seep into the earth (and to further a quasi-Third Reich agenda, in a dirty, makeshift London marketplace, books are on offer only because they can "burn well.") Unfortunately the director provides everything too flat for its own good, undermining what should have been the showpiece sequence of the Wembley stadium incarcerations, which is only memorable for Quatermass' dialogue on the sky ("the colour of vomit.") 

This relentless sombre atmosphere inevitably created a muted Press reaction, describing QUATERMASS as "pedestrian," "capable humdrum" and even "mumbo-jumbo." This was particularly galling for the amount of money and extensive location filming invested in it; made on 35mm Panavision stock by the Euston Films umbrella of Thames, a lucrative £1.25m budget was made available for the four-part programme and a re-edited, 106-minute theatrical version for overseas (entitled THE QUATERMASS CONCLUSION). This truncated cut basically sliced in half the first, second and fourth episodes, with only brief sequences used from episode three, where Quatermass is saved and befriended by the underground OAPs. However, in the post-STAR WARS world there was little room for downbeat cinema science fiction, and the film version made only sporadic appearances across North American, and the intended UK dates never transpired.

Beast of Burden

AGAINST THE CROWD - MURRAIN (1975)
BEASTS (1976)

The thing in the wall: Jo (Jane Wymark) increasingly feels that she and her unborn child are in danger, in the BEASTS episode BABY.

MADE for the ATV anthology series AGAINST THE CROWD - a set of self-contained dramas focusing on outsiders - the Nigel Kneale-penned MURRAIN acted as an impromptu pilot for BEASTS, produced for the same ITV studio a year later. MURRAIN is the story of young vet Alan Crich (David Simeon), who discovers that a stretch of farmland may be hexed by Mrs Clemson (Una Brandon-Jones). Crich attempts to mediate between the alleged witch and the disgruntled local farmers, led by Mr Mably (Bernard Lee). Featuring Kneale's preoccupation of the clash between the supernatural and the rational, the play is also influenced by the writer's own superstitious locale growing up on the Isle of Man. There are no real scares in the programme, rather it is a character-and-mood piece where the viewer is left to draw their own conclusions.

Kneale's six stories for BEASTS would detail another of his favourite themes, that of the primal instincts that exist within civilised man, and the effects when repressed feelings are set free. BABY sees the mummified remains of a strange creature found in a country cottage; BUDDYBOY features a haunted dolphinarium; THE DUMMY has an actor taken over by his monster suit; SPECIAL OFFER tells of a gremlin loose in a mini-supermarket; WHAT BIG EYES shows an amateur scientist carrying out experiments to turn himself into a wolf; and rats are on the rampage in DURING BARTY'S PARTY.

Set in North Cornwall, the farmers of the AGAINST THE CROWD play MURRAIN believe a witch is responsible for the plight of their pig stock and the illness of a local boy.

Kneale was always an "ideas" man, but BEASTS shows a developing flair for character and dialogue. Thankfully then that the series features a number of stoic performances from fresh faces and seasoned veterans - including Simon MacCorkindale, T.P. McKenna, Martin Shaw, Clive Swift, Thorley Walters, Pauline Quirke and Elizabeth Sellars. Particularly effective are the verbal battles between Michael Kitchen's RSPCA officer and Patrick Magee's eccentric pet-shop owner in WHAT BIG EYES. For a such a character-driven series, the misses are uniform to a handful of weaker performances. Quirke is fine in SPECIAL OFFER, but her co-workers seem staid in what is in itself the silliest and most repetitive episode. BUDDYBOY is the oddest of the tales, and the fusion of Shaw as a porn theatre owner taking over a disused dolphin pool never quite gels in story or execution. The actor is suitably bullish, put the performance of Pamela Moiseiwitsch as a girl who has an umbilical connection with the ghost of the star dolphin is overtly glacial.

As BEASTS is made up of six totally unrelated entries, the quality ultimately dips, despite Kneale's impressive scope of imagination. The doom-laden BABY is almost a companion piece to MURRAIN, as it features another vet at odds with a superstitious rural community. It is widely considered to be the best - and certainly the most chilling - of the series, and as Andy Murray points out in his programme notes to the Network BEASTS DVD, BABY also has connections to QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, with builders unearthing "a sinister, ancient capsule which turns out to contain ... something." THE DUMMY is also a highlight, and a real joy for Hammer fans, as Kneale draws on his underwhelming experiences working for the production house. There is little doubt that with the casting of Walters and the feature being made by a fictional British company - REVENGE OF THE DUMMY - are thinly veiled snipes at his time with the famous studio.

"Analyse a spook?"

DEAD OF NIGHT - THE EXORCISM (1972)
THE STONE TAPE (1972)

Anna Cropper plays Rachel in the DEAD OF NIGHT episode THE EXORCISM. Cropper also appeared in the 1975 West End stage version of the story, after Mary Ure died from an alcohol and barbiturate overdose following a disastrous opening night.

DEAD OF NIGHT was a series of self-contained supernatural stories broadcast on BBC2 in 1972. Taking its name from the Ealing portmanteau film of 1945, this incarnation ran for seven fifty-minute episodes, and only three - THE EXORCISM, RETURN FLIGHT and A WOMAN SOBBING - are known to survive in the BBC archives. RETURN FLIGHT - shown on the 12th of November - is a surprisingly banal and predictable aviation-based story from the pen of Robert Holmes; A WOMAN SOBBING - shown on 17th December - is a solid yarn which greatly benefits from the wide-eyed performance of Anna Massey as a bored housewife and mother who hears a female voice crying from the attic space. The two programmes under consideration here have a fluid association with the series: THE EXORCISM was conceived as a stand-alone work but shown as the DEAD OF NIGHT opener, and THE STONE TAPE was included in the same production block for "internal" reasons, but was broadcast as a singular play on Christmas Day.

THE EXORCISM begins with Edmund (Edward Petherbridge) and his wife Rachel (Anna Cropper) showing Dan (Clive Swift) around their recently renovated cottage. As Dan's partner Margaret (Sylvia Kay) helps prepare Christmas dinner, Rachel plays a clavichord, but realises that she has no idea what the tune is. There is a power cut, and the telephone is also suddenly inoperable. After digesting their meal, all four suffer shooting pain; Dan finds that the door won't open, the windows can't be unlocked, and the outside has been plunged into total blackness. Rachel falls into a trance, and relates the experiences of a woman whose husband was hanged when trying to obtain food for her and their two starving children, while the squire and his family indulged in sumptuous meals. We learn that the wife locked herself and the children in their house and waited to die from starvation, hoping that the house would recall the injustice of their deaths.

After appearing uncredited as a six-year-old child in Hammer's film version of THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, Jane Asher is reunited with the work of Nigel Kneale in THE STONE TAPE.

Written and directed by Don Taylor, THE EXORCISM is the standout surviving episode of DEAD OF NIGHT, and different in tone to the famous run of ghost stories made by Lawrence Gordon Clark for the BBC in the 70s. Instead of the seeping vistas of M.R. James and Charles Dickens, THE EXORCISM is reminiscent of Luis Buñuel's absurdist 1967 comedy THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL. A socio-political spook story, the programme is highlighted by some choice but resonant dialogue; after Dan surmises that the couples "should concentrate on how to be socialists and rich", he later tells Margaret not to be afraid as they have been privileged. The coda, where a newscaster reports that the four friends have been found dead apparently from starvation, provides a chilling conclusion to a real time, claustrophobic play which has been enhanced by a sparse but solid cast: Swift is particularly suited to his role, and Cropper's performance in her possessed state is alarmingly believable.

THE STONE TAPE has Peter Brock (Michael Bryant), head of Ryan Electrics research, working on a new recording medium. Scientists move into Taskerlands, an old Victorian mansion, that has been renovated to act as their facility. Foreman Roy Collinson (Iain Cuthbertson) says that the refurbishment of one of the rooms remains uncompleted, as builders refuse to work on the grounds that it is haunted. The researchers explore the area and hear the sounds of a woman followed by a scream. Computer programmer Jill Greeley (Jane Asher) - who is susceptible to the paranormal - sees an image of a woman running up the steps in the room and falling, apparently to her death. Inquiring with the local villagers, they learn that a young maid died there, and Brock realises that somehow the stone has preserved an image. Becoming more desperate under mounting pressure to deliver results, Brock wipes the image. Jill realises that the maid was masking a much older recording, and is confronted by a malevolent presence. Transported to a proto-Stonehenge, she falls to her death, with the elder force claiming a replacement for the ghost girl.

The BFI's STONE TAPE DVD of 2001 includes an audio commentary by Nigel Kneale moderated by critic Kim Newman. Containing an array of interesting trivia and asides, Newman states that this programme - however dated in equipment and fashion - remains seminal because it portrays a technological development we are still living through.

Written by Nigel Kneale and directed by Peter Sasdy, THE STONE TAPE is a landmark slice of supernatural television. A central theme in Kneale's stories are conflicts that stem from some primal yearning, effecting the past, present, or future. In fact, THE STONE TAPE can be considered the final part in a trilogy of Kneale tales - together with QUATERMASS AND THE PIT and his lost masterpiece THE ROAD - that refine and counteract the notion of haunting by applying scientific evaluation. It was also one of the first stories to promulgate the hypothesis of residual haunting, that ghosts may be explained as recordings of past events made by the physical environment. Amazingly, this science babble has come to be known as the Stone Tape Theory by parapsychological researchers, and in the 2004 BBC7 Radio Serial Ghost Zone, a character refers explicitly to the theory as an explanation for the way an invading alien intelligence is "replaying" scenes from the past. For what is ostensibly a ghost story, THE STONE TAPE explores the living; how humans interact in such a situation - particularly in relation to business and money - and, if indeed, a human presence is required to amplify the process. This is effectively bought to the screen by an excellent ensemble cast, whose intense performances often border on the melodramatic.

Terrors Below and Above

X THE UNKNOWN (1956)
QUATERMASS 2 (1957)

Fuelled on the then-current fears of radioactivity,
X THE UNKNOWN is Quatermass without the nuances.

IN the wake of THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT's success, Hammer approached the mentor of their breakthrough picture - Nigel Kneale - for permission to use the Quatermass character in a sequel. When Kneale refused ("I said 'No, you can't - it's mine' - they were funny people"), the company progressed with Leslie Norman's X THE UNKNOWN, from an original screenplay by Jimmy Sangster. The film begins with a sudden appearance of what seems to be volcanic fissure in military grounds. When a soldier, then a young boy, die of first-degree radiation burns, Dr Adam Royston (Dean Jagger) - a scientist working on a radio signal capable of neutralising bombs  - investigates. Collaborating with McGill (Leo McKern), a representative for Atomic Security, Royston surmises that an opening has unleashed a mass of energy from the centre of the Earth, a sentient being that has fed off natural radiation for millions of years.

X THE UNKNOWN is sombre 50s Hammer, using its premise of internal horrors primarily for budgetary reasons - at least the studio wouldn't have to build expensive sets and spaceships. Royston is no Quatermass, and the sloppy movement of the titular creature (which, when finally glimpsed, looks like chocolate mousse) mimics the film's lack of thrills. Impervious to "Machine gun bullets! Dynamite! Flame Throwers!," this combination of radiation and molten crust is often mentioned in the same breath as THE BLOB which followed a year later, yet the latter was an extraterrestrial mineral, and X shares more in common with particle masses CALTIKI THE IMMORTAL MONSTER and THE H-MAN. Where X THE UNKNOWN does deliver is with its disintegrating radiographer; Phil Leakey placed a heating element in a plastic skull housing a wax mask of actor Neil Hallett, a scene which is still a show-stopper.

A stylish French poster for QUATERMASS 2 makes the paramilitary zombie guards centre stage.

When Hammer did return with Quatermass at the helm a year later, the result - in contrast - was one of the finest science fiction films produced by a British studio. Val Guest's QUATERMASS 2 sees metallic meteorites rain down on Winnerden Flats, a town near a highly guarded chemical plant. Professor Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) is startled to discover that contact with the shells causes deadly infection, and that the facilities - supposedly producing synthetic food - appear to be modelled on his own aborted moonbase design. Quatermass uncovers a sinister conspiracy that extends to Government level, and has to battle zombie-like guards who will stop at nothing to protect the top secret complex. With the aid of old friend Inspector Lomax (John Longden), the Professor discovers that the plant is in fact housing an alien invasion, and that gestalt creatures have been arriving inside the meteorites.

Britain's answer to INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, QUATERMASS 2 drips with postwar paranoia. Scripted by Kneale (from his 1955 BBC teleplay) and Guest, the film is as urgently paced as the alien takeover (the actors even indulge in "cue biting"). Kneale was always critical of Donlevy's brutish approach to the beloved scientist, but the actor's forcefulness here actually works with the rapidly unfolding horrors and realisations, especially when the Professor commandeers a guard uniform to infiltrate the plant. This insurrection culminates in a memorable pressure control room scene, where oxygen is being pumped to kill the alien manifestation in the plant domes. When workers venture out to talk to their "superiors," they are murdered and their body parts stuffed into the pipes to impede the oxygen flow, an action, as Jonathan Rigby states in his book English Gothic, is "as grotesque an image of capitalist exploitation as can be imagined."

Pit of History

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967)



One of the best Hammer productions, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT is science fiction as audacious as 2001, with considerable less pretension. Here the film is being shown in a double-bill with CIRCUS OF FEAR.

SCIENCE fiction is a genre of ideas, apprehensive about the universe and our role within it; H.G.Wells was obsessed with human insignificance, and George Orwell our capacity for authoritarian evil. Away from the US style bug-eyed monsters and space cadets, British SF is sullied by a dark ocean of history and class struggle, yet today we live in a world of perpetual surveillance, apocalyptic pathogens and computer hyperconnectivity which has not only blurred fact and fiction, but eroded boundaries of national identity and personal space (in Fredric Brown’s one-page story Answer, when a new supercomputer is asked if there is a God, it replies "Yes, now there is a God.") London, in particular, has suffered at the hands of SF, with differing intellectual richness; DOCTOR WHO featured numerous "creature of the week" alien invasions, and on a more dystopian level totalitarian regimes have been evident in Nineteen Eighty-Four, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and BRAZIL. More bombastically, LIFEFORCE found the capital overrun by space vampires, and in REIGN OF FIRE a hibernating dragon is awakened by construction work on the London underground.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT is the greatest "London under supernatural siege" picture, and a seminal ideas film. Based on Nigel Kneale's BBC series, Hammer's version  - directed by Roy Ward Baker from Kneale's screenplay - begins with the discovery of ape men skeletons during work at Hobbs End underground station. When a strange metal container is found, it is thought to be a German V2, but this is quashed when Professor Quatermass (Andrew Keir) finds insect creatures inside. He believes that these beings came from Mars five million years ago, and helped humanity to gain racial consciousness. The Martian psychokinetic energy lies dormant in mankind and the horned insect figures are remembered in human memory as The Devil. Working with Dr Matthew Roney (James Donald) and his assistant Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley), Quatermass uncovers Hobbs End as a hotspot for the paranormal and now - with the full uncovering of the spaceship - the dormant powers become active.

Penguin's 1960 QUATERMASS AND THE PIT novel was published with a cover illustration by the author's brother, Bryan Kneale.

Kneale has always been abrasive of the stealing of his ideas, particularly by DOCTOR WHO. But here the writer borrows from Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End - a novel about a race of aliens who resemble the classic image of The Devil - and also Clarke's The Sentinel, a short story which was expanded and modified into Kubrick's 2001. Although the releases are poles apart in budget, both films share a great deal thematically: the impact of alien intelligence upon human evolution and the consequences of that intervention being discovered. But while 2001's alien intelligence is arguably one of teacher and observer, Kneale suggests that Martian genetics are actively malevolent, transferring the Martians own instinct to kill the other into the ape men who they experimented upon. Consequently, the human urge to hate, despise and destroy is explained through the fact that, as is explicitly stated, “we ARE the Martians!”

Kneale's concept of induced human violence is linked with the equally sensational notion that rationalises our conception of haunting and The Devil, explaining apparitions ("ghosts... [are] phenomena that were badly observed and wrongly explained") and demonology in one handy revelation. Consequently, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT portrays our layered heritage of old, weird Britain with historical and supernatural clout unlike any other. The film is lensed by Arthur Grant in his trademark muted style, providing a perfect feel for a film so obsessed with bones and ancient mythology. The scenario of unearthing a long-buried evil is addressed with equal zeal in BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW, where a skull is uncovered by a farmer's plough; this artifact turns the young people of a 17th-century village into a cult with a penchant for erotic blood sacrifices. Shooting with an abundance of low camera angles, this amplifies the feeling of being watched by some ancient other.

Hammer Monster Mash

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)
THE GORGON (1964)



"All Earth Stands Helpless!" Aware that the Quatermass name held no weight in the United States, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT was retitled SHOCK! then THE CREEPING UNKNOWN, and cut by United Artists. The movie was released with THE BLACK SLEEP, which featured Basil Rathbone as a mad scientist opening the brains of his victims to discover a means to cure his wife's tumour. It was alleged that this double-bill literally scared a nine-year-old boy to death, who died of a ruptured artery during a showing in Illinois.

HAMMER were always happy to capitalise on established hits; having drawn on radio (Dick Barton, PC49), the studio looked towards television with a truncated version of Nigel Kneale's THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT. While most British production houses regarded the X certificate as a kiss of death for the box office, Hammer hoped that the title change to XPERIMENT would be a marketing ploy to help the financially stricken company. Thankfully the film was a hit; without THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, it would be doubtful that Hammer would have survived to create the celebrated Gothic horrors that are so entrenched in our heritage.

The film begins with experimental rocket ship Quatermass 1 crash landing at Oakley Green. This opening - where the phallus-like craft plunges into the ground breaking the monotony of two coy lovers - is a fitting allegory for the arrival of Hammer horror. In this instant, the domesticity of the British feature film makes way for a new order of directness. Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) - the British rocket group scientist responsible for launching the ship without official sanction - discovers that two of the three crew members have disappeared. The sole survivor - Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) - is suffering from low blood pressure, pulse and heart rate. As Carroon's condition worsens, the astronaut plunges his fist into a cactus, starting a consumption by an alien organism which mimics the plant form. Quatermass tracks the creature to Westminster Abbey, and before its spores can spread, is electrocuted.

Richard Wordsworth's alien-infected Carroon in THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT is an unwilling martyr to Professor Quatermass' abrasive scientific crusade. The actor would later bring similar sympathetic tendencies to the role of the feral beggar in THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF.

In keeping with a long-established pattern, a Hollywood star was contracted for the benefit of stateside distribution. Fading heavy Donlevy was selected much to Kneale's horror (Donlevy's alcoholism reducing the actor to read off cue cards) and in 1995 the writer was still vociferous of the actor's portrayal: "I may have picked Quatermass' surname out of a phone book but his first name was carefully chosen: Bernard, after Bernard Lovell, the creator of Jodrell Bank. Pioneer, ultimate questing man. Donlevy played him as a mechanic, a creature with a completely closed mind. He could make nothing of any imaginative lines, and simply barked and bawled his way through the plot. A bully whose emotional range ran from annoyance to fury." Donlevy's Quatermass is indeed pointed and bullish, refusing to waste time even when considering Carroon's increasingly catatonic suffering ("there's no room for personal feelings in science ... some of us have a mission").

As well as the wayward Donlevy, American Margia Dean plays Carroon's wife Judith. Suffering from indifferent post-synching, Dean was imposed upon director Val Guest because she was reportedly the girlfriend of American co-producer Robert Lippert. Thankfully the British cast feature strongly: David King-Wood as Dr Briscoe, Harold Lang as private eye Christie and Thora Hird as Rose the baglady are uniformly excellent, with Jack Warner's Inspector Lomax shadowing his trademark role in DIXON OF DOCK GREEN. Wordsworth's heart-rending performance, however, is the highlight; communicating an unbearable loneliness through mime, the success of the actor's illustration of a once intelligent man consumed by forces beyond his control was key to Hammer when contemplating their re-imagining in THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Discovering body horror years before Cronenberg, Wordworth's poignancy matches Karloff's Frankenstein, particularly in the scene with a little girl (Jane Asher), which mirrors Karloff's lakeside encounter with Maria (Marilyn Harris). It is this sequence that we glimpse Carroon in human form for the last time, as if the innocence of the child evokes a last note of sympathy.

The girl who befriends Carroon in THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT is played by Jane Asher, who seventeen years later would star in Nigel Kneale's THE STONE TAPE.

Many characters and sub-plots are inevitably missing when compressing the television serial to feature length - for example, the intriguing notion that the alien ether had made Carroon absorb the other two astronaut's minds - but such trimming makes THE QUATERMAS XPERIMENT a fast-paced thriller which is made even more immediate by Guest's gritty, semi-documentary style. Perhaps one constriction too many was the change made to the Westminster Abbey conclusion; instead of the explosive climax in the film, on television Quatermass appeals to the human consciousness within the alien, which wills itself to death. Totally lost upon the feature is the teleplay's framing of this climax within a fictionalised live BBC broadcast - which must have raised a few eyebrows of those tuning in late - but although THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT loses this particular faux realite, Guest's feature does incorporate one of the earliest examples of found footage in cinema history: a silent video feed shows the bombardment of Q1 by the cosmic rays which cause Carroon's transformation.

While the changes to the teleplay are in the interests of producing a box office success, the cuts made by United Artists for the Americanised THE CREEPING UNKNOWN release are, in fact, insulting. Nearly three minutes of footage is removed - mostly cheapening the London Zoo sequence - but the devil is in the detail: Donlevy and Dean receive above the title billing opposed to Donlevy and Warner in the British version, and the titles also downplay the importance of Kneale's play. Furthermore, American prints eliminate acknowledgments to the BBC, The Air Ministry, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co, The British Interplanetary Society, The Post London Authority and General Radiological Ltd, as well as replacing the closing "A Hammer Production, produced at Bray Studios" with a simple "The End."

Having exhausted the gallery of classic movie monsters, Hammer turned to mythology for inspiration, resulting in THE GORGON being one of the studio's most poetic and haunted achievements.

When THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN was unleashed, it set in motion an initial burst of robust Hammer Horrors that focused on dominating male characters. THE GORGON, however, made seven years later, started a trend towards predatory yet well-spoken female parts that fundamentally weakened narrative. Hammer's later move from Bray to Elstree was detrimental enough, but this gender shift resulted in a hit-and-miss series of films which portrayed murderous but sexualised lead woman: for every measured entry like FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN and HANDS OF THE RIPPER, there was THE WITCHES and LUST FOR A VAMPIRE.

The last Hammer film to combine the talents of stars Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and director Terence Fisher, THE GORGON is overwhelmingly fatalistic.  Set in 1910, the film focuses on the village of Vandorf, which has been suffering a series of mysterious deaths for five years. However, the local doctor Namaroff (Cushing) has been concealing that the victims were all turned to stone, and suspects that the derelict Castle Borski is housing Megaera, the last of the legendary Gorgons. When an artist's model and her unborn child are turned to stone, her boyfriend Bruno (Jeremy Longhurst) hangs himself, which results in the boy's grieving father Professor Heitz (Michael Goodliffe), his second son Paul (Richard Pasco) and Paul's mentor Professor Meister (Lee) investigating.

Barbara Shelley in THE GORGON. Ballet dancer Prudence Hyman played Shelley's monstrous alter ego with the infamous stiff snake-hair.

Ambiguities add to this dream-like storyline. Hammer may have looked to mythology for new monsters, but the Greek Megaera was not even a Gorgon, rather a deity who causes jealousy. It is unclear why The Gorgon only appears during the full moon, as is the question of why - after thousands of years - the spirit has possessed a human, Namaroff's assistant Carla (Barbara Shelley). Although her back story is never elaborated on, Carla was an amnesia victim who came to Vandorf for treatment, the doctor exhibiting both concern and deeper feelings for his patient. Shelley brings her usual grace and strength to the role, but the inversion of Cushing and Lee's usual screen persona's creates mixed results. Cushing plays the stern, humourless authority role that Lee would normally be presented with, Namaroff a tormented variation of Cushing's Frankenstein as he struggles with guilt and unrequited love. Lee, however, seems uneasily cast in an unflattering greying facade.

The doctor's observation "the most noble work of God, the human brain, is the most revolting to the human eye," underlines Fisher's grim approach. With only some humorous asides from Meister to relieve the gloom ("don't use long words, Inspector; they don't suit you"), the director's emphasis on the pain of romance has great depth, with the central love triangle being the most poignant to be found in Fisher's oeuvre. Despite THE GORGON being considered a second-tier release by Hammer historians, It is an intimate picture which uses its careful pace as a necessity of its mood. Indeed, there are scenes that rank with the best of Fisher: Heitz's call to the Castle Borski, for example, and the sequence where the doomed father attempts to pen a letter to Paul during his gradual petrification.

Devil's End

DOCTOR WHO - THE DAEMONS (1971)

DOCTOR WHO’s Moriarty: Roger Delgado is The Master.

SHOWN as part of BBC4’s recent Archaeology Night, THE DAEMONS fits neatly under this banner for two reasons. Firstly, this Jon Pertwee DOCTOR WHO serial revolves around the live broadcast (on BBC3 no less) of the excavation of an ancient barrow. Secondly, the episodes themselves are something of a treasured relic; shortly after transmission, four of the original five colour videotapes were wiped. Luckily, BBC Enterprises had made a black-and-white film copy and a colour version (also now lost) for overseas sales. In the 1990s, the BBC painstakingly produced a watchable colour restoration using the black-and-white film and the colour signal from a fan’s home-recording made in the United States.

The Master (Roger Delgado) - posing as local vicar Mr Magister - uses black magic in an attempt to assimilate the powers of Azal. The story’s underlying theme of science versus magic is established early on, then explored during the episodes in which the viewer learns that many of the magical traditions and images are in fact a product of the Daemons “psionic science.” Viewed today, the story suffers from Pertwee's arrogant and inconsistent attitude, and the monumentally inappropriate line when The Doctor refers to Hitler as a “bounder.” The serial is also weakened by its somewhat simplistic denouement - Jo (Katy Manning)’s offered self-sacrifice makes Azal self-destruct - but there's also much to enjoy: in dog collar garb and latterly scarlet ceremonial robes, Delgado’s Master is a highlight, the epitome of evil charm.

The stone gargoyle Bok (Stanley Mason) is brought to life as a servant to the Master. Whether this is because of The Master’s rituals or as a side effect of Azal’s appearance is never made clear.

The Time Lord’s writers had always transformed generic material for their own ends, but the Pertwee/UNIT era drew on Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass to create a template for a large run. The Third Doctor’s first story SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE, for example, gleefully referenced - to put it politely - QUATERMASS II. THE DAEMONS’ plot is not the most groundbreaking regardless of outside influences - witchcraft in an English village has long been a staple ingredient - and the idea of an impenetrable dome barrier had previously been used in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. But ultimately THE DAEMONS recalls QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, with its televised opening of an ancient burial mound which turns out to contain an alien spacecraft, whose dormant crew use technology which Mankind has come to know as Magic.

Into the Unknown

Quatermass at the BBC (1953-2005)

André Morell, the definitive Professor Quatermass, in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.

THE stories of Nigel Kneale explore science, superstition and social issues. Although hating the tag "science fiction writer", his work, nonetheless, takes us through experiences that leaves us brighter and more aware, speculating on all the mysteries that remain to be clarified. He was one of the genre’s most illuminating humanists, a confrontational individual who used his writing as a metaphor for our problematic times. Kneale often painted cynical landscapes of our future and developed into a masterful satirist, whose tweaks at mankind’s expense proved just as prophetic as his works undertaken in a more sombre mood. His abundance of intelligent ideas tapped into contemporary fears and a succinct observation of human behaviour. Comparisons to H. G. Wells cannot be underestimated; Kneale was a genuine seer, predicting the disintegration of broadcasting and society, typified by his depiction of Reality TV in THE YEAR OF THE SEX OLYMPICS.

Kneale’s arrival as a staff writer at the BBC coincided with television’s post-Coronation mass appeal. Early drama was dominated by unambitious stage and literary adaptations, and there is some justification in Mark Gatiss’ claim that the writer invented popular television. During the 1950s, Kneale wrote three serials featuring his most famous character, British Rocket scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass. Each broadcast live, THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, QUATERMASS II and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT all made a lasting impact on the nation’s consciousness, and were also subsequently made into films by Hammer. Manned space flights were years away, but THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT presented them as near docu-drama; viewers were terrified by the realistic presentation of astronaut Victor Carroon (Duncan Lamont) returning to Earth in the grip of alien infection. Its sequel, QUATERMASS II, features a heavily guarded government refinery, supposedly a factory for synthetic food, but in fact an alien-breeding colony nurtured on poison gas and processed human blood. And in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, a capsule unearthed on a London building site is found to contain the remains of Martians and augmented ape-men, tapping into the dormant Martian mental faculties bred into Mankind and provoking a gigantic race purge. QUATERMASS AND THE PIT is the most complex and bleakest in the trilogy, portraying the human condition as an irreversible alien experiment, and Kneale’s only remedy is restraint against the ancient destructive urges implanted in us. This last serial was shown at a time when newly arrived Caribbean immigrants – the so-called Windrush Generation – faced widespread daily abuse.

The Quatermass Memoirs were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1996. The series mixes a new monologue by Kneale - in which he discusses the genesis and development of Quatermass - together with archival material and a dramatised strand in which the Professor discloses his reasons for reclusion and discusses his demons with a persistent reporter.

THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT evokes the wartime blitz spirit, while QUATERMASS II tackles the threat of an Orwellian "enemy within." Unlike the bombastic spectacle of American horror films of this period, Kneale’s aliens use humans as involuntary symbiotic hosts as part their life cycle, or as a means of continuing their species. Consequently, the strongest emotion evoked by the Quatermass stories is one of disgust. The tales create images that allude to things that are universally repulsive: faeces, urine, rotting flesh, foul odours and deformed bodies, a literary technique used more by writers of horror and supernatural fiction. In THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, there is the physiological deterioration of Carroon whose arm resembles an exfoliating cancer, not to mention the gelatinous remains of the missing crewmembers, the slime the creature leaves in its wake, and the deformed bodies of those it has drained of life. Similarly, QUATERMAS II has foul-smelling gases and faecal aliens writhing in the excremental "food" inside pressure domes, and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT takes place almost entirely in a mud-filled excavation in which the decomposing bodies of the Martians are discovered.

In April 2005, BBC4 aired a new QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, the BBC’s first live drama broadcast since a series of lunchtime plays in 1983. Shown as the centrepiece of the channel’s ‘TV on Trial’ season – a re-evaluation of the medium from the 1950s to the 2000s - like almost everything involving Kneale’s character, the production is literally an experiment; it takes risks, suffers from underfunding but certainly is heroic. With only the first two episodes of the original series surviving, the idea of creating a two hour condensing of the writer’s scripts was a fine one, if only for the nerve of its staging and to have a more complete document for posterity. The setting is a notional present day via 1955, leading to an almost alternate feel to the 21st century in which there has seemingly been little space exploration and terms like "pressure suit" are still in use. Kneale’s references are only lightly updated, like casting Anglo-Indian actress Indira Varma as the astronaut’s wife, who delivers her 1953 dialogue without seeming as comically cut-glass as the original actress, Isabel Dean. And as a replacement for the Coronation-friendly Westminster Abbey, which saw the mutated Carroon’s demise in the original, the finale takes place at the Tate Modern Gallery, an inspired choice in finding an equivalent symbol of pride in an era where Royal association is forever receding. Not only does it provide a vast, shadowed space for Quatermass (Jason Flemyng)’s "casting-out" of the alien lifeform within its fabric and air, the Tate acts as a stringent metaphor in a cultural shift from religion to art.

Jason Flemyng is the Professor in BBC4’s rendering of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT.

Other changes, however, are less successful. In the year Christopher Eccleston became the new DOCTOR WHO, the casting of Flemyng as a younger Professor seems to appeal to the same primetime mentality. Flemyng delivers his high-tech speak as well as anyone, but being the same age as the actors playing the astronauts and his colleagues creates both a symbolic and plot problem. Most of his scenes are with seasoned performers as Adrian Dunbar, David Tennant and Mark Gatiss, over whom he cannot adhere to the same boffin-like authority of Reginald Tate’s Quatermass from the initial serial. Tate was undeniably in charge, but Flemyng is too often on the defensive, as if any of his co-stars could challenge his role.