The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), AKA The Creeping Unknown, is a sci-fi/horror film based on the hugely-popular BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment (1953).
The serial was written by the great Nigel Kneale. Kneale, along with John Wyndhan, Roald Dahl and Benny Hill, are among the greatest storytellers to come out of England.
The Quatermass Xperiment is about an astronaut who returns from space and turns into a vegetable version of The Blob.
Hammer Films produced The Quatermass Xperiment. The reason for its odd spelling is because the film received an X-rating, and Hammer Films shrewdly decided to make that part of the marketing campaign. It worked. The film was a box office hit and brought Hammer Films to the attention of United Artists, allowing the studio to grow to new heights of popularity.
While The Quatermass Xperiment does not get much mention from Gen Z, it was a big hit with the Baby Boomers. Both Stephen King and John Carpenter reported the film had a huge impact on them. In fact, it made enough of an impression on Carpenter to motivate him to work with Kneale on Halloween III.
The Quatermass Xperiment
Val Guest directed. He had previous experience with Hammer Films on The Men of Sherwood Forest (1954). Guest continued to work with Hammer Films after The Quatermass Xperiment, as well, directing The Abominable Snowman, starring Peter Cushing. Guest even has a James Bond movie on his resume… sort of. He directed the 1967 version of Casino Royale.
American actor Brian Donlevy starred as Quatermass. Donlevy is known for Beau Geste, a Gary Cooper film from 1939. Donlevy even showed up in a Gamera movie. If that doesn’t display enough range, Donlevy married Bela Lugosi’s ex-wife, Lillian. Donlevy was not well-received as Quatermass. Critics found him to be phoning it in and a poor replacement for Reginald Tate, who played the role in the serial.
Richard Woodsworth, great-great-grandson of the poet Williams Woodsworth, portrayed the afflicted astronaut. Woodsworth has severe features, which worked well for the part. His looks also paid off for his role as a sinister taxidermist in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Woodsworth plays the infected astronaut with essentially zero dialogue. He staggers through the film with a zombie-like demeanor and gait. It evokes an unsettling feeling in viewers. If I saw Woodsworth stumbling toward me, I’d cross to the other side of the street.
Woodsworth’s performance is aided by simple makeup effects. Shading on his face gives it a skull-like appearance. As The Quatermass Xperiment moves along, Woodsworth’s arm also begins to mutate into a club-like vegetable appendage.
Xperimenting With The Genre
The Quatermass Xperiment is an alien-possession movie. Astronaut comes back from space infected with something. Doctors try to help. The infection increases its influence over its victim. Escape. A frantic manhunt before the world is destroyed.
It is a tried-and-true formula. Unfortunately, the formula has been so refined since 1955 that The Quatermass Xperiment now seems quite tame. The film takes its time with its build up. Horror is hinted at from oblique angles. The movie would be better served to be more overt in its terrors.
The seeds of an unsettling movie exist. One can easily see The Quatermass Xperiment getting the 1980s remake treatment and being mentioned in the same breath as The Thing, The Fly and The Blob. Someone missed the boat in that regard.
The Quatermass Xperiment is best viewed as an artifact from when the sci-fi/horror genre started to find its sea legs. It should be noted that Nigel Kneale did not like the film version of his serial either. He found the changes made to the story to knock it back to 80 minutes made the plot suffer. On the other hand, every article I’ve ever read that contained an opinion from Nigel Kneale showed a negative opinion. The man seemed to have an idea of how things should work and damn any other take on the subject.
Still, one can see his point. In Kneale’s original story, the afflicted astronaut absorbed the bodies and memories of his team members. The final creature then had its last vestiges of humanity appealed to so it would commit suicide rather than destroy the world.
In the film, the beastie is simply electrocuted before it can go to seed. Interestingly enough, tripe and a real octopus was used for some of the effects shots in this ending.
Quatering To The Masses
This was not the last time we saw Quatermass, of course. Quatermass II (1957) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967) also made their way into circulation. It is perhaps time for another film featuring the character to be made, especially in this age of plundering IPs.
Quatermass is probably something that could be leveraged for the modern area without destroying its legacy. The original films don’t need to be remade, but further adventures could happen as the character encounters more scenarios of sci-fi/horror. These kind of stories could offer a lot of opportunity for gooey body-horror effects and actor performances going through transformations.
Certainly the Quatermass films have influenced other works, even if the source material itself hasn’t been remade. A case can be made that Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers and Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce both borrow from the Quatermass films without apology.
The Quatermass Xperiment also holds one more dubious honor. A nine-year-old boy died of a ruptured artery during a showing of the film. The Guinness Book of Records recognized the incident as the only known case of an audience member dying of fright while watching a horror film.
Results Of The Xperiment
The Quatermass Xperiment is a tough film to grade in 2025. It struggles to stay afloat when viewed through a modern lens. It is only fair to consider it during the time it was made, however. For a 1955 film, it generated a quiet mood tainted with dread and spookiness.
Yet, it also pays to consider what was coming out of American in the 1950s when it came to sci-fi entertainment. The United States was hitting a new level of refinement and special effects. War of the Worlds had already come out in 1953, dazzling audiences. Likewise, 1955 saw the release of This Island Earth, which showed yet another level of ambition.
It is maybe best to view The Quatermass Xperiment as something like the original Night of the Living Dead. That film carved its own niche in the public square as a down-and-dirty horror movie amidst more elevated material like 2001 and Planet of the Apes.
As an experiment in melding science fiction and horror, The Quatermass Xperiment built on stories like Frankenstein by moving beyond earth, which certainly proved viable. In a post-Alien world, a movie fan can’t swing a dead xenomorph without hitting yet another entry in the sci-fi horror genre.
