ABCs of Horror 3: “X” Is for X the Unknown (1956)
Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?
There are times when one of these ABCs of Horror entries is tied inextricably to a past entry, so allow me to begin here by reposting the intro from our previous look at 1955’s The Quatermass Xperiment.
As the 1950s dawned, the U.S. film industry was mired in what was perhaps its longest drought of proper horror cinema, a true low point for the genre. Studios surmised at the time that post-war audiences had no interest in the hoary old monster movies and mad doctor stories that Universal had proliferated so readily throughout most of the 1940s, and were instead craving more “modern” tales that could reflect, on some level, the changed world that now existed in the nuclear age. Ultimately, it was the nascent science fiction genre that would give horror a route back into cinemas, via films like The Thing From Another World or The Man From Planet X in 1951, but the front half of the decade is still pretty fallow horror ground regardless, notable only for the rise of the “giant monster” movie via the likes of Godzilla and Them!. It wouldn’t be until the back half of the decade that more classical horror would return to prominence … and it wouldn’t be the U.S. leading the charge.
Across the pond, it was Britain’s Hammer Film Productions that would ultimately spearhead what turned into a global horror revival, as they embraced the spirit of the age in returning the old monsters to colorful life, rendering the likes of Frankenstein’s Monster or Dracula frightening once again in a new era of plunging necklines and lurid splashes of Eastmancolor blood. But before The Curse of Frankenstein or Horror of Dracula, there was The Quatermass Xperiment. This was the true genesis of what would quickly coalesce into “Hammer Horror,” an atmospheric melding of body horror and science fiction that embraced those newly “modern” post-war sensibilities while also laying a foundation for numerous sci-fi horrors to come.
And where the “Xperiment” of Dr. Quatermass left off, X the Unknown was waiting to continue its forays into Cold War paranoia and nuclear hypotheses. Arriving a year later, the film was written by Jimmy Sangster, who would go on to pen both Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula for Hammer, cementing his legacy in the horror genre. X the Unknown, on the other hand, deals with a more invisible (at least at first) menace, a being or consciousness from within the Earth itself, which eventually grows to monstrous scale in a conclusion that heavily presages the American release of The Blob two years later in 1958, albeit in atmospheric black and white.
Actor Dean Jagger stars as Dr. Adam Royston, an inquisitive and open-minded researcher for the U.K.’s “Atomic Energy Laboratory” who is called in to investigate after a fissure in the ground cracks opens in Scotland, resulting in several soldiers being killed by mysterious radiation burns. After more unnatural local deaths–including a young boy killed in a particularly creepy sequence after approaching an abandoned tower in the woods–Royston develops a theory that a creature from within the Earth composed of an unknown type of energy has emerged to the surface, seeking sustenance in the form of radiation. His superiors are all duly shocked by the preposterous idea, naturally.
This kind of theorizing (and film plotting) probably seems quaint to the modern audience, but it reflects the very real and deep-seated anxiety that was collectively experienced by members of the general populace in this era when the topic of nuclear science and radiation were being broached. It’s sort of ironic to think that radiation had of course surrounded us invisibly in every format since the beginning of time, but in the wake of World War II it had taken on newly stupendous and deadly significance, both as a bringer of life and of vast destruction, only hammered home by regular drills instructing school children to huddle under the desks to await their fiery demise. By no means was it an uncommon view of the time that perhaps man was not meant to meddle with these forces at all, a view that is expressed by the father of the dead boy, who fixes his grief on Royston and exclaims “you should be locked up, letting off bombs you can’t control.” You can’t quite argue with the level of distrust–these people are right to question whether their scientists and military minds are more concerned with cracking the secrets of the natural world than shielding the public from harm.
And yet, who will save that public from radioactive blobs, if not the eggheads? Because rest assured, they need saving here, as when it comes to dispatching people through massive doses of destructive radiation, X the Unknown actually manages to be pretty gruesome for a British film released in 1956. Multiple poor saps die notably grisly deaths, the most graphic being a doctor at a hospital who sneaks away with a nurse into the “radiation room” for a little necking, only to find that the creature has infiltrated in search of a radioactive meal. Pelted by atomic particles, the guy instantly melts into a pool of flesh and bone. The brutality is almost shockingly direct. And of course, it’s up to Dr. Royston to find the only tools effective against a creature of pure atomic energy.
Given the nature of these deaths, it’s kind of funny to think that if X the Unknown had arrived in another era–say, the 1980s/1990s rather than the 1950s–it might have been part of the extreme gross-out genre of Dead Alive, or been lumped among the so-called “melt movies” like Body Melt, Street Trash or even the 1980s version of The Blob. As is, only its judiciously brief death scenes and black and white cinematography keep the deaths from reading on the same level of squelchy unpleasantness, but rest assured–when it comes to reducing human beings to pools of goo, X the Unknown was absolutely a trailblazer for the genre.
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.