X the Unknown
Director: Leslie Norman; Joseph Losey
Year: 1956
Rating: 7.0
After
the success that Hammer had with The Quatermass Experiment the previous year,
another sci-fi with a strong dollop of horror was soon on its way. Hammer
knew they had something different on their hands. In fact, X the Unknown
may strike one as the second Quatermass but Nigel Kneale who owned the rights
to Quatermass refused to let them use that name. But it is certainly similar
in plot even with an American actor playing the scientist who investigates
an unexplained phenomenon. At the time Jimmy Sangster was a production manager,
but they asked him to come up with a script, but he demurred saying he was
not a writer. Oh give it a go. And he did and then went on to become an integral
part of Hammer over the next 15 years scripting many of the Frankenstein,
Dracula and Mummy films.
This one is fraught with anxiety. The same
anxiety that much of the world felt. Fears over radioactivity and foreign
subversives. There is a horror out there killing children, melting people
and creating a climate of fear of the unknown. For much of the film the Unknown
is never seen, just the abject horror on people's faces. The young boy's
face of stricken terror is a classic image. Once we actually see the cause
of the terror, it takes away much of mood of the film. And the climax is
much too simplistic.
It begins with British soldiers having an
exercise on a barren field. Suddenly there is an explosion that causes radiation
burns and leaves a large deep fracture in the ground. They call in Dr. Royston
(Dean Jagger) who is working at a nearby Atomic Energy Lab but he finds no
traces of radiation. He has a lab that looks like something a boy would have
ordered from the back of a comic book. But strange things continue to occur;
Royston's lab is broken into, a hospital's radiation unit also interrupting
a doctor-nurse tryst in a gruesome way. Royston realizes something has come
out of the earth and has an appetite for radiation. Leo McKern is on hand
as an Inspector. It was directed by Leslie Norman (Dunkirk) after apparently
Jagger had the blacklisted American director Joseph Losey removed for being
a Red.
