October Horrors #2: X… The Unknown (Leslie Norman, 1956)

One strand I want to try to work into my horror marathon this October involves filling in a few gaps re: films I really should have seen by now, but for some reason have not.

Given that I’m a big fan of both Hammer Films and eccentric, black & white British sci-fi movies more generally, the awkwardly titled ‘X… The Unknown’, Hammer’s immediate follow up to the success of ‘The Quatermass Xperiment’ a year previously, and the very first scripting credit from Jimmy Sangster, certainly fits the bill.

Essentially dealing with the travails of a giant, sentient oil slick from the centre of the earth as it rampages around some less picturesque areas of Scottish highlands eating radioactivity (and people), Sangster’s story is an admirably straight-down-the-line, bullshit-free exemplar of a ‘50s radioactive monster movie, but one which still, somehow, remains curiously compelling, touching at least in passing on the kind of Big Ideas and weird thematic resonances which Nigel Kneale reliably brought to his Quatermass stories.

By and large though, the feel of the movie is… dour in the extreme, reminding me somewhat of other military-focussed British films like Cliff Owen’s ‘A Prize of Arms’ (1962), whilst also pre-figuring the ‘Doomwatch’ franchise of the early ‘70s via its emphasis on lengthy scenes featuring blokes in great-coats stomping about in the frozen mud, poking patches of oil, taking Geiger counter reading and talking about science, whilst bored squaddies hang around in the cold awaiting orders. Grim weather, military manners, very few smiles, and no female characters whatsoever.*

A bit less of this kind of thing and a bit more excitement might have livened things up during the first half of the picture, but nonetheless, it’s all very well made (much as you’d expect of a Hammer production of this vintage) and moves at a fair old clip, with a varied and interesting cast (including such notables as Leo McKern, Anthony Newley and - of course - Michael Ripper) all doing good work re: keeping the audience engaged. It’s also worth mentioning meanwhile that, as the token American ‘star’, the bumbling, softly spoken Dean Jagger proves a vastly more likeable and convincing presence than Brian Donlevy did in the Quatermass movies.

The shock / horror scenes, when they eventually arrive meanwhile, are pretty great too. There are some really cool effects, and the black, amorphous crawling creature is genuinely quite unnerving - a totally alien presence, not so far removed from the kind of thing which might have slurped its way up from the depths of some ancient, pre-human vault at the end of a Lovecraft tale.

In fact, it is the few brief moments in ‘X… The Unknown’ which veer into gothic horror territory, splitting the difference between a scientific and occult threat, which prove to be by far the most memorable. 

For all the nuts n’ bolts SF logic of Sangster’s writing, it’s difficult not to feel that some weird, atavistic race memory has been unleashed, as we see the residents of a remote Scottish village cowering for protection in a cold, stone church as an evil, nameless menace which has literally crawled up from the depths of Hades slimes its way through the misty graveyard outside, demolishing the pretty dry stone walls, and narrowly missing an errant toddler who is pulled to safety at the last moment by the heroic vicar.

Great stuff, needless to say, and hey, check out this amazing Japanese poster I found (featuring a far cuter monster, apparently sourced from a different movie altogether, but never mind).

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* Ok, precisely speaking, I realise there’s a nurse who turns up at one point and has about five lines, and there’s the mother of a boy who’s killed by the monster, and some old dears being hustled into the church by the vicar… but we’re pretty much looking at an all-male affair here, perhaps reflective of the same awkwardness / inability to find things for women to do which later became a hallmark of Sangster’s gothic horror scripts?

October Horrors #1: Circus of Horrors (Sidney Hayers, 1960)

Released, I believe, one year prior to Franju’s definitive ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’, this early outlier in the ever-popular field of plastic surgery / facial reconstruction-themed horror differs slightly from the norm, in that Anton Diffring’s Dr Schüler [formerly Rossiter] is actually really good at restoring facially scarred women to their former beauty, requiring neither non-consenting skin-donors nor years of gruesome trial and error grafting experiments to get the job done.



Unfortunately however, despite his exceptional expertise and high success rate, fame and fortune do not await the good doctor and the brother / sister team of assistants who inexplicably follow him around, partly due to that stuffy ol’ medical establishment refusing to countenance his radical innovations… but largely due to the fact that he is also shady as fuck, in addition to being played by everybody’s favourite cold-eyed, expressionless Nazi officer.



As such, Schüler / Rossiter instead finds his true vocation acting as the tyrannical manager of a continental travelling circus, whose artistes are in fact petty criminals and prostitutes whose faces the Doc has surgically altered in order to grant them a new identity (as well as apparently training them all to be world class acrobats in the process), and whom he inevitably ends up murdering via various circus-appropriate staged accidents when they decide to leave his employ and/or threaten to expose his sinister racket. All of which falls pretty far from anything which might normally be deemed to make “a lick of sense”, but hey, who’s counting?

Unleashed upon the British public by Anglo-Amalgamated productions shortly after they’d delivered the sublime-to-the-ridiculous double whammy of Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’ and Arthur Crabtree/Herman Cohen’s ‘Horrors of the Black Museum’, it’s probably fair to say that ‘Circus of Horrors’ falls somewhere between those two poles, quality-wise, but a lot closer to the latter than the former.

Indeed, most of the plotting and character stuff here consists of tacky, ultra-lurid sado-melodrama, very much in the vein of the three films Cohen made with Michael Gough during this era, the details of which need not concern us here. But, at the same time, the production values are FAR higher than on any of Cohen’s flicks, with the use of a genuine circus (and its performers) lending a sense of scale and visual interest to proceedings which belies the low budget, whilst the cast also do a bang-up job breathing life into their corny, under-motivated roles.

Douglas Slocombe’s photography though is what really seals the deal, balancing rich colours with deep shadows, and adding real depth to Hayers’ oft-imaginative framing, especially during the scenes set in the big top, which (unusually for circus stuff in movies) have some decent atmosphere to them, and are quite fun to watch.

By the standards of a late ‘50s British production, this is strong stuff content-wise too, beating Hammer at their own game by including at least one absolutely startling bit of gore, whilst the circus setting meanwhile allows the glamorous (and numerous) female cast members (notably including both Yvonnes - Monlaur *and* Romain) to display acres of pulchritudinous flesh, whether crammed into kinky outfits, getting frisky with the ever-lecherous Diffring, or indeed with the equally randy cop/hero character who belatedly attempts to, uh, save the day?

Also - there’s a superbly fruity early Donald Pleasence performance to enjoy here too, as he pops up (with hair!) in the 1947-set prologue, playing the shell-shocked, alcoholic owner of a destitute circus, collapsing into despair amid the ruins of post-war France. And boy, does he ever get his teeth into it. It’s a shame he exits the film so early, but seeing him meet his sorry fate, crushed beneath the weight of an entirely inanimate dancing bear, is worth the entry price alone.

October Horrors 2024: Intro.

Ok, several days late and several dollars short this year, but I mean… I couldn’t just let this blog fade away into the digital void with a snarky hatchet job on a Roger Corman film at the top of the page, could I..? 

Despite all manner of time / life related pressures, I’m still doing my damnedest to meet the now traditional “one horror movie a day” challenge this year, and have been posting notes on my viewing over at the Rock!ShockPop! forums, so… it would seem churlish of me not to work ‘em up into posts for this blog at the same time really, wouldn’t it? In fact, it’s the least I owe any kind and patient readers who are still hanging on in there.

More-so than ever, the usual October disclaimers will apply here: these bits of writing are basically just slightly tidied up versions of initial notes I scribbled down immediately after watching the film; they have no particular structure, make no particular point, probably do nothing to upset the established critical consensus regarding any particular movie, and are only researched / fact-checked in the most hap-hazard of fashions. But, they’re something - and after nearly three months of nothing, why not? 

As I’m a bit behind, I’ll try to put the first few post up within the next 12 hours, and we’ll go from there…