It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). Directed by Edward L. Cahn. Written by Jerome Bixby. Starring Marshall Thompson, Shirley Patterson, Kim Spalding, and Ray “Crash” Corrigan.
The one thing most sci fi fans know about this movie is that it’s considered one of the many films that inspired Alien (1979).
In a 1979 Cinefantastique interview, Alien producers Walter Hill and David Giler name-check It! The Terror from Beyond Space several times; they say they became aware of the similarities late in the production and pretty firmly place any responsibility for that on screenwriter Dan O’Bannon. I haven’t been able to find much about what O’Bannon has said about it, and he tends to change his stories and contradict himself a lot anyway, so we’ll leave it at that. O’Bannon’s Alien screenplay borrowed a lot of ideas from a lot of movies, but it’s not that important for our purposes here today.
Today, we’re here to talk about this movie and its place in the schlocky, low-budget, rubber-suited halls of 1950s B-movie fame.
Let us all cast ourselves back to the bad old days of the United States in the ’50s. World War II was over, the Cold War had begun, and the world had fully entered the Atomic Era. As we’ve seen when we watched The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Godzilla (1954), a lot of sci fi in the ’50s was a vehicle for exploring anxieties about terrifying new atomic science that most people didn’t understand, but everybody knew was potentially destructive on an unprecedented scale. Add those cautionary atomic tales to the prevalent post-war stories about invasion (see: War of the Worlds [1953], Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956], The Mysterians [1957], Village of the Damned [1960], etc.) and we’re starting to get a pretty good idea of what cinematic sci fi looked like at the time.
All we need to complete the picture are the creatures.
Sure, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla are monster movies, but big, stompy, city-destroying, war-metaphor monsters weren’t the only kind of sci fi monsters around. There were also a lot of smaller-scale monsters sneaking, sliming, slashing, and skittering through sci fi movies in the ’50s, particularly in the very low-budget B-movies that were often shown as double features. Then, as now, horror movies were a way to sell a lot of movie tickets to audiences who just wanted some Friday night screams and scares at the drive-in. This was important to filmmakers in the ’50s, as the expansion of television into American homes and the faltering of the Hollywood studio era left production houses scrambling for a way to get people into theaters.
So they turned to monster movies. Movies that were full of swarms of giant insects and mind-controlling parasites and things with tentacles and pincers. There were also mutating blobs and lobster people and disembodied brains and man-eating trees. There were monsters made out of sludge and monsters made out of rock and a whole lot of monsters that want to steal your women. There were even more giant insects. There were so many giant insects.
A lot of these monsters were, of course, aliens. There was The Thing From Another World (1951) and Invaders from Mars (1953) and It Came From Outer Space (1953) and many more. The vast majority of these movies involved alien creatures coming from outer space to wreak havoc on Earth, because there wasn’t actually a whole lot of space-based sci fi at the time. Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M (1950) was the first post-war movie to head into space; its human astronauts encounter the remains of a Martian civilization that has descended into barbarism. And, of course, there was Forbidden Planet (1956) with its invisible Freudian monster. But for the most part, space was still coming down to Earth instead of the other way around.
While movies were a bit slow to head into space, sci fi authors had been blasting off and exploring the stars in countless magazines and anthologies and paperbacks all along. Among them was writer Jerome Bixby. By the time he wrote the screenplay for It! The Terror from Beyond Space, Bixby had already written and published the short stories that would eventually secure his place among the legends of sci fi writers: “It’s a Good Life,” which in 1961 would be adapted into an amazingly creepy episode of The Twilight Zone; and “One Way Street,” which in 1967 he would adapt in the truly legendary Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror.”
Bixby had numerous short stories to his name when he wrote two screenplays for producer Robert Kent and director Edward L. Cahn. One of them was The Curse of the Faceless Man (1958), which according to Wikipedia “…concerns a Roman gladiator, buried alive in Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, who returns to life in modern times to find the reincarnation of the woman he loves.” I asked my archaeologist sister, who did her PhD research at Pompeii, if she ever found a cursed and reanimated undead gladiator during her excavations. She replied, and I quote, “I wish I did,” so draw your own conclusions about the verisimilitude of that film’s premise.
Bixby’s other screenplay was It! The Terror from Beyond Space. The two movies were produced outside of a major studio but distributed by United Artists as a double feature, which was very common for low-budget horror films in the ’50s, especially those that are just over an hour long. Additionally, both were filmed by cinematographer Kenneth Peach. His name might not mean anything to you, but if you’re thinking that some of the high-contrast, shadow-driven visual style of It! The Terror from Beyond Space looks familiar, it might be because he was the man behind the camera for a good half of the episodes of the original The Outer Limits, which aired from 1963 to 1965.
So here’s the thing: It! The Terror from Beyond Space is not a good movie.
It was never going to be a good movie. That wasn’t really the goal of the low-budget creature features shown at late night drive-ins in the ’50s. They were made quickly and cheaply to sell a lot of movie tickets in a short period of time. But I can still see why it’s so often cited as an inspiration to many much better movies that followed.
It was filmed over the course of about a week, with a shoestring budget and a cast that was pretty much only there for the paycheck. Stuntman Ray “Crash” Corrigan refused to drive out to the effects artist Paul Blaisdell’s workshop to make sure the monster suit fit, so it doesn’t fit, and there are scenes where we can see Corrigan’s chin sticking out of the creature’s mouth. Blaisdell was the artist responsible for a great many rubber suits in ’50s monster movies; in 2011 artist Vincent Di Fate wrote a deep dive into his career on this very site: “The Strange Creature of Topanga Canyon: Paul Blaisdell, His Life and Times.”
Corrigan was also drunk most of the time on set, which is one reason the monster stumbles around like it does. The other reason might be that those enormous lizard feet—which look like something a couple of Florida men might have used to hoax an entire town for decades—were probably not easy to walk around in.
The film shows us the monster before we even know there’s a monster to be afraid of, and we learn that it got on board because somebody forgot to close a hatch. The spaceship’s crew let a man they believe to be a mass murderer wander around freely. The two female characters, who are canonically a doctor and a scientist, still serve food and coffee for the menfolk. A large portion of the plot involves firing guns and setting off grenades aboard a spaceship. They also flood at least part of the ship with radiation, and it doesn’t kill anybody. Nobody ever suggests trying to toss the monster into space, even though there is a sequence where the human characters pass through the airlocks to maneuver outside the ship, and another sequence when they a depressurize a portion of the ship.
Even so, there is just enough in the film to make it interesting. Because the premise is fantastic!
We’re in the far-flung future year of 1973 (ha), and humanity is venturing out to explore other planets. But it’s not all going well. The first manned mission to Mars lost contact with Earth upon landing. When the rescue ship arrives, they discover a lone survivor: Colonel Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), who claims that the rest of his crew was attacked and stolen away by a mysterious creature during a sandstorm. The rescue mission commander, Colonel Van Heusen (Kim Spalding), is extremely skeptical of Carruthers’ tale. He thinks it’s far more likely that Carruthers killed the rest of his crew in order to preserve resources for his own survival.
Unfortunately, nobody actually treats Carruthers like a suspected mass murderer, so that conflict never really develops. There are some nicely spooky moments before the crew discovers the monster, and some nicely tense moments when they aren’t sure what to do because all their plans keep failing. I enjoyed the whole sequence from when Kienholz (Thom Carney) goes to investigate the mysterious sounds up until his body tumbles out of a ventilation shaft. But, again, that mystery never really develops either, because we already know there is a monster. It doesn’t even work up a proper Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None scenario, because most of the crew survives.
It’s so easy to see how this movie’s unfulfilled potential could inspire future sci fi writers. In fact, I’ll go even further than that: I understand the appeal completely, because while I was watching I kept thinking of all the ways the story could have twisted and turned to be so much scarier.
One thing I find interesting about this movie is just how committed it is to the idea that humankind going into space means going out and looking for trouble. “Another word for Mars is Death!” is an unintentionally funny ending line that surely somebody has already stolen as a story title (if not, I call dibs)—but it’s also an example of where the genres of sci fi and horror start to diverge. This movie was made just a few months after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 and kickstarted the Space Race, so people were very much thinking about and talking about going into space. By that time there were already sci fi movies that portrayed space travel with a focus not solely on the alarming space dangers but on relatively serious practicality, such as Rocketship X-M and Destination Moon (1950).
It! The Terror from Beyond Space tries to do a bit of both, but in the end it comes down firmly on the side of horror. Whereas a film like Forbidden Planet is saying, “Exploring space is dangerous, so we should be careful out there and learn from past mistakes,” this movie is saying, “Exploring space is dangerous and when we go out there we’re all going to die!”
To be clear, I don’t think this is any sort of representation of what Bixby or Cahn or anybody else involved actually thought about space travel, and there are some limits to drawing conclusions about what society fears from the horror movies it produces and watches. The U.S. in the 1950s was in fact overflowing with paranoia and fear, quite a lot of it related to science and technology, and a lot of the horror films in theaters portrayed this with endless variations of “the unknown is scary and gross and also wants to steal your women.”
At the same time, the public perception of space travel was evolving into something that is dangerous, yes, but also inevitable and exciting. I think that conflict is one of the reasons I love space-based sci fi horror so much. We don’t have to go into space. But we want to, so we do. Bad things can and do happen. But we’re going to keep going out there anyway.
What do you think of It! The Terror from Beyond Space? Would you go to Mars even if you knew there was a grenade-proof moisture-wicking lizard monster waiting for you? I probably would. Think of what we could learn about exobiology!
Next week: Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires is another movie cited as inspiration for Alien. It contains no vampires, but its title in Italian is Terrore nello spazio (Terror in Space), which is much more accurate. There is, indeed, terror in space. Watch it on Amazon, Apple, Hoopla, and a handful of other places.
One detail in this movie that I respect is that in a scene where members of the crew, in space suits, are walking along the exterior of the ship, they are clearly walking as if wearing magnetic boots. I’ve got to admire that someone thought enough to make that scene credible like that.
Except magnetic boots are not a credible way to move around in space at all. They’re the equivalent of trying to swim by strapping weights to your ankles and walking along the floor of the pool — it’s deliberately choosing the slowest, most awkward and difficult possible way to move in that environment merely to pointlessly mimic how you move in a different environment. It also wouldn’t work, because spaceship hulls tend to be made of lightweight, non-magnetic materials, and because the magnetic fields could interfere with sensitive shipboard electronics. In actual space, magnetic boots would be the dumbest possible way to move around — if you want to move outside a ship’s hull, then just use a tether, which doesn’t send you flying away if you should lose your grip with both feet. The only advantage of magnetic boots is to filmmakers trying to pretend that scenes filmed on Earth are actually in space.
I always thought the use of Corrigan’s chin as the creature’s “tongue” was an intentional design feature.
Also, it’s a reach to say that “One Way Street” was adapted into “Mirror, Mirror,” since it has little in common besides the idea of a parallel universe. Bixby’s original version of the episode had more in common, like the idea that the protagonist had a happy marriage in the other universe that he had to give up because his presence endangered the universe like an infection (though in the story he found a way to keep it), but that was all removed when the story was reworked to be about an evil-twin universe rather than just a moderately different universe.
Firing guns on a spaceship isn’t quite the problem people tend to assume, since micrometeoroids hit at least as hard as bullets, so spaceship hulls would need to be bullet-resistant. There is a danger of damaging equipment, though, not to mention hearing damage from guns going off in enclosed spaces. And grenades would be out of the question.
For all its faults, I watch this, even if only casually in the background, whenever I come across it (I love OTA TV). I saw this some years before “Alien” was released and noticed the similarities right away, particulary the crew crawling around through the the ventilation ducts and the climax where they kill the creature by opening up the airlocks. The similarities don’t in any way deteact from the film and in fact add to the fun. The scene where one crew member finds one if the missing shipmates stored away, still alive like a snack in the cupboard within the air shafts, still gives me the creeps.
… we learn that it got on board because somebody forgot to close a hatch.
Spunkmeyer!!
I’m always amused that they brought all those guns and grenades on a mission to a (supposedly) lifeless planet.