An astronaut infected with an alien organism stumbles across London (The Quatermass Experiment [1955]); alien-controlled humans construct a sinister refinery in the English countryside (Quatermass II [1957]); a Martian space-craft is unearthed at a tube station (Quatermass and the Pit [1967]); an extraterrestrial masquerades as a housewife (Unearthly Stranger [1963]); aliens take over a country hospital (Invasion [1966]); a visitor from one of Jupiter’s moons kidnaps young women and returns them to his planet for breeding purposes (The Night Caller [1965]).
In reality Britain has rarely been invaded. In its fantasies the opposite is true. It is perhaps fitting that a nation with such an expansive imperial past should have developed a rich tradition of narratives about itself being invaded, whether this be in the thriller, horror or science fiction genres. All the examples of invasion referred to above come from British science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s, an especially active time as far as imaginary invasions are concerned. Sometimes dismissed as lesser versions of or adjuncts to the better known US science fiction invasion films of the 1950s, these British films actually have a distinctive character of their own and this essay will seek to identify the nature of this distinctiveness. It will focus on the ways in which the films engage with issues to do with national identity that are quite different from those addressed by their American cousins. Also discussed will be the changes that occur in the British invasion fantasy as it moves from the 1950s to the 1960s.
Before embarking on this, however, it is worth considering some of the broader issues associated with the subject of imaginary invasion. A useful starting point is perhaps the most famous fantastic invasion of all.
Fears of invasion
No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.
– H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
These resonant opening lines from The War of the Worlds – with the matter-of-fact sense they give of humanity being caught in the gaze of another race – constitute a founding moment in the history of the science fiction invasion fantasy, just as the novel in which they feature has proven to be something of a model for alien invasion narratives. It is also true to say that while Wells has secured a place for himself (albeit a marginal one) in the literary canon as the writer of ‘popular classics’, twentieth-century fantasies about alien invasion have generally received a bad critical press. It is as if the intelligence of Wells’s anti-imperial work – with its full-scale assault on British complacency – has been betrayed by a pulp tradition which has assimilated only the sensational qualities of the story and discarded its more serious elements. Bug-eyed monsters wielding death-dealing ray guns and, more recently, the increasing public fascination with UFOs and alien abductions have all been insistently associated with a credulous, juvenile point of view. This has been so regardless of whether one is concerned with real life – and the alleged actual presence of extraterrestrials amongst us – or merely with fictions about alien assault and invasion. The audiences for the latter, it is assumed, are content, keen even, to see any culture that is different from their own presented as threatening simply because of that difference. Matters are made worse by the association of this us/them attitude with a politically reactionary point of view – whether this be the anti-communism of 1950s America or the gung ho nationalism of Independence Day (1996). The imperatives remain clear in all cases – we are good, they are bad, destroy them before they destroy us.
Film historians writing on 1950s American sf cinema – notably Peter Biskind (1983) and Mark Jancovich (1996) – have sought to dispel this prejudicial outlook through identifying a set of ambiguities and ambivalences apparent in a range of American invasion fantasies. In particular they have drawn our attention to the ways in which these films are as much about anxieties internal to America as they are about real or imagined fears of communist infiltration and invasion. As Jancovich notes, ‘the concerns with the Soviet Union were often merely a displacement or a code which different sections of American society used in order to criticise those aspects of American life which they feared or opposed’ (Jancovich 1996: 17).
While this is certainly true, the stress laid in many of these accounts on films which are especially distinguished and insightful in their exploration of the collective national psyche – Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the films of Jack Arnold – tends to cover over the fact that the alien invasion fantasy as a generic format is less straightforward than might be imagined. The transformation presented in The War of the Worlds of what were once transcendent and immutable values into a set of relative, contingent beliefs is actually a property of alien invasion fantasies in general, even (perhaps especially) those which seek most rigorously to deny it. This is because the mere imagining of an alien culture always involves an acknowledgement of Otherness and this in turn unsettles a certain complacency and racial self-centredness. Humanity’s imaginary dominion, its sense of itself as being at the centre of things, is wounded – and the extraterrestrial origins of this means that the wounding is especially traumatic, inflicted as it is against humanity in general rather than any circumscribed section of it. Once it is realised that, to use a phrase firmly associated with the science fiction genre, ‘we are not alone’, and once humanity is forcibly made aware of the boundaries or frontiers between it and an Other, then humanity becomes limited and is rendered fragile and perpetually vulnerable.
Alien invasion fantasies rely on what might be termed a relativisation of culture and cultural values. The instabilities and anxieties inevitably involved in this are managed in a variety of ways. In Wells’ case, for example, the day is saved via the intervention of germs, ‘the humblest things that God, in His wisdom, has put upon this earth’. Thus God – God in man’s image, so to speak – is restored to the centre, although this turns out only to be a provisional conclusion, for mankind is left in expectation of further possible attacks. Many readers might well be left suspicious that those helpful germs could in the end prove just as dangerous to humanity as they were to the Martians. One thing should be clear, however: there can be no going back to a life led in blissful – and, as far as Wells is concerned, complacent – ignorance of something which exists ‘out there’. Bearing this in mind, it does seem that the Martians’ lasting achievement is not their temporary occupation of Earth but rather their forcing humanity to acknowledge the existence of an alien culture and in effect to make mankind return the gaze directed against it at the novel’s beginning. Inasmuch as they succeed in doing this, the Martians have won, for they have effectively destroyed once and for all a particular human-centred way of existing in and making sense of the universe. It does seem that this destructive mechanism, by which humanity is presented with an overwhelming sense of its own limitations, is constitutive of all invasion fantasies. Regardless of the narrative outcome, the war is always over before the invasion even begins simply because the mere existence of an alien culture is sufficient to do the damage. It could further be argued that the articulation of such fantasies is dependent on a social and cultural context which has become relativised and less sure of itself. Hence the 1950s was a prime decade for invasions, not only because of the tensions associated with the Cold War, but also because of a number of shifts and new trends in the West, most notably a growing affluence and materialism coupled with a widespread sense that traditional values were increasingly being brought into question. Importantly, these various changes did not manifest themselves uniformly across the Western world. Consumerism, for example, meant something different in America from alleged undue influence of American culture on the British way of life). It follows that any account of British sf, while needing to preserve a sense of the generic character of the alien invasion fantasy and how all such fantasies, regardless of their country of origin, share certain qualities, must at the same time take account of the socially and historically specific pressures exerted upon the fantasies by the context within which they were produced.
Quatermass and the aliens
Alongside the best-selling novels of John Wyndham (including The Day of the Triffids [1951], The Kraken Wakes [1953] and The Midwich Cuckoos [1957]), probably the best-known invasion stories to emerge from 1950s Britain featured the character Professor Bernard Quatermass. Making his first appearance (played by Reginald Tate) in The Quatermass Experiment, a highly successful BBC Television serial from 1953, he subsequently featured in two more serials, Quatermass II (1955, played by John Robinson) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958/1959, played by André Morell). All three were written by Manx writer Nigel Kneale (also responsible for the celebrated television adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 (1954)). Each of them presents a narrative in which an alien threat to the Earth gradually escalates to a point of absolute crisis at which time the knowledgeable Quatermass acts decisively in order to save humanity. In 1955 Hammer released its film version of The Quatermass Experiment. Directed by Val Guest with the American actor Brian Donlevy in the title role, it proved to be the company’s first major box-office hit and in many ways was a forerunner to the Gothic horror cycle that was shortly to follow. Film adaptations of Quatermass II (again directed by Guest with Donlevy as the scientist) and Quatermass and the Pit (directed by Roy Ward Baker with Andrew Keir as Quatermass) appeared in 1957 and 1967 respectively. (A fourth Quatermass television serial appeared in 1979. Known both as Quatermass and The Quatermass Conclusion, it featured John Mills as Quatermass. There was also a radio serial – The Quatermas Memoirs – in 1996.) Hammer’s film versions are better known today than the original television serials, if only because the serials are much harder to see. In writing about Quatermass, however, it is necessary to consider both versions of each story. This is not only because the television versions often contain significant sequences omitted from the films, but also because film and television programme alike display a considerable media awareness. Each contains comments about the medium in which it appears as well as about other media, and this in turn has implications for the way in which the alien invasion itself is presented.
The film version of The Quatermass Experiment concludes with the monster being discovered in Westminster Abbey by a live television outside broadcast team who promptly cease transmission, thus cutting off the television audience – but not the cinema audience – from the sight of Quatermass dealing with the threat. Charles Barr has linked this break in transmission with other attempts by 1950s British cinema to distance itself from television, its main rival, by presenting itself as ‘a more autonomous and full-blooded experience’ (1986: 214). This insistence on the difference between the two media is also apparent in the film being sold on its initial release as The Quatermass Xperiment, a marketing device designed to draw a prospective audience’s attention to its status as an ‘X’ certificate film. The ‘X’ certificate, denoting a film for adults only, had been introduced in 1951 and had rapidly become associated with a growing explicitness vis-à-vis the representation of sex and violence. As Barr notes, there is a certain irony attached to this given that the film had itself been adapted from a television serial. The irony is compounded when one realises that the 1953 television version of the story contains a sequence set in a cinema during a screening of an absurdly juvenile, pulp-like science fiction film. Here the television drama, with obvious aspirations to be a mature treatment of pre-existing generic themes, seeks to differentiate itself from what it perceives as the mindlessness of the mainstream, conventional science fiction product. One might add here that the television version of Quatermass and the Pit also contains a scene not unlike the film version of The Quatermass Experiment in which a television outside broadcast is interrupted. In the case of Quatermass and the Pit, this takes place at a press conference in front of the recently uncovered Martian spacecraft and is witnessed mainly from the viewpoint of some people watching television in a nearby pub. Yet again television is shown as inadequate as a means of representing some appalling alien threat, although it is noteworthy that this time it is the television version of the story itself which is announcing its own shortcomings.
In fact the more one looks at the Quatermass stories, the more one sees how both television and film versions exhibit a sense that the material with which they are dealing is not easily assimilated into traditional forms and mechanisms of representation. Hence all the distancing references in both television programmes and films as well as the fact that the camera on board the original Quatermass rocket in The Quatermass Experiment (a device meant to provide a reassuringly objective account of the space journey) is broken in the crash which initiates the story. Hence too the presence in both versions of Quatermass and the Pit of a new type of recording device which picks up brain waves and translates these into images which can then be projected and viewed by others. Such a device abolishes the distinction between the prosaic mundanity of the television broadcast and the vapid escapism of the space opera shown in the TV Quatermass Experiment, engaging instead with private mental processes. In Quatermass and the Pit, the knowledge this provides finally enables Quatermass to discover the truth about the Martian invasion of the Earth that took place five million years previously. What the use of this radically new device suggests is that a new way of seeing is required in order to counter the alien threat, one that goes beyond what is currently available in 1950s British society. More generally, such moments of modest self-reflexivity – where, if only for a few sequences, a particular technology of vision and/or representation is foregrounded in the narrative – point to a widespread sense in these stories of they themselves being something new and strange within British film and television culture, something which is in many respects quite alien to the pre-existing norms of representation and storytelling.
These narratives about alien invasion, and indeed the aliens themselves, are defined in their strangeness against what for 1950s Britain passes for reassuringly familiar contexts. This means that while many of the conventional trappings of the science fiction genre – rockets, extraterrestrials and the like – are present, they are invariably located in relation to a reasonably accurate approximation of the real, even humdrum, world. The opening of the film version of The Quatermass Experiment, in which a rocket crashes near a cottage in the country, neatly dramatises a much more widespread collision that takes place throughout this and the other Quatermass narratives between the fantastic regime of science fiction and the ‘realism’ of British everyday life. The climactic sequence in Westminster Abbey would have had a particular resonance in this respect, especially for the television audience who only a few months previously had witnessed the same location on their screens during the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. There is a kind of iconoclasm here, a furtive pleasure in seeing the Queen supplanted by a deadly alien monster about to reproduce, just as there is in Quatermass II (film), where the Shell Haven Refinery in Essex is transformed into an alien base, and in Quatermass and the Pit (TV), where the Martians and the surgically-altered apemen are discovered in, of all places, Knightsbridge. One consequence of this mixing of the familiar and the strange, with the strange often concealed within the familiar and close to home, is that audiences are invited to look at their own world in a different light, seeing it to a certain extent as itself an alien world.
A comment made by Kim Newman in a discussion of US anti-communist movies offers a useful way of thinking about the view of 1950s Britain found in the Quatermass stories. Newman states that unlike their American counter-parts, British sf invasion films of the 1950s seem to be ‘still fighting World War Two’ (1996: 79). It is certainly true that the Quatermass television programmes and films are replete with distancing references to a Cold War conflict. As the avuncular Inspector Lomax (played by Jack Warner) puts it in The Quatermass Experiment (film), ‘No one wins a Cold War’, an attitude fully endorsed by the discrediting of the views of the hawk-like militarist Colonel Breen and his cronies in Quatermass and the Pit (TV and film). It is also true that the Quatermass stories show Britain as a nation still bound to the experience of the Second World War. This manifests itself in a number of ways: examples include the workers at the alien factory in Quatermass II who seem to have been transplanted directly from a morale-boosting Second World War film and whose social club contains a poster boasting the war-like slogan ‘Secrets Mean Sealed Lips’; the concern with wartime unexploded bombs in Quatermass and the Pit as well as the way in which the destruction visited upon London at the conclusion of that story very clearly re-enacts the Blitz. It does not follow from this, however, that these stories are simply nostalgic or backward-looking. Instead this attachment to a collective memory of the Second World War needs to be connected with another distinctive feature of the Quatermass stories – one which further separates them from the US invasion fantasy – and that is their marginalisation of romance and sexual desire and their general suppression of domestic matters.
In the 1950s Quatermass stories, Quatermass himself is someone who, while working to protect the nation, remains a curiously isolated figure, bereft of anything resembling a meaningful relationship. (In the 1979 Quatermass, he has acquired a granddaughter; possibly connected with this is the fact that here he seems a much weaker figure who can only defeat the aliens through the sacrifice of the lives of both himself and his granddaughter.) The standard, if not clichéd, figures of the clean-cut square-jawed hero and his girl, which are present in some form or other in most US sf films of this period and parodied in the film-within-a-TV-programme in The Quatermass Experiment (TV), are absent. The most likely candidates for such roles are Victor Caroon, the surviving astronaut in The Quatermass Experiment, and his wife, but in both film and television versions their relationship remains marginal to the main narrative and Caroon himself ends up converted into an alien monster. In addition to this, families – another notable signifier of normality in many US sf films – are few and far between in the 1950s Quatermass stories.
While US science fiction invasion fantasies generally proceed in the direction of a heterosexual and/or familial resolution, the Quatermass stories have a tendency to view individuals as existing primarily within and in relation to groups, institutions and collectives. In the world of Quatermass, there are scientists, soldiers, policemen, politicians, journalists, workers, but few lovers or families and, to a certain extent, no free-standing individuals either. What one finds instead is a mode of social existence that bears more than a passing resemblance to a notion of the people developed and circulated in Britain during the Second World War. This pervasive ideal of national identity was presented in a range of propagandistic material in which the people as a national collective absorbed and superseded the individual, where romance and desire were expendable, even frivolous, given Britain’s troubled circumstances, and where the nuclear family that had been disrupted by war was replaced by the group as the prime site of interaction and mutual support. The crucial difference between this wartime notion of the people and the Britain of Quatermass is the populist and hegemonic nature of the former. In the late 1930s the population, and especially a working class alienated from ideas of national unity after the experience of the Depression, had to be won over to the war and the accompanying need for sacrifice. This led to the propaganda for this position having a persuasive, concessionary quality to it, the constant message being that Britain would be a better, more just and integrated nation after the war than it was before (Hurd 1984).
The nation as it exists for Quatermass in the 1950s is certainly unified in that, initially at least, there seems to be no internal dissent or conflict (apart from that occasionally articulated by Quatermass himself). However, the nation in the films lacks any sense of a wartime urgency to bind it together; its unity – with everyone having a place in the collective – is superficial. On one level this registers in a mass complacency where the people seem unconcerned about the dire threat with which they are faced. So in The Quatermass Experiment (film), rubbernecking crowds stand idly by at both the beginning and the end while the police’s only advice is for everyone to go home (where, presumably, they would all watch television until something disturbing appeared on screen, at which point transmission would be terminated) (Hutchings 1993: 41–50). Similarly in Quatermass II the community at Wynerton Flats seems extraordinarily blind to the weird events going on around them, while the nation in general is complacent to the point of culpability in not noticing that aliens have established a firm foothold in Britain. On another, more disturbing level, the superficiality of unity and consensus is apparent in the violence that suddenly – shockingly in the context of the 1950s – tears apart the social order. One thinks here of the worker uprising in Quatermass II where the managers and their agents are machine-gunned and the workers themselves fed into the factory machinery, and the riot that concludes Quatermass and the Pit, in which a kind of race war breaks out on the streets of London. In each case, the violence can be related to underlying social tensions to do with class and race conflict apparent in Britain at this time; but because these tensions have only been faintly articulated within the respective dramas (for instance, there is a passing reference to a race riot in a radio news broadcast heard near the beginning of the TV version of Quatermass and the Pit) the violence has a frighteningly spontaneous, irrational quality to it.
Within such a context Quatermass himself tends to be viewed ambivalently. On the one hand, he is a boffin-like protector of a society which generally seems incapable of protecting itself. On the other, as a 1950s scientist he is also, more disturbingly, associated with advanced technologies that register as strange and alien in the 1950s world and which on occasion parallel the technologies used by the alien invaders. So in The Quatermass Experiment it is the scientist’s own failed experiment, and the Frankenstein-like hubris embodied in it (emphasised, not surprisingly perhaps, in the Hammer version) which brings the alien infestation to Earth while in Quatermass II Quatermass’s design for a moon colony is turned against the human race when it appears fully realised in the English countryside as the initial home for the invading aliens. In part this ambivalent treatment derives from a broader uncertainty at this time about the role of the scientist in the nuclear age, as someone who deals with a mysterious power that is both wonderful and immensely destructive. However, typical of the idiosyncratic slant taken on such matters by the Quatermass stories is the fact that the narrative most explicitly about the nuclear age – Quatermass and the Pit – is also the one where Professor Quatermass is at his most dove-like and socially responsible and where, for once, he is not made complicit with the alien invasion (this role is taken instead by Colonel Breen).
It should be clear by now that lurking beneath the appeal of the Quatermass stories to the virtues of the wartime collective is a sense that something is wrong with Britain and that this predates any alien invasion. To a certain extent the function of the aliens is to reveal and clarify something that is already there, with their subsequent destruction a means of dealing, if only temporarily, with internal social tensions. It is interesting in this respect that, on a superficial level, the Quatermass aliens tend to be associated with a particular sort of modernity – especially shiny, streamlined artefacts such as the rocket in The Quatermass Experiment, the Wynerton Flats complex in Quatermass II, and the Martian spacecraft in Quatermass and the Pit (in which, ironically, the most modern-looking object turns out to be five million years old). However, once these smooth, futuristic surfaces are penetrated, the aliens themselves are revealed as ultra-natural, defiantly organic, even primordial. So in The Quatermass Experiment the alien infestation is a primitive biological organism that absorbs human bodies and eventually transforms Victor Caroon into a plant-like creature; in Quatermass II the aliens are yet again relatively primitive, jellyfish-like objects nourished by an ammoniacal substance; while in Quatermass and the Pit the spacecraft not only contains the insect Martians and the genetically altered apemen but itself seems to have organic qualities.
When seen in this way the aliens do not merely inaugurate a Darwinist struggle of the species but also raise the possibility of an evolutionary regression, whether this be characterised by the primordial creatures in the first and second Quatermass stories or the apemen in Quatermass and the Pit. (A more appropriate Wells reference than The War of the Worlds here might be The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). Significantly, these aliens are often also associated with a contaminating dirtiness – for example, the black slime in Quatermass II which nourishes the aliens but which besmirches everything else it touches, or the mud from which the spacecraft is dug in Quatermass and the Pit. This filth, and the disgust and revulsion that go with it, makes the invasion/possession of the body which precedes the attempted full-scale invasion in all three 1950s Quatermass stories especially traumatic. The polluting experience of bodily invasion is thereby equated with the messy eruption of biological processes, with this taking place in a society whose adherence to a collective unquestioning mode of existence and general censoriousness and conservatism render it singularly ill-equipped to deal with something quite so vulgar and shockingly physical.
Within this situation Professor Quatermass mounts a holding operation. Associated himself with an alienating modernity, he nevertheless works to protect the existing social order from both external and internal threats. Yet Quatermass’s Britain is visibly weak and vulnerable, caught as it is in a kind of collective post-war doze. Clearly this state of affairs cannot continue indefinitely. Change must be recognised and assimilated while Quatermass, who in combining traditional and progressive qualities is very much a figure of transition, will have to step aside. Britain faces a different sort of invasion.
Closer to home
In a sequence near the beginning of John Krish’s Unearthly Stranger (1963), a scientist invites a male colleague home to meet his new wife. The scientist is concerned about his wife, because, as strange as it might seem, she never blinks. Everything seems normal, even clichéd, in this early 1960s household with the partially domesticated husband willing to do a share of menial chores while the sexy wife manages the major tasks in her smart kitchen. Then the husband’s friend sees the wife remove a red hot casserole dish from the oven with her bare hands. Understandably shocked, he retreats without comment but during the meal he cannot help staring at her. She chides him gently for this. Then she blinks.
The housewife is an alien, of course, sent to interfere with the scientist’s attempts to project humanity out into space. Unlike the earlier Quatermass invasions, however, the principal site for this alien invasion is the domestic household and the face the alien wears is that of the female. The refocusing apparent here on both domesticity and gender is a general characteristic of many of the post-Quatermass invasion fantasies. A consequence of this – in films such as Unearthly Stranger, Invasion (1966), The Night Caller (1965), The Earth Dies Screaming (1965) and Night of the Big Heat (1967) – is that invasions take on a smaller-scale, more intimate quality. The aliens are merely passing through (Invasion), have relatively limited strategic aims which do not include a full-scale invasion (The Night Caller, Unearthly Stranger) or are encountered in isolated settings that are never integrated into a national or international whole (Invasion again, Night of the Big Heat). To a certain extent the aliens’ limited ambitions in these films might be assigned to low budgets and a consequent restriction to small casts and few sets, although the fact that the hardly high budget Quatermass television programmes and films still managed to convey a sense of the whole nation being under threat, suggests that something other than financial constraints is at stake in these 1960s films. Arguably connected with this disappearance of an idea of the nation as an integrated whole is the foregrounding in these films of notions of sexual difference – whether this be female invaders (Unearthly Stranger, Invasion), male aliens seeking out human females (The Night Caller) or, more generally, the alien invasion highlighting gender divisions and tensions within a particular group of humans (most spectacularly, Night of the Big Heat).
Quatermass-like elements are still un-doubtedly present, especially in the films’ opening sequnces. Invasion begins with an ominous failure in a military radar system; The Night Caller with the descent of a mysterious extraterrestrial object to Earth and its subsequent investigation by a team of scientists (with both of these decidedly reminiscent of Quatermass II); and Unearthly Stranger with the unexplained death of a scientist working on a top secret government space project. Yet these various inaugural mysteries never really demonstrate the possibilities for escalation and proliferation found in all the Quatermass stories. Thus in Invasion the aliens are only interested in recapturing a fellow alien and once they have done this they leave; while in The Night Caller the alien escapes to Soho where instead of planning for an invasion he advertises for women in the improbably titled magazine Bikini Girl. More prosaically, Unearthly Stranger focuses its attention on an extremely bizarre marriage. Even those figures who appear most Quatermass-like – notably the scientist played by Maurice Denham in The Night Caller – turn out to be ineffective, compromised by their personal relationships or, in the case of Denham’s scientist who is killed by the alien, just plain weak.
The view of the nation that emerges from this is also quite different from that offered by the Quatermass storis. Perhaps inevitably given the context within which they were produced, these invasion fantasies all register a general diminution in British national identity consequent upon the visible decline of Empire after the Suez affair in 1956. The idea that Britain had a world-wide sphere of influence – a precarious enough notion in the 1950s – was clearly no longer tenable in the 1960s and one gains the sense that underlying the 1960s invasion films is the strategic question of why anyone would bother to invade Britain at all. As far as internal matters are concerned, it seems from these films that Britain has lost its centre and become fragmented, its population scattered in isolated groups and its institutions and hierarchies no longer as efficacious as they once were. So, for example, the hospital in Invasion is a far cry from the hospitals that feature prominently in a whole range of 1950s films – including White Corridors (1957), No Time for Tears (1957), Doctor in the House (1954) and its sequels – and which there act as a kind of microcosm of the caring Welfare State. Invasion’s hospital, by contrast, is beset by internal squabbles and is eventually sealed off from the outside world by an alien force field. More comically, the unsuccessful attempts of the army officer in The Night Caller to explain over the phone the situation to his obviously less than intelligent superiors yet again points to the inadequacy of any higher authority.
Connected with this is the films’ fascination with and anxiety about gender, and especially the changing role of the woman, something that hardly concerned Quatermass at all. In a sense, particular notions of femininity are central to the increasingly consumerist society that was Britain in the 1960s. On the one hand, the woman as embodied in the figure of the housewife is the prime organiser of domestic consumption; but on the other hand, she is also often presented as the sexualised object of male consumption (most notably in this period in the James Bond films). The kidnapped women in The Night Caller, which in many ways is the most reactionary of the films being discussed here, seem to fall into the latter category. Defined entirely by their physical appearance and their sexual attractiveness – their abductor presents all his victims with a photograph of them as if to underline their objectification – they are throughout the film completely under the control of the male alien. Surprisingly, they are not even rescued at the end. It is interesting in this respect, if also disturbing, that the most intelligent, self-assured and independent woman in the film, the scientist Ann Barlow, is identified by the alien as especially threatening and is brutally killed.
More complex in their treatment of women are Invasion and Unearthly Stranger. In the former, all three aliens – two women and one man – are played by oriental actors. At first glance this might be seen as invoking fears of Chinese communist subversion, but Invasion also needs to be located in relation to a wider orientalist strain in British cinema in the 1960s – including the Fu Manchu movies starring Christopher Lee, Battle Beneath the Earth (1967) and even Dr No (1962) – which in their stress on warlord villains seemed to be more about nostalgia for a lost imperial age than more contemporary fears and anxieties. Invasion is certainly not nostalgic, but its treatment of race is far from straightforward. While it might use the race of its oriental actors in an arguably racist sense to accentuate the otherness of the aliens, it also features another oriental female as a nurse at the hospital. What this produces is a kind of racial ambiguity about the identity of the aliens so that they are not fully or easily distinguishable from the humans in the hospital, or, to be more precise, from the hospital’s ‘resident alien’, i.e. non-white human. This ambiguity is carried over into the gender roles adopted by the aliens as well for while there is a good deal of evidence in the film to support the female aliens’ account of themselves – namely that they are extraterrestrial police in search of an escaped male criminal – the male alien’s claim that he is a dissident on the run from what presumably is a female-dominated society is never fully discounted. The authoritative identification and containment of the aliens that is enacted throughout the 1950s by Quatermass is clearly no longer achievable and what one is left with instead are some unanswered questions and a sense that the truly important drama is taking place elsewhere.
This failure to name and control the alien threat is developed further in Unearthly Stranger with particular reference to the figure of the housewife. The film works systematically to make the image of the housewife appear strange, so that in effect it becomes a surface beyond which some otherness may be lurking. It does this through stressing the performativity of the role, the way in which housewifery seems to be defined via the carrying out of a series of actions – such as preparing the evening meal – under the benign gaze of the husband. Once this performance is recognised for what it actually is – as is the case in the kitchen scene – then immediately the woman becomes a threatening enigma for the male, who can no longer trust the evidence of his own eyes. Hence the film’s stress on the transformation of the male gaze at the woman into something troubled and fearful; hence too the mounting male paranoia of its hero – such a traumatic revelation obviously puts male identity itself in a state of turmoil. Unearthly Stranger concludes in true paranoid style with the scientist discovering that not only his wife but the helpful secretary at his office are aliens. He is last seen surrounded by a group of women, any or all of whom might be aliens too. The cool gaze of the Martians at the beginning of The War of the Worlds has been transformed into the female gaze, a gaze that dispels male complacency. The scientist’s self-confidence, which in the Quatermass stories saved the nation from disaster, has gone and all that is left is a state of perpetual uncertainty.
Quatermass revisited
Hammer’s 1967 version of Quatermass and the Pit is something of an anachronism. Of all three film versions, it is the most faithful to the television original and yet the view of Britain it conjures up, with all its wartime resonances, surely belongs more to the 1950s than it does to the 1960s. Nevertheless there is something about the story it tells which has a significance that goes beyond the immediate circumstances of its original production and which clarifies some of the more general qualities of the British invasion fantasy. In the story it is discovered that five million years ago Martians mounted a successful invasion of Earth by proxy through altering selected humans to instil Martian-like behaviour in them. The consequences of this are startling for it means that, as one of Quatermass’s associates remarks, ‘We’re the Martians now’. This statement of fact is also, of course, a statement of defeat, for how can one change the very essence of the human when it is revealed as being partly alien?
As was suggested at the beginning of this essay, the invasion fantasy generally can be seen as a narrative of defeat. In a sense, aliens always win. What is apparent in Quatermass and the Pit, however, and indeed in all the British sf invasion films discussed here, is how close to the surface this realisation actually is, certainly more so than in most of the contemporaneous American sf films. It is as if Britain, displaced from an imperial history and the glories of the Second World War and caught up in a series of bewildering social changes, is more open to self-doubts and an accompanying acknowledgement of its own limits. That such an acknowledgement is always fearful – and viewed in films such as Unearthly Stranger and Invasion as a kind of collapse – is hardly surprising given that the identities of both the nation and the individual are at stake. Yet the dispelling of a self-centred complacency can in itself be seen as a positive experience for, as Quatermass finally comes to realise in Quatermass and the Pit and as H. G. Wells understood all along, to know the alien more clearly is to know oneself as well.
Works Cited
Barr, Charles (1986) ‘Broadcasting and cinema: 2: Screens within screens’, in Barr (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema. London: British Film Institute.
Biskind, Peter (1983) Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. London: Pluto Press.
Hurd, Geoff (ed.) (1984) National Fictions. London: British Film Institute.
Hutchings, Peter (1993) Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Jancovich, Mark (1996) Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Newman, Kim (1996) ‘Are you now or have you ever been…?’, in Stefan Jaworzyn (ed.) Shock. London: Titan.
Wells, H. G. (1993 [1898]) The War of the Worlds. London:Phoenix Mass Market Publications.