Chapter 11
The 1950s became a breeding ground for low-budget science-fiction movies and among the countless turned out was United Artists’ It! The Terror from Beyond Space. The film tells of a rocket returning to Earth from Mars, the crew terrorized by a monster that requires human blood and tissue to sustain it, leading to cellular collapse in its victims. It’s a picture that’s mentioned a lot in this book, and not without due cause; here is the one production that transcends its budget limitations to take on the mantle of “The Decade’s Finest Sci-Fi B Thriller.” Everything about It! screams “Archetypal Classic!” Once in a while, a group of filmmakers get their heads together for a singular idea, everyone pulls his weight and the end result is an artistic triumph for all concerned, making, in a way, their own personal statement. It!, in terms of ’50s commodity, represents one such golden moment and holds its head up well 54 years on. But to find out why, let’s analyze the picture’s various components to see how those components, welded together, form a deeply satisfying whole.
Director: Edward L. Cahn; Cinematographer: Kenneth Peach
Cahn directed a fair number of horror thrillers in his time, but none to match It! After the title credits have leapt out of the screen in mock 3-D, almost knocking you back into your seat, the camera pans across a forbidding Martian landscape to a sleek spaceship, waiting to blast off. Cahn then segues effortlessly into a two-minute prologue: A Washington spokesman explains to the press that Colonel Marshall Thompson, sole survivor of the Challenge 141 Mars expedition, is being brought back to Earth for court martial on the grounds that he killed nine colleagues for food and water after the rocket crash-landed (a neat device to relay the plot to the audience). Returning swiftly to Mars, Captain Kim Spalding prepares for takeoff. On the five-minute mark, Cahn allows the viewer a glimpse of a silhouette, certainly not human, and large reptilian feet padding the deck, accompanied by a throaty, growling noise — but only for a few seconds. We now know there’s a monster aboard, even if Spalding doesn’t. The ship shoots off into a starlit space and Cahn takes things easy, introducing the characters, their relationships and Thompson’s own version of events. At 15 minutes in, having racked up the tension and expectancy levels, the mood and tempo changes: Thom Carney hears banging and crashing beneath his cabin; Cahn shows a three-digit claw rummaging along a shelf and another fearsome silhouette, and a roar breaks the silence. Investigating two decks below, Carney walks through a doorway to his death. Cahn depicts his savage demise at the hands of the stowaway in shadow to keep audiences on the edge of their seats. From here on in, the director ups the pace to fever pitch, ably guiding his camera around the ship’s cramped, utilitarian interiors, subtly photographed by Kenneth Peach: galleys; storage compartments cluttered with crates, drums and cabinets; narrow corridors; metal stairways and the flight deck; blinking, flashing analog instrument panels; inky black corners set off by brightly lit foregrounds; faces/bodies in half-shadow — visually, Gothic sci-fi at its most intriguing. It!’s most mesmerizing section commences at 25 minutes and demonstrates magnificently the merger of Cahn and Peach’s talents, both going for the jugular. The monster’s face comes into view inside the air duct, the crew deciding to dispatch it with grenades, rigging them to the ventilation hatch’s grill (“Get outta here! Get a lead start,” yells Thompson, realizing they’re too close to the thing for comfort). As the monster bursts out of the exploding grill, smoke forcing it to breathe heavily in the oxygen-depleted air, Cahn tracks along a line of worried faces, the crew listening to the bedlam over the intercom system. Spalding and his men, carrying guns, descend the stairs and tentatively approach the battered door to C compartment. The buckled door opens, then jams, the lights flickering and short-circuiting. Paul Langton, rifle at the ready, peers through the murk. The monster emerges half-seen from the smog, grabs Langton’s weapon and bends it in half, twisting the edge of the door in anger. As Spalding and company open fire, the thing, a dark menacing figure, advances toward camera, filling the frame; still blazing away, the crew retreat through the connecting hatch. Cahn’s forceful approach, combined with tight editing and Peach’s imaginative lighting, brings this riveting sequence of events to heart-racing life, one of sci-fi’s most memorable eight minutes of alien monster pandemonium.
The Cahn/Peach partnership remains consistent throughout the movie and never slackens. Cahn shoots the baggy-suited alien from above, looking down from deck hatches as it drags its lifeless prey through the smoke left by gas grenades, Peach shrouding some scenes in a near-blackness. His use of masking light against shade really comes to the fore in the parts where the monster is trapped in the ship’s nuclear reactor, and when Thompson electrifies a stairway. Much of It!’s footage is just plain dark, period! Cahn also inserts, at regular intervals, views of the rocket drifting through space (the same views, judging by the three stars to the right of the vessel!) to segment the action, and only the ’50s could get away with a space walk created by tilting the camera to one side, filming the actors in slow motion, and making it work. So Cahn plus Peach become the perfect sci-fi marriage, both director and photographer complementing the other to exhilarating effect.
Composers: Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter
It!’s title theme (mentioned in chapter four) is one of the ’50s greatest, 61-seconds of seat-shaking power that rolled over packed audiences in the early 1960s and left their ears ringing. And that’s only for starters. The remainder of the soundtrack is just as spellbinding. There’s the mournful, out-of-key wailing that is the accompaniment to the rocket falling through space, the views of Mars becoming musical cues for new scenes; the rumbling, menacing overtures announcing the snarling arrival of the monster; the prolonged aural assaults during the confrontations between crew and alien and the softer, incidental snatches when the crew discuss life-threatening injuries or Marshall and Shawn Smith begin to bond. And Cahn isn’t afraid to dispense with music altogether in some interludes, thereby heightening the suspense — silence often speaks louder than music. Make no mistake, Sawtell and Shefter’s arrangements for this film are in a class of their own, the B-movie soundtrack elevated to stratospheric heights; the music still resonates in the ears of fans decades later.
The Actors; Scriptwriter Jerome Bixby
Marshall Thompson, Kim Spalding, Shawn Smith, Dabbs Greer, Ann Doran, Paul Langton, Robert Bice, Richard Benedict, Richard Hervey and Thom Carney act with a total belief in what they are doing (and so does Ray Corrigan as “It”), doing full justice to Jerome Bixby’s terrifically wry script. There’s not a moment where we think, “What are they going on about?” or spot a hammy performance because hammy isn’t part of It!’s manifesto. Let’s indulge ourselves in a selection of juicy morsels from Bixby’s sparkling screenplay:
Spalding to Thompson, convinced he’s a murderer: “What are you thinking about? Those nine men you left down there?” Thompson: “Yes. But I didn’t kill them.”
Spalding: “Still sticking to your story of the mysterious creature. Do you expect a court martial to believe it?”
Thompson: “Those men were killed by something — not me.”
Later, when Spalding points out a bullet hole in a skull found on the Martian surface, he states to Thompson “There’s only one kind of a monster that uses bullets.” “By the time we get to Earth, I’ll have his confession on tape,” he tells his team before dark-haired Smith, his girlfriend, tells him to back off from Thompson; besides, she’s already got her sights trained on the colonel, the only one around to not discount his story.
Greer, on receiving no response on the intercom from missing Carney: “If this is one of his jokes, I’ll make him walk home.”
On discussing the monster, Greer asks: “How could that thing have gotten aboard, and why?”
Spalding: “Just to kill us?”
Thompson: “What is the usual reason an intelligent creature kills.”
Smith: “It’s hungry? What makes you so certain it’s intelligent, Colonel, not just an animal?”
Thompson: “It opened the door to C compartment.”
Greer, hearing the monster crashing around via the intercom, sums up their predicament to perfection: “It has to kill us or starve, and we’ve got to kill it or die.” Thompson, as he wires up a stairway: “There’s enough voltage in these lines to kill 30 human beings. The only drawback is, the thing isn’t human.”
Spalding, dying from an alien infection, observing Thompson and Smith tactlessly holding hands and making eyes at one another: “You and him, just out of nowhere.” Thompson to audience, as the monster batters its way up through the hatches toward the survivors: “We are in the top level of the ship. This is either where we die, or it dies.”
The final word is left to the Washington spokesmen who informs the press at the end, “Another name for Mars is death.”
Bric-a-brac
William Glasgow, Herman N. Schoenbrun and Bixby were responsible for the functional set design: Overhead pipes, conduits, electric wiring, interconnecting stairs and fuel tanks, resembling the Arctic base’s drab Quonset huts in The Thing from Another World. Cleverly added to the serviceable hardware were the day-to-day sounds:
Continuous whirrs, hums and beeps emanating from the ship’s console boards. Fanciful gave way to realism — swanky this spaceship wasn’t!
The action, set in 1973, demonstrates that producers in 1958 were a little too overly optimistic regarding man’s dreams of reaching other planets by the 1970s.
The monster is suffocated to death by the opening of outside hatches to let the air escape. In actuality, this would cause the rocket to implode. Instant annihilation would be the result as well with grenades detonating on a spaceship, as well as two bursts from a bazooka.
Paul Blaisdell designed the alien suit but didn’t receive a credit listing.
It! runs at 69 minutes and not a single frame of those 69 minutes is wasted.
As we all know, Ridley Scott’s Alien was more or less structured on It!’s basic storyline.
In England, X-rated It! shared the bill most of the time with Curse of the Faceless Man, but could also be found with United Artists’ Man on the Prowl. The author was lucky enough to catch it in February 1964, co-featured with Horrors of the Black Museum. You don’t get value for your money like that these days!