‘Let’s not conjure up visions of nameless horrors creeping around in the night.’ Hammer Films originally hoped to use Professor Quatermass in this follow-up to their 1955 hit adaptation The Quatermass Xperiment, but Nigel Kneale declined. Instead, they took the general tone and approach, repurposed Quatermass as a doctor (explicitly not of medicine) and leant into the ‘mixture of scientific hokum and sadism’ that had so appalled the BBFC. The result is an interesting predecessor to Doctor Who – both drawing similar lessons from The Quatermass Experiment.

The story involves a chasm opening up somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, spewing forth torrents of sentient radioactive sludge, which is drawn to feed on radiation – at a local hospital’s X-ray machine, and a nearby atomic research centre – destroying everything and everyone in its path. There are some effective scenes of its hideous effect on human victims – skin boils, flesh swells and bursts then melts from the bone. It’s more explicitly nasty than The Quatermass Xperiment, although a lot of the grue that earned it an X certificate in 1956 would become pretty par for the course in Doctor Who during the 1970s and 80s.

Interestingly, with The Quatermass Xperiment having dealt with an infection from space, scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster invented ‘a monster that comes from the centre of the Earth’ – exactly the solution Malcolm Hulke settled on when Terrance Dicks challenged him to think of more than two types of UNIT story (alien invasion and mad scientist). You can glimpse in it elements of Doctor Who and the Silurians, Inferno, Fury from the Deep (which originated as The Slide, a radio play with a very similar premise to this), even The Abominable Snowmen (the ooze creeping down a mountain). The shapeless creature breaking into a reactor to steal radiation (and its impact on human beings) anticipates The Claws of Axos.

Similarly, the hero Dr. Adam Royston, though based on Quatermass, is much closer to the concept of the Doctor than Hammer’s gruffly stolid version of the Professor. Dean Jagger plays him with sensitivity, but an unquenchable thirst for knowledge – he’s introduced in his lab doing an experiment that will prove crucial to saving the world (or at least Inverness), and is thrown into an uneasy relationship with the military (Major Cartwright assumes, Brigadierishly, he can just blow the monster up and seal it underground). After The War Machines, this increasingly became standard for the Doctor (even if some of his military allies were on the Moon or Tibetan monks).

It’d be foolish to claim X – The Unknown as the forerunner of Doctor Who, even despite the muddy Beaconsfield quarry locations, the monster’s-point-of-view shots and the presence of alumni including John Harvey, Edwin Richfield, Neil Wilson and Frazer Hines. It’s one of several similar B-movies of the 1950s. For me, the main interest is how it first distilled the Quatermass formula in a very similar way as Doctor Who would a decade later, focusing on scary monsters, the scientist hero seeking a non-military solution, and the idea of buried evil rising again to menace the present, as though the past has to, in some sense, be paid for. These themes are most prominent in Doctor Who between 1966 and 1976, but remain central to its DNA.

Next Time: Dr. Who and the Daleks

Sources: X – The Unknown (Shout Factory Blu Ray, 2020); Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years (Wayne Kinsey, 2002)