“Quatermass and the Pit” (1968)

On first release this British sci fi classic suffered from unfortunate timing, coming out in the same year as “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Planet of the Apes”.  It’s modest budget and special effects could never compete with these American financed blockbusters but as a speculative fiction on the way aliens have influenced mankind’s evolution it is their equal.

The third of four cinematic incarnations of the Quatermass character created by Nigel Kneale, it sees the good Professor investigating a mysterious object unearthed during an extension of London’s underground.  Thought by unimaginative military authorities to be an unexploded bomb, Quatermass forms the opinion that it is a capsule sent from Mars, one capable of exerting tremendous psychic power over the population, effectively getting them to restage an ancient red planet genocide.

Kneale’s strength as a writer is drawing parallels between old myths and superstitions and contemporary science.  The Martian spacecraft is thus seen not only, as in “2001″, as having altered our DNA at a formative stage, but being behind medieval tales of demons and even Lucifer himself.  Appropriately, for a film whose style and tone is as much that of the horror genre, it is produced by Hammer Studios.