In October 1955, shortly after Hammer Films had released their film adaptation of the Nigel Kneale television series The Quatermass Experiment, the BBC began broadcasting the sequel Quatermass II, with Professor Bernard Quatermass once again saving the Earth from an alien threat. The public reaction to the new series, with its story of aliens secretly arriving on Earth and using humans as hosts prior to colonisation, virtually ensured that Hammer would wish to bring the character to the screen again in an attempt to replicate the first film’s success.
Having made his mark in the first film, American actor Brian Donlevy (who is actually much better than Kneale’s oft-repeated criticisms would suggest) returned to play the irascible professor, and the resultant film, tautly handled by director Val Guest (another returnee), is an unsettling and often disturbing work (a character’s horrific death by immersion in ‘synthetic food’ remains a particularly chilling moment) and ultimately one of the most spine-tingling of all alien invasion films, British or otherwise.