Alex Klotz Review of Quatermass and the Pit

Quatermass and the Pit (1958–1959)

Science-Fiction at its most intelligent, yet giving lots of thrills.

[10/10 · 22 February 2002]

I'm actually more a fan of horror movies, but besides "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", this is one of the movies that scared me intensely. There's no trace of the Manichaism of latter popular horror movies, it is made perfectly clear that evil lies in the human conscience and doesn't dissolve from some foreign being or "just plain evil". Nigel Kneale, the writer of this story, is a master in combining traditional horror tales with contemporary scientific explanations. The long TV-Version is quite suspenseful and I didn't notice that three hours passed by. In the later remake they let out the bits concerning the spaceship might by a German bomb, which was a reasonable decision.