‘X the Unknown’: the bizarre B-movie about a Scottish mud monster
After Hammer Film Productions was established in 1935, it made its first foray into horror with 1955’s The Quatermass Xperiment. Hammer soon became known for its low-budget horror movies, mainly gothic productions, which were staples of British cinema.
Some of Hammer’s biggest hitters included characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy, with Christopher Lee rising to prominence in many of these roles. After the incredibly successful The Quatermass Xperiment, Hammer made X the Unknown, which further aided Hammer’s transition into the horror world.
At the time, horror looked a lot different to how it does today. It wasn’t until 1960’s Pyscho and Black Sunday that more explicit horror made its way to screens, with these films making way for more brutal depictions of violence and gore. Before then, horror was more concerned with terrific monsters and the supernatural, and Hammer was one of the leading companies to produce such scary stories.
X the Unknown was released in 1956 and continued with similar themes to The Quatermass Xperiment. Set in Scotland, the film follows several men who investigate a mysterious creature which appears to be radioactive. For most of the runtime, the monster is not shown, subsequently making its presence all the more terrifying. It could be anything, and the fact that the movie makes us wait until the end before we are granted the chance to see what it is makes it considerably more suspenseful.
In one unnerving scene, a young boy witnesses the creature at night, and his exposure to it kills him the next day. Almost everyone who happens to witness the creature succumbs to its powers, apart from one man, Elliot, who is part of the Atomic Energy Laboratory. The ‘unknown’ reflected the worries felt by many British people as the Cold War loomed above their heads. The atomic bomb had been invented just over a decade before, and the threat of its use during the Cold War was on many people’s minds.
The movie starred the Academy Award winner Dean Jagger, as well as Leo McKern and Edward Chapman. Direction was carried out by Leslie Norman, who started his career as a film editor. His first project, Too Dangerous To Live, was co-directed by Anthony Hankey and released in 1939, although X the Unknown significantly helped to boost Norman’s reputation in the British film industry.
However, the movie was almost directed by someone more significant – Joseph Losey – who was known for films like M and The Big Night. After being blacklisted in the United States due to his communist leanings, he made a series of works in the United Kingdom instead. Interestingly, his politics got in the way of X the Unknown, with Jagger refusing to work with a Communist.
Watch the trailer for X the Unknown below.
