FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH

I saw it when I was a kid. Several times as a teenager, then, it disappeared. I haven't seen it in thirty years or more, yet it remains the scariest film I've ever seen.

I love horror movies and I'm a jaded fan; it's hard to scare me these days, but I love it when one does. The Exorcist, The Entity, The Grudge and several others have delivered the nightmares that a good horror film should, but the best of all of the hundreds I've seen will remain forever, Five Million Years to Earth!

In the late 1960's, Hammer Studios turned out this classic, which, for all I can uncover, has been lost. Based upon a 1950's six part English TV series titled, Quatermass and The Pit, the Hammer Studios saw, quite astutely, that the American audience might well enjoy a good ole hair-raiser. Converting the teleplay to movie script added more depth and impact to the story and the visual content (special effects such as they were in the 60's) stirred up spine-tingling, terrifying spectacle the likes of which I have yet to see equaled.

Like stories about ghosts and goblins? This one has them. Demons and aliens? Yeah, it's got those as well. In fact, every sort of horror mankind has imagined down through the years seems to be in this one, tying them all into a terrifying knot that leaves you clinging to sofa cushions and biting your nails down to the quick.

A new subway tunnel is being excavated in south London. The workers come across skulls and bones of some sort. The police arrive and find that the bones are old ones, really old! The renowned expert scientist and anthropologist Professor Quatermass is called in and he is bedazzled by the finds. Digging commences as the work on the tunnel is put off for the moment, "This is history!" Quatermass points out.

The mystery deepens as the good doctor determines, despite all logic and current scientific standards, that the bones and fossils are of some new sort: The missing link, he is convinced, between man and ape! But before he can finish making a fuss about this new find, the students digging at the sight uncover something else; something metallic. This is post World War II London, mind you, and finding bombs buried under the ground is still common place. What Quatermass can't understand is, how did the fossils, fossils that seem to date back over a million years, as absurd as that seems, find their way to the level of excavation that is above this metallic finding?

As

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

---

Add your voice

Know something about Scariest horror movies?
We want to hear your view. Write now!