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Brains Over Brawn: The Story Of Quatermass, British Sci-Fi’s Scientist Superhero
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Bernard Quatermass
Brains Over Brawn: The Story Of Quatermass, British Sci-Fi’s Scientist Superhero
One of the founding templates of serialized television, the trials of Bernard Quatermass pit scientific knowledge against the unknown.
By Don Kaye
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Published on October 2, 2025
Screenshot: BBC
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Screenshot: BBC
The story of British filmed science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s—and indeed, a large swath of the genre onscreen in the ensuing decades—runs through Bernard Quatermass and his creator, Nigel Kneale. The latter was an English writer for TV and film whose BBC serials and Hammer films starring the former—a rocket scientist battling alien threats to Earth—remain his best-known and most influential work.
Over the course of three serials and three movie adaptations, as well as a miniseries that concluded his saga, Kneale’s hero repelled alien invaders with the power of science and deductive reasoning. While the particulars of the character—a white, cisgender, middle-aged man—are not remarkably different from any number of screen heroes we’ve seen over the years, Quatermass’ heartfelt, humanist belief that science can save humanity remains just as relevant now as it did then and perhaps sets him apart from most.
Kneale’s Quatermass stories were arguably the template for the kind of serialized genre TV that is now popular with audiences, while his ideas were often provocative, ambitious, and even dizzying in the way they brought together concepts like extra-terrestrial invasion, government takeovers, conspiracy theories, and ancient folklore—the latter in particular casting a long shadow over works by other filmmakers that melded science fiction and horror.
Born in 1922, Kneale began his career as a radio actor but quickly found a groove as a writer, publishing a collection of short stories (Tomato Cain and Other Stories) in 1949. He began working as a staff writer for BBC Television in 1951, contributing to the company both as an employee and independently for the next 46 years. But his breakthrough with the BBC came in 1953 with the transmission of the first Quatermass serial, The Quatermass Experiment.
The Quatermass Experiment
Screenshot: Hammer Films
Kneale—who stated on many occasions that he did not care for science fiction—reportedly was inspired to write the serial due to his own interest in science and a desire to pen something that might frighten audiences. He came up with the name for his protagonist by finding a random last name in the phone book and appropriating the first name of a noted astronomer named Bernard Lovell.
The plot followed Quatermass, head of the British Experimental Rocket Group, as he investigates the ill-fated return to Earth of the first manned mission into space. The spacecraft crash-lands in England with two of its three-man crew missing and a third in a catatonic state. It quickly becomes clear that an alien organism has penetrated the ship, absorbed two of the astronauts, and is now in the process of transforming the third—with the entity also preparing to reproduce and thus consume all life on Earth.
Helmed by famed BBC director Rudolph Cartier and starring veteran British thespian Reginald Tate, The Quatermass Experiment was transmitted live as six half-hour episodes over the summer of 1953. It was not only the first adult-oriented TV drama with a science fiction premise, but was formatted as the kind of serialized storytelling—each episode ended with a cliffhanger—that is now a common standard for TV and streaming. Kneale’s template certainly proved successful, as the ratings for each episode steadily rose, with 3.4 million viewers (even then, a record for British TV) tuning into the first segment and five million watching the finale.
Sadly, since the show was broadcast live and not recorded, only the first two episodes survive in degraded condition. While Tate—the first of many actors to play Quatermass—seems a good fit for the role of the brilliant, sometimes brusque, but morally upright scientist, the show is a fairly crude production by any modern standard. Kneale himself played the final incarnation of the alien organism—a giant, plant-like monstrosity—by sticking his hands into two flora-covered gloves in front of a still of the interior of Westminster Abbey, where the story concludes.
What’s unusual about the original serial’s climax is that Quatermass uses reason and an appeal to humanity to defeat the creature; learning that it can’t be destroyed by conventional weapons, he pleas to the minds of the three astronauts it’s absorbed—which still exist inside the organism—to merge their thoughts together and essentially kill the monster from inside, which they do. In an era largely defined (at least in Hollywood) by the military blasting giant monsters and aliens to smithereens, this was a decidedly more cerebral, thoughtful ending.
With The Quatermass Experiment proving enormously popular, Kneale was commissioned to begin work on a sequel even as he penned adaptations of Wuthering Heights and Nineteen Eighty-Four for the BBC. At the same time, the fledgling British studio Hammer obtained the rights to adapt The Quatermass Experiment to the big screen, with the movie—directed and co-written by Val Guest (The Day the Earth Caught Fire)—arriving in theaters in late 1955.
Retitled The Quatermass Xperiment for British audiences (to capitalize on the adults-only “X” certificate in the British ratings system) and called The Creeping Unknown in the U.S. (since American audiences did not know who Quatermass was), the film is fast-moving, tense, and filled with often unsettling black and white imagery. It also condenses the original three-hour serial down to under 90 minutes and dispenses with a number of subplots, subsidiary characters, and development for the ones that remain.
The biggest change, however, was in Quatermass himself. With an American actor deemed necessary to land U.S. distribution, the role was handed to 52-year-old Brian Donlevy, long past his prime and best known for playing tough guys. His gruff, less-intellectual Quatermass was a far cry from the conception of the character by Kneale, who was displeased with the casting. With Donlevy in the lead and some elements of the story excised, The Quatermass Xperiment plays now as a more conventional 1950s sci-fi thriller, although the haunting transformation of the main astronaut, Victor Carroon (played quite eerily by Richard Wordsworth), remains intact. (The ending was changed too, with the monster now electrocuted à la The Thing.)
The Quatermass Xperiment/The Creeping Unknown was nevertheless a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, only fueling the anticipation for more Quatermass stories and—in another example of how the property changed the course of genre film history—putting Hammer Studios on the map. The film’s success allowed Hammer to move forward with a full-blown horror and science fiction slate, starting with X the Unknown, The Curse of Frankenstein—and Quatermass 2.
Quatermass II
Screenshot: Hammer Films
Nigel Kneale followed The Quatermass Experiment with Quatermass II in 1955. Once again directed by Rudolph Cartier and starring John Robinson as the title character after the sudden death of Reginald Tate, it was also broadcast in six parts, each running between 30 and 40 minutes. The story this time was more expansive, and the serial—which survives in its entirety and has been released on DVD and Blu-ray—reflects that with higher production values, although again they are primitive compared to the genre spectacles of later years.
This story—which has been compared to Invasion of the Body Snatchers—starts with a disheartened Quatermass learning that his dream project, the construction of a livable base on the Moon, is losing its funding after a disastrous rocket malfunction. But he is even more perplexed when the discovery that small meteorites are falling all over England leads him to a mysterious industrial plant that has been built over a bulldozed village—a factory that looks exactly like the design for his moonbase.
The meteorites contain small living organisms that take possession of humans and turn them into slaves, using them to construct the plant. The organisms themselves are part of an alien hive mind that is sending the meteorites to Earth from a high-orbiting asteroid, with the goal of poisoning the Earth and making it more like the aliens’ home world. Quatermass also finds out that not only have the aliens possessed the humans who lived in the village where the plant now stands, but they have infiltrated the highest levels of the British government.
Cold War paranoia and concerns about industrialization and government bureaucracy exist side by side with giant, Lovecraftian monsters from the cosmos (or one of the moons of Saturn, to be exact) in Quatermass II, which was watched by nine million viewers at its peak (there were also more TV sets in England by then). The finale, in which Quatermass and a colleague land on the asteroid in one of his nuclear rockets, which they plan to detonate, was severely hampered by the visual effects of the time and, like the ending of the first serial, changed for the movie.
The film version, released in 1957 as Quatermass 2 in the U.K. and Enemy from Space in the U.S., featured the return of Val Guest as director and Brian Donlevy as Quatermass. This time, however, Kneale himself wrote the screenplay (with revisions by Guest), bringing the character on the page a bit closer to the one in the serials and allowing Donlevy to adopt a slightly softer tone. But Kneale faced the same challenge of reducing the three hour-plus TV version down to 85 minutes, discarding characters (including Quatermass’ adult daughter) and condensing much of the action (Quatermass’ journey to the asteroid was omitted entirely).
Another box office hit in England and the U.S., Quatermass 2 (the first film sequel to ever include a number in the title, incidentally) is much like its predecessor: fast, exciting, and seasoned with shocking imagery (like a man careening down the side of a huge cylindrical tank covered in smoking black slime), as well as some cringeworthy effects and acting. Guest’s black and white, almost documentary style of shooting helps a lot, and the subtext of dehumanization and paranoia still holds up. But Kneale’s next Quatermass tale would be his masterpiece.
Quatermass and the Pit
Screenshot: BBC
Quatermass and the Pit was transmitted live in December 1958 and January 1959, in the franchise’s now standard format of six 40-minute episodes directed by Rudolph Carter. Andre Morell—who was originally offered the role for The Quatermass Experiment—was cast as Quatermass this time, in a story that begins with the discovery of a primitive human skull and a strange object during the excavation of a London street known as Hobbs Lane.
Paleontologist Matthew Roney begins further examination of the site until it’s speculated that the larger object that has been unearthed may be an unexploded German missile. That’s when Quatermass is called in, accompanied by British military representative Colonel Breen. It turns out that the object, along with other pre-human remains, has been in the ground for five million years and is not a German weapon at all, but an alien spaceship.
Quatermass learns that the street—which was spelled in earlier eras as “Hob’s Lane” (or “The Devil’s Lane”) before it was modernized—has been haunted by ghostly manifestations for years. At the same time, the mummified corpses of aliens that resemble insects, with horn-like antennae on their heads, are discovered inside the craft, while people living around the area start experiencing disturbing visions and behaving erratically. Quatermass and Roney eventually deduce that the aliens are Martians, who tried to vacate their planet millions of years ago when it became uninhabitable.
Landing on Earth, the Martians altered some—but not all—of the primitive humans they found there in an attempt to keep the Martian race alive genetically. Eons later, the unearthed dead Martian ship is reactivated by electrical cables, and in turn reawakens the Martian gene in a certain number of humans, leading them to begin a cull of all other humans not containing the Martian DNA. Presiding over it all is a gigantic manifestation, generated by the ship, of a Martian, which with its demonic gaze and horns resembles nothing less than the Devil himself.
In The Quatermass Xperiment, an alien tries to adapt itself to life on Earth; in Quatermass II, extra-terrestrial invaders plot to reconfigure the planet so they can live on it; in Quatermass and the Pit, Kneale postulates that we ourselves are the aliens. The idea that “ancient astronauts” from a different planet or solar system have visited Earth in the distant past was not a new one: Its origins are found in science fiction and supernatural literature published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ranging from Garrett P. Serviss’s 1898 novel Edison’s Conquest of Mars to H.P. Lovecraft’s 1931 novella At the Mountains of Madness to Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 story “Encounter in the Dawn,” which also provided Clarke with material for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But years before the arrival of 2001, Kneale created perhaps the first such origin story for the evolution of humankind ever seen in a teleplay or film, as well as a theory behind millennia of religious myths and supernatural folklore. The story captures the ongoing conflict between science and the supernatural, and is rightly regarded as Kneale’s and his character’s crowning achievement. Even the racism inherent in the “ancient astronauts” theory, which suggests than ancient, non-white civilizations could not have achieved feats like the Pyramids without interference from aliens, is indirectly addressed by Kneale, with the brutal, ingrained bigotry of the Martians wiping out not only their own civilization but threatening ours as well.
While the serial still suffers from being broadcast live on (mostly) video, it is the most ambitious and easily the most gripping of the three, with the best (relatively speaking) production values. The audience ranged from nine million to 11 million, and streets and pubs throughout England were allegedly deserted on the nights that each new episode aired. Nine years later, Hammer adapted the serial to the big screen, titled Five Million Years to Earth for the U.S. market. With kindly Scottish actor Andrew Keir taking the role of Quatermass (and far superior to Donlevy), a script by Kneale, and the production directed in color by Roy Ward Baker, the film managed to again condense the serial to half its length but this time was more successful in doing so.
This author saw the movie Quatermass and the Pit on television as a child, and the profound impact it had on me has stayed with me ever since. The sheer, fast-moving sweep of the story, the way that our most terrifying myths are woven into the history of the Martians, and the ingenious melding of science fiction and horror—along with excellent work from Keir, James Donald as Roney and Barbara Shelley as the latter’s assistant—all contribute to Quatermass and the Pit regularly showing up on lists of the best science fiction movies of all time.
The Quatermass Conclusion
Screenshot: BBC
Nigel Kneale put Quatermass on hiatus after Quatermass and the Pit, but finally penned a new miniseries in 1979. Simply titled Quatermass (but also known as The Quatermass Conclusion in a shortened version prepared for theatrical release), the four-part, four-hour series finds an elderly Quatermass (John Mills) living in seclusion in Scotland when he must travel to London in search of his granddaughter Hettie (Rebecca Saire). The now-retired scientist is startled to find the city—and the world—in a state of near collapse and violent upheaval.
With the help of an astronomer named Joe Kapp (Simon MacCorkindale), Quatermass focuses on the Planet People, a cult of hippie-like young people who insist that they are going to soon be transported to another planet and a better existence. As thousands of young people begin to gather at prehistoric sites and vanish in a flash of light, Quatermass deduces that an alien presence somewhere out in deep space is projecting powerful beams of light at the Earth in order to disintegrate the mass gatherings and absorb their life energy.
This fourth adventure for the stalwart scientist stumbled more than it soared. John Mills was not as effective as Andrew Keir in the role, and Kneale’s basic idea—of old people having to save young people from themselves—smacked of an old man yelling at a cloud, especially with its dated, already decade-old conception of the hippie-esque Planet People.
Aside from a 2005 live broadcast of The Quatermass Experiment on BBC Four, with Jason Flemyng in the title role, that was it for Quatermass on the screen. Nigel Kneale wrote many other acclaimed genre teleplays and films, including The Creature (filmed as The Abominable Snowman), The Stone Tape (a chilling paranormal thriller), Beasts (a horror anthology series), The Year of the Sex Olympics (an acidic satire which foretold the cultural dominance of reality TV), and his only venture into Hollywood, Halloween III: Season of the Witch—although he had his name removed from the credits after the producer meddled with the film.
Nigel Kneale passed away in 2006, but the influence of his work—particularly Quatermass, his greatest creation—can be seen in everything from Doctor Who to The X-Files to the films of John Carpenter (who wrote the very Kneale-like Prince of Darkness under the pseudonym Martin Quatermass) to the stories of Stephen King. Actor and former Doctor Who writer Mark Gatiss declared that Nigel Kneale could “really lay claim to having created popular television with Quatermass—there was nothing like it before, and after it everything changed.”
The British Film Institute called the first serial, The Quatermass Experiment, “a landmark of science fiction and the cornerstone of the genre on British television.” The Quatermass saga effectively melded ideas about science and superstition in a way that reaffirmed the former while challenging the latter, and Bernard Quatermass was a hero who never raised his fists or fired a gun—the power of science proved to be the most formidable weapon of all.[end-mark]
The post Brains Over Brawn: The Story Of Quatermass, British Sci-Fi’s Scientist Superhero appeared first on Reactor.
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