Danger Man: Koroshi/Shinda Shima (1968)

Posted on May 7, 2017 at 10:59 am by Jeff Kuykendall

“They’ve given you a number
And taken away your name.”
–“Secret Agent Man,” Johnny Rivers

2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the seminal ITV series The Prisoner starring Patrick McGoohan. To celebrate here at Midnight Only, I’m embarking on a comprehensive episode guide, taking an in-depth look at each of the 17 installments one at a time. (It’s long been a parlor game of fans to guess the “best” order for the episodes, since the original airing sequence in both the U.K. and North America is so unsatisfactory. I’ll be using my own preferred order for these reviews.) But before we leap into the head-spinning world of No.6 and the Village, we’re going to take a brief stop at the series which planted the seeds for The Prisoner, the spy show that made McGoohan a star: Danger Man. The series launched in 1960, two years before Sean Connery watched Ursula Andress step out of the sea in her white bikini and the spy craze exploded. It was principally the product of two men: Lew Grade, Managing Director of ITC, and Australian Ralph Smart, who had previously written for the 1958-1960 series The Invisible Man. Smart conceived of Danger Man with input from fellow Invisible Man writer Ian Stuart Black, and even briefly took meetings with Ian Fleming in the earliest stages of development. When McGoohan was signed, the actor further honed the character and concept to suit his liking. Danger Man told the adventures of a NATO agent, John Drake (McGoohan), who travels the world to thwart assassinations, expose double agents, and liberate valuable assets from behind enemy lines. Smart would write many of the scripts, and his name would prove apropos: the show radiated intelligence and expected the audience to pay attention and keep up with its fast-arriving twists. Apart from the basic premise of Drake on a mission week after week, Danger Man defied conventional episodic TV formulae, presenting challenging characterizations and morally complex dilemmas for its chilly protagonist to confront. Although The Prisoner has eclipsed it in popularity, Danger Man was a phenomenon of its own – even if its first run of thirty-nine episodes were broadcast without too much fanfare, and very few of them aired in the States as Grade had originally hoped. The program was cancelled in 1962, but as the appetite for superspies came to a boil, Smart’s espionage thriller once again became a commercial prospect. Production resumed in 1964, and the show was finally picked up for regular broadcast in the U.S. as Secret Agent. The theme song, “Secret Agent Man” as sung by Johnny Rivers, peaked at #3 on Billboard’s Top 100. The episodes were extended to an hour, and John Drake’s accent changed from American to English, his base of operations no longer NATO but the British M9 organization. Despite these changes, he wasn’t a 007 clone. McGoohan despised the sex and violence formula of Fleming, and was far more interested in his character solving problems with his wits. McGoohan also infused Drake with the actor’s own unique mannerisms: an enigmatic gleam in his eye, a slight exasperation and quickness to anger, and a bit of well-bred condescension. Of course he didn’t seduce women; with Drake, a sexual overture could only be a con, the requirement of an undercover assignment. His interior life was closely guarded, and he rarely expressed personal hobbies apart from those wide-ranging skills that could save his life in a pinch. Yet his heroics also lent him a basic decency. These traits would spill over into The Prisoner‘s No.6, spurring decades-long debates as to whether No.6 was actually John Drake.

Patrick McGoohan as John Drake in “Koroshi.”

After two color episodes were filmed for a fourth series in 1966, McGoohan suddenly quit, turning his sights toward his personal project, The Prisoner: a show which would begin, critically, with No.6 abruptly resigning from his own successful career, baffling his superiors. A winking statement from McGoohan, perhaps? Those last two Danger Man/Secret Agent episodes, a two-parter called “Koroshi” and “Shinda Shima,” would not air until 1968, slipped into The Prisoner‘s regular time slot and further blurring the line between the two programs. The same year these two Danger Man episodes were also released together in the States as a TV movie called Koroshi. A two-parter that also works as two separate installments, Koroshi (as I’ll refer to the whole) sees Drake traveling to Tokyo to investigate the killing of one of their agents, uncovering the Order of Murder Brotherhood and their sinister designs against the United Nations. Here, at last, Drake seemed to venture into the world of James Bond, though it’s worth noting that these two episodes were filmed before the release of the Japan-set 007 outing You Only Live Twice (1967). This is especially true in “Shinda Shima,” in which Drake spends most of his time in a remote Japanese island’s underground lair, which is populated by martial artist assassins and a villain whose desk opens up to reveal a machine gun. The episode features a climactic underwater battle a la Thunderball (1965). “Koroshi” even includes a character named Tanaka, which is the name of Bond’s Japanese contact in both the novel and film of You Only Live Twice. But you might recognize this Tanaka as Burt Kwouk, better known as Cato of the Pink Panther films. (Sadly, Kwouk’s part is pretty miniscule.)

John Drake prepares for an assassination attempt in a room of kabuki mannequins.

When operative Ako Nakamura (Yoko Tani, First Spaceship on Venus) is killed in her room by an artificial flower that emits poison gas, Drake goes undercover as a reporter in Tokyo during its Festival of Fragrance. He meets two British expats, Mr. Sanders (Ronald Howard, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb) and Rosemary Riley (Amanda Barrie, Carry on Cleo) who introduce him to kabuki theater, a performance of Hamlet which features a “koroshi,” or murder scene. Drake then finds himself alone in a room with kabuki mask-wearing mannequins, and as he walks amidst them, he looks for the one that might be real, bracing for an attempt on his life. Directors Michael Truman and Peter Yates (who was soon to make Bullitt) draw out the suspense masterfully in a scene that foreshadows a similar moment in Blade Runner. It’s far and away the highlight of these two episodes. Discovering another poison flower in Rosemary’s room and destroying it before she can be killed, he identifies Sanders as the man responsible for Nakamura’s murder. He escapes one more assassination attempt and follows Sanders to his cavernous HQ, where his Brotherhood preach the “poetry of death.” In a surreal touch that anticipates The Prisoner, a dummy with a metronome for a heart beats loudly to mark time until their next victim’s heart is stopped. Drake makes his appearance with a typically droll line: “In my case, Mr. Sanders, the poetry of death did not rhyme.” Sanders tries to make a getaway in a small plane, but Drake plays a game of chicken using a jeep on the runway, driving his man off the road and into a fatal explosion.

An example of the James Bond stylings of “Shinda Shima”: the Controller (George Coulouris) springs a machine gun from his desk.

“Shinda Shima,” directed by Yates, does not at first appear to be a continuation of the same story, despite the Japanese setting. But connections reveal themselves as the episode unfolds. Drake now takes the identity of a British electronics expert from “Q department,” Edward Sharp. While the real Sharp is detained, Drake investigates his briefcase riddled with secret compartments (shades of From Russia with Love). Each of these hiding places contains elements of a decryption device, which Drake helpfully identifies to the tune of “The 12 Days of Christmas.” Drake then delivers the components to the island of Shinda Shima, which earned this name – “The Murdered Island” – because of unexplained deaths that have sent the superstitious population into exile, fearing evil spirits. In fact the deaths were orchestrated by Controller (George Coulouris, Citizen Kane), a Blofeld type establishing his secret HQ much like the Japanese volcano base that would feature in You Only Live Twice. (Though the film was still in production at the same time as “Shinda Shima,” there are similarities between this episode, written by Norman Hudis, and the original Fleming. In Fleming’s novel, Blofeld takes residence in a castle on a Japanese island overgrown with poisonous flora, driving the locals away and affording him privacy for his world-conquering plots.) Drake begins negotiations to sell his decryption device to Controller and his army of martial arts-practicing henchmen – followers of the death cult from the previous episode – but when one of his own, a woman named Miho (Yoko Tani again), reveals that she is the sister of Ako Nakamara from “Koroshi” and seeks revenge for her murder, Controller asks Drake to electrocute her. This forces Drake to improvise.

Kenneth Griffith – soon to be seen in “The Prisoner” – as the double-dealing Richards.

Although the Koroshi two-parter is not without the standard contemporary examples of yellowface, there is only one that is truly glaring. Otherwise Koroshi is refreshing for offering no Yellow Peril villains, but instead white British men: Ronald Howard in the first half, and both George Colouris and, as a greedy opportunist, Kenneth Griffith in “Shinda Shima.” In the finale, Drake and Miho stir up a revolt, bringing the local villagers back to the island to fight off the (almost universally white) invaders. Of course, for pulp like this, the villagers know their martial arts. Some have said the show’s turn, in these episodes, toward more standard spy adventure contributed to McGoohan’s abrupt decision to leave the series, just two episodes into its fourth series. Certainly Koroshi lacks the Ralph Smart cleverness, and, despite the program’s fresh change from black-and-white to color, these fail to represent the show at its best. But we do know that McGoohan was tiring of John Drake, and he had his own concept, The Prisoner, which he was eager to pursue one way or another. McGoohan was able to convince Lew Grade to proceed with this new project at ITV, and Grade had every interest in keeping his star happy. It’s unclear whether McGoohan ever proposed The Prisoner as a direct continuation of Danger Man – John Drake in the Village. Regardless, without Ralph Smart’s involvement, the name John Drake was certainly not going to be used. In an invaluable 1985 interview with Barrington Calia for New Video Magazine, McGoohan gave the following response to the question of whether No.6 was Drake: “No!…Unfortunately, people assume that The Prisoner is a sequel to Secret Agent because I began the project closely afterward. No.6 is a former ‘secret agent,’ which is why people maintain this false notion for the sake of continuity. I would’ve preferred someone else play the role, but circumstances wouldn’t have it that way.”

Drake’s contact, Potter (Christopher Benjamin), delivers the mission in “Koroshi.” His character would subsequently appear in an episode of “The Prisoner.”

But, as we will see in the weeks ahead, The Prisoner at times encourages the viewers to draw connections to Danger Man, sometimes with apparent sincerity, at other times as in-jokes. As Matthew White & Jaffer Ali write in The Official Prisoner Companion, “Obviously some of the comparisons are encouraged within the show itself. And to top it off, several people involved with the creation of The Prisoner are quick to make comparisons with Secret Agent. [Script editor] George Markstein has stated for the record that No.6 was John Drake, no doubt about it. And Jack Shampan, who was the art director for the series, remembers his first meeting with Patrick McGoohan and producer David Tomblin. He was asked to ‘chat with [Tomblin and McGoohan] about doing a continuation of Danger Man that they were toying with the idea of calling The Prisoner.'” In 1995 I joined the American Prisoner fan club called Once Upon a Time. I wrote a Prisoner novella for the club (Soliloquy) and contributed some art for their magazine. The editor asked me to draw a cartoon for their Danger Man issue. At the time, even though I was fascinated by The Prisoner and had even visited Portmeirion, I had not seen Danger Man. I was born after it had originally aired, and it was almost impossible to find in those pre-DVD, early-Internet days. I was inclined to believe McGoohan, since he was the prime creative force behind The Prisoner, in his statements that John Drake was not No.6, so I drew a cartoon (below) showing the two characters meeting in No.6’s suite in the Village. Many years later, A&E released the full series on DVD, and I began working my way through them. The more I watched, the less convinced I was that John Drake was not No.6…

My 1995 cartoon for the Prisoner fan magazine “Once Upon a Time,” speculating on the No.6/John Drake connection.

The Danger Man website suggests that the third (and last complete) series of Danger Man depicts Drake reaching a “turning point” that will lead him to resign in the opening of The Prisoner: “Drake was much the same, still dedicated and cynical, but more and more the series was to show the down side of being a spy.” Six episodes are listed as tracing the disillusionment of Drake. I also noticed a little telling moment in the final episode, “Shinda Shima.” When the Controller says to the undercover Drake, “You would be more comfortable in one of our uniforms,” Drake demurs: “I am never comfortable in any uniform, thank you.” (In the Village, No.6 is always in the same outfit, defiantly different from the pinstripes of the locals, and he never dons his numbered badge.) But throughout the series there are connections to No.6. He demonstrates a resentment toward his superiors in episodes like the bitter, brutal “That’s Two of Us Sorry.” He follows the same rigid moral code as No.6, avoiding firearms and showing little interest in sex. McGoohan doesn’t seem to be invested in differentiating the two characters, even though he has portrayed a variety of roles throughout his career. Further shades of The Prisoner creep into Danger Man in “Colony Three,” about a spy school established by the Soviets to resemble a British village, and “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove,” a surreal, dreamlike excursion much like the Prisoner episode “A, B & C.” Of course many of the actors from The Prisoner first show up in Danger Man, including future No.2.’s Derren Nesbitt in “Sting in the Tail” and Kenneth Griffith in “Shinda Shima.” And the connection extends to the very first episode of the series, written by Smart and future Avengers creator Brian Clemens. It was filmed in an eccentric Italianate resort in Wales designed by architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis: Portmeirion. Later, this would become the iconic shooting location of The Prisoner, though audiences would get their first taste in six separate episodes of Danger Man. McGoohan was charmed by the little village, and as the concept for his next program began to take shape in his imagination, the selection of its ideal shooting location was inevitable.

Up next: ARRIVAL.

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The Way of the Dragon (1972)

Posted on April 29, 2017 at 10:29 am by Jeff Kuykendall

In May, Shout! Factory continues their line of 4K restorations of Bruce Lee classics with Return of the Dragon, whose original title is The Way of the Dragon (1972). (These Blu-Rays are great, but it would’ve been really nice – and a lot less confusing – if the true titles had been used.) Shout will also be releasing Game of Death (1978), the posthumous Lee film with just 11 minutes of footage of the actor. Enter the Dragon (1973) is Lee’s last proper film, which makes The Way of the Dragon all the more valuable: his penultimate feature, with Lee himself in the director’s chair. It could be argued that this is the film which best portrays the sort of film Lee wanted to make, his idea of the perfect star vehicle. (His previous films The Big Boss and Fist of Fury were directed by Lo Wei.) It’s often labeled as a comedy, which is misleading, and not just because the attempts at humor are seldom funny. This is a martial arts film, and the showcase is Lee’s fighting techniques, in collaboration with co-“action instructor” Unicorn Chan, Lee’s colleague who also appears in the film. Even the crudely animated titles, which continue the energetic, Morricone/Leone style of the previous Lee opening credits, come off this round more like a pasted-up handbill outside the local karate school. Come and see “Chuck Norris, 7 Times U.S. & World Karate Champion!” Plus “Robert Wall, World Professional Karate Champion 1970!” And guys, stick around for “Italian Beauty, Malisa Longo!”

Bruce Lee (third from the right) leads his crew in battle.

By now, the plot should sound pretty familiar. Lee plays Tang Lung, who flies into Rome from Hong Kong to help pretty entrepreneur Chen Ching-hua (Nora Miao, his co-star of The Big Boss and Fist of Fury), whose restaurant, and the land it occupies, is coveted by a crime syndicate. They’ve been pressuring her into selling and sending thugs to bully and threaten the staff (which includes Unicorn Chan). The staff are trained in karate, but Tang Lung quickly begins schooling them in his own method of Chinese boxing. The leader of the gangsters (Jon Benn) and his flamboyant second-in-command, Ho (Paul Wei, Fist of Fury), now face a more challenging resistance, in particular from Tang Lung, who uses hand-carved throwing darts on his enemies, when he’s not relentlessly punching and kicking them in the crotch. (Crotches see a lot of abuse in this film.) When Tang Lung refuses to accept a plane ticket back to Hong Kong, the syndicate hires a hitman with a rifle, then Japanese karate experts (Robert Wall and Hwang In-Shik) and an American martial artist, Colt (Chuck Norris, in his debut). As with his other films, Lee only gets more pissed off, and more savage in his fighting, as the story progresses, leading to a climactic battle with Norris set in the Colosseum. Before the fight, the two take a moment to warm up, and Lee shows us that even his muscles have muscles; when he flexes his back into strange protruding shapes, it looks for a fleeting second like he might transform into the American Werewolf in London. The fight itself has rightly gone down as one of Lee’s greatest on screen, and it demonstrates the strength of having him direct. It’s easy to follow the different stages of the battle: first Lee getting overpowered by Norris, then using his boxing style to confuse and strike at his opponent; Norris, desperate, clumsily attempts to imitate Lee’s dancing body, but Lee pummels him easily, breaking bones before putting the hobbling Texas Ranger out of his misery. Here we see Lee’s strength as a storyteller – not through a script, but through fight choreography. The drama transitions naturally into something more tragic; Lee even returns to Norris’s body to cover him, honoring his worthy opponent. Although ostensibly set in the Colosseum, the fight is clearly in a studio, yet impressive location footage shows Norris stalking Lee through the labyrinthine open-air passages of the Colosseum grounds.

Colt (Chuck Norris) vs. Tang Lung (Lee).

Elsewhere, Lee’s weaknesses as a director are more evident. The film opens with Tang Lung as a fish out of water, with no English skills (a nice touch, actually), awkwardly ordering and eating everything on the menu, then taking ill-timed bathroom breaks while introducing himself to Chen. When told that he needs to be more friendly with the locals, he acquiesces by interrupting their conversation to run off with a local beauty who offers to take him back to her place. Once he’s there, however, he flees at the first sight of her bare breasts; it’s both inexplicable and weirdly charming that our hero is apparently a virgin, chaste to the point of being afraid of women. (By contrast, in The Big Boss he was all too eager to jump into bed with the local prostitutes. A scene deleted from that film, but which features in the trailer, has Lee paying for sex to warm up for the final battle.) It takes a while to get to the first action scene, and everything leading up to it is handled crudely and shot in the most rudimentary fashion. The plotting also feels redundant once the fights begin; a last-minute twist involving the character of Uncle Wang (Chung-Hsin Huang) feels lazily tacked-on. By contrast, Fist of Fury felt urgent and lushly cinematic in every moment. Still, even second-rate Lee is fun to watch. He’s an electric performer even in the non-action scenes, and the unblinking takes and fast-striking choreography demonstrate what’s lacking in so many modern action films and TV shows (I’m looking at you, Iron Fist). The romance may be absent, and the comedy may be lacking, but this is pure athleticism as film. Next would come a more varied and entertaining movie, his most iconic: Enter the Dragon, and a level of superstardom that, sadly, Lee would not live to see.

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Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

Posted on April 15, 2017 at 10:16 am by Jeff Kuykendall

One of the most admirable qualities of the science fiction scripts of the late Nigel Kneale is that their stories proceed through the scientific method, albeit leading to fantastic conclusions. They are examples of true science fiction – a rare commodity in TV and film. Most of his screenwriting was done for television, but among his feature work, none stands taller than Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years to Earth, 1967) for Hammer Films. It was the third and final Hammer Quatermass following The Quatermass Xperiment (aka The Creeping Unknown, 1955) and Quatermass 2 (aka Enemy from Space, 1957), and the truest to Kneale’s vision. The first films brought in an American star, Brian Donlevy, to portray Professor Quatermass, whose origins (in Kneale’s original serials for television) are as British as Doctor Who’s, and Kneale was furious at Donlevy’s bullheaded approach to the character. Nonetheless both films, in condensing the sprawling miniseries from which they were based, kept intact a very Kneale-like scientific curiosity and wide-eyed fascination for all permutations of alien grotesquerie. This quality is also on display in a Kneale-scripted Hammer film that isn’t part of the Quatermass series, the underrated chiller The Abominable Snowman (1957). Quatermass and the Pit, arriving a decade after these films and directed by Roy Ward Baker (A Night to Remember), attempts to right previous wrongs by replacing Donlevy with Andrew Keir, a man who radiates formidable intelligence, and who had appeared in Hammer’s The Pirates of Blood River (1962), The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), and, most notably, Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), as the vampire-slaying Father Sandor. Kneale’s script takes the original 1958-59 serial Quatermass and the Pit and condenses it down to the major plot elements and twists, giving it an intense, anxious tone, even if it still doesn’t contain the sort of action that one usually expects from a science fiction thriller. That’s because it plays as a mystery – one that doesn’t even reveal, for quite a while, what genre it is. It respects the viewer’s intelligence; it expects us to pay attention, and rewards handsomely.

Professor Quatermass (Andrew Keir) explores a “haunted house” in Hobbs End.

Quatermass, who designed the rocket that sent a man into space (disastrously) in The Quatermass Xperiment, is introduced in this film arguing with a Colonel Breen (Julian Glover of The Empire Strikes Back and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) over the militarization of his space exploration program. The British government intends to build bases on the Moon to “police” the Earth with ballistic missiles. The two men are sidelined by a discovery at an excavation in a London Underground station, Hobbs End: what appears to be a giant unexploded bomb buried in the earth. The archaeological dig is being led by Dr. Matthew Roney (James Donald, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Great Escape), with his assistant Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, The Gorgon). The two have discovered a humanoid skull at Hobbs End which they believe dates back, astonishingly, five million years. After Quatermass and the Colonel arrive, Roney realizes that the skull was actually inside the “bomb.” Furthermore, a curious detail excites Quatermass’ interest when he learns that the homes in this section of Hobbs End were abandoned before the war due to local superstitions and remain derelict. A police inspector who lived in Hobbs End at the time, and guides the professor and Barbara through one of the empty houses, describes “noises, bumps, even things being seen.” Barbara finds claw-like scratches on the walls. As they look further into the paranormal activity reported in the area, including reports of horned imps, Quatermass also notes that it was once called “Hob’s End,” and “Hob” is a name for the Devil.

The discovery of an alien cockpit, where Quatermass finds its dead inhabitants.

Having crept into the realm of supernatural horror, the story then swerves into high-concept science fiction. Drilling into the “bomb” creates a violent psychic and physical disturbance. Inside what appears to be an alien ship, the bodies of an insect-like race are discovered. They resemble the imps of Hob’s Lane legend, but deteriorate quickly when exposed to the air. Barbara demonstrates a psychic connection with the creatures and their craft, and we learn that the extraterrestrials originated from Mars. Most disturbingly, because the Martians could not survive in Earth’s atmosphere, they seem to have genetically altered apes five million years ago in order to create a Martian-influenced race that could live on in their stead. These evolved into a parallel human race still psychically connected to the Martians to establish a Martian colony on Earth; Barbara is one of them, and soon we learn that so is Quatermass. A malevolent psychic energy is transmitted throughout London, spurring telekinesis-fueled violence and riots as those descended from the Martians try to exterminate everyone else, a reflection of the violent, race-purging mentality of Mars. But before this spectacular finale, Quatermass and the Pit acts as an ever-shifting puzzle, with multiple possibilities explored before the truth begins to reveal itself; at one point, someone even suggests the bomb was WWII Nazi propaganda to persuade England of an alien invasion.

Barbara (Barbara Shelley) unlocks her ancient racial origins and latent telekinetic abilities.

To bring this story to the big screen, the star of the serial, André Morell, was curiously replaced by Keir; odd, because Morell was himself a part of Hammer’s standard repertory players. Perhaps it was simply to separate the serial from the film – but Keir is excellent in the part, demonstrating a stubbornness, intelligence, and empathy which is more well-rounded than Donlevy’s performance in the 50’s films. Supporting players Donald, Shelley, and Glover are equally outstanding, and reveal different facets to their personalities as the story progresses. This is an actor’s film, with a paucity of special effects until the big finale, and one of the film’s most effective moments is its unusual ending credits, as we watch Keir and Shelley recover from their manipulation and absorb the impact of what they’ve just learned and what’s just unfolded. Unfortunately, the one glaring flaw in the film is when the special effects really need to deliver: an admittedly far-fetched scene where Shelley’s character mentally channels her racial origins into a television monitor, allowing a glimpse of the race wars of Mars. Here the insectoid Martians are depicted as phony-looking miniatures. A scene meant to inspire awe (the soundtrack is ominously silent while the actors are transfixed by the images on the screen) plays ludicrously. But this is a small bit of a very special film, a Hammer movie like nothing else they produced. Without quite being a Hammer horror, Kneale’s story is somehow more disturbing than most of the studio’s conventional horror films. While The Devil Rides Out (1968) and every movie where crucifixes conquer the vampires inhabit a Christian universe of good vs. evil, Kneale offers the less reassuring suggestion that we have evil encoded by malevolent designers at the cellular level, ready to be triggered at any moment, at which point we will lose our personality and moral compass. When Quatermass himself succumbs to that influence, all hope seems to be lost. The solution, neatly, utilizes both scientific and supernatural principles. In this, Kneale’s script reminds me of Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel Hell House, which also explores both supernatural and (pseudo-)scientific explanations for its haunted house scenario before splitting the difference in the finale. Kneale’s story is not entirely original – it has at least one antecedent in Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End – but very little of its kind had been seen on screens big or small. Its influence was great. John Carpenter has cited Quatermass and the Pit as an inspiration (you can see glimpses in Prince of Darkness and Ghosts of Mars), and similar science fiction stories include Lifeforce (1985) and the “Inhuman” storyline in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. In writing his original serial, Kneale was inspired by the race riots of Nottingham and Notting Hill against black West Indies migrants. Almost a decade later, the tale found new relevance in the riots of the late 1960’s. Sadly, it’s just as relevant today, with the Western paranoia and resentment toward immigrants and Muslims and the resurgence of white supremacist groups. Maybe some of us have Martian blood boiling deep inside, and seek to purge those who are different. Any one of us could be capable of committing sudden violence. This is why Quatermass and the Pit remains so very unsettling 50 years later.

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