MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*
Though I liked Hammer Studios' FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH back in the day, I haven't reviewed it as yet. Then I noticed one streaming channel made available QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, the original TV 1950s serial on which MILLION was based, and so I decided to check out the original production on which the 1967 movie was based.
It wouldn't be hard to draw lines of influence to both real-world speculations about "alien ancestors" or famous fictional variations on that theme, such as H.P. Lovecraft's 1931 AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS. Indeed, the Lovecraft work even contains a not dissimilar idea as to how humanity may have been bred as potential pawns for alien conquerors.
Like MOUNTAINS, PIT is an archaeological mystery, in which investigators come across remnants of an ancient civilization on Earth. Unlike Lovecraft, Nigel Kneale, creator of the Quatermass series, posits that there are no living survivors of the alien colonists. However, Londoners' unearthing the buried redoubt of the ancient aliens triggers something in the ship they left beneath the earth. This is a weak point in Kneale's script, since it's never clear as to why anything in the archaic ship still works after five million years.
Professor Quatermass (Andre Morell) is called in to consult on the mysterious redoubt, and he immediately butts heads with an army martinet who sees everything in terms of military advantage. The pacing is necessarily slow and deliberate, as Quatermass and his allies uncover various aspects of the alien civilization. One of them doesn't make a lot of sense: an artifact that's mistaken for an unexploded bomb from WWII. I'm sure this had a short-term impact for British viewers, whether they had lived through the Blitz or not, but that particular sidenote didn't have much of a payoff. The meat of the story is the investigative team digging beneath London streets and uncovering a graveyard of insectoid aliens (who also have not deteriorated over five million years). Quatermass eventually speculates that the insect-people were colonizers, possibly from Mars, and that, because they couldn't adapt to Earth's environment, they experimented upon primitive ape-men to make them into pawns. I'm not sure what utility it had for the Martians to endow their pawns with psychic talents, but Kneale supposes that after the last Martian ship crashed to Earth, it killed all the Martians but some of the experiments got loose on Earth and so interbred with "normal" hominids.
I'm tempted to think that in PIT Kneale was influenced less by Lovecraft than by British horror-writer Arthur Machen, whose famous tale "The Great God Pan" posited that the Greek terror-deity still survived to menace humankind in a more or less archetypal form. Even without being unearthed, the ship has been stimulating occult experiences in London and maybe in Britain as a whole, causing people to experience such phenomena as elves and poltergeists. The ship's power becomes even stronger once it's unearthed, with the result that Londoners start experiencing a fanatical emotional upsurge compared to "The Wild Hunt" of Nordic mythology. However, Quatermass speculates that this "hunt" was part of the aliens' mythology, and that it was actually a purge among their own kind, to eliminate impurities. The determined scientist must find a way to annul the ship's influence in order to save his people from the evils of war.
Kneale's message is pretty unsubtle, particularly since after all the shouting is done, Quatermass lectures the world on his anti-war stance. But all the incidents of supernatural phenomena being somehow generated by the alien ship, or by latent psychic talents of humans, are still fun, and Andre Morell brings more humanity to his role than have some other performers.
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