Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

London workers dig up what they think is an unexploded wartime bomb. It turns out to be a five-million-year-old Martian spacecraft, buried alongside the bones of early humans. What we learn threatens to shake the foundations of faith, indeed of human civilization.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967) began as a six-part BBC serial, written by Nigel Kneale and broadcast across the winter of 1958 and 1959. Hammer brought it to the screen eight years later, released in America as Five Million Years to Earth and directed by Roy Ward Baker. It remains one of the most intelligent science fiction stories ever filmed.

Kneale conceived it when World War II was still recent memory and unexploded bombs a real hazard, so the image of digging into the ground and finding buried death from above lands before any alien appears.

The film argues that the impulse toward genocide is ancient and innate. The original television version made its subtext text: The Notting Hill race riots against Black migrants had occurred just before the series aired, and Kneale inserted a fictional news bulletin into Episode 1 stating that "race riots are continuing in Birmingham." The suggestion that real-world violence had continued to spread prompted complaints from Birmingham's West Indian community.

Kneale's cold, scientific dread runs through decades of the horror that followed. John Carpenter loved this film so much that he wrote Prince of Darkness under a pen name, Martin Quatermass.

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Quatermass and the Pit (1967) was co-financed by Seven Arts Productions, with Associated British Picture Corporation and Twentieth Century Fox, after a previous partnership with Columbia Pictures fell through, leading to a split international theatrical distribution strategy. In the United Kingdom, Associated British Pathé distributed the film under its original title on November 9, 1967, whereas Twentieth Century Fox handled the United States release on February 16, 1968, retitling the film Five Million Years to Earth.