Fiend Without a Face is generally considered one of the better science fiction horror movies of the 1950s. Its reputation is almost entirely based on the last few minutes of the movie, when the stop motion “fiends” become visible. It’s really a must-see if you’re a fan of the genre.
Tagline: “New Horrors! Mad Science Spawns Evil Fiends! …Taking form before your horrified eyes!”
WTF Factor: ****
Notable Dialogue:
- Jeff: “How does it live?”
- Walgate: “How else but in the brains and nerve centers removed from these dead people?”
- Colonel: “Then where are they and why can’t we see them? This is nonsense.”
- Walgate: “We’re facing a new form of life that nobody understands. I believe that it feeds on the energy from your atomic plant, and that it’s evil.”
Synopsis: We open at a U.S. radar testing facility, complete with nuclear reactor, in Canada.
A guard hears gross squishing noises and a thumping like a heartbeat coming from the nearby woods. He immediately abandons his post to investigate. We hear a man scream and the guard finds a body with a terrified expression. Roll credits.
After the suspenseful beginning, we are treated to stock footage of military planes and radar towers, repeatedly. We meet our hero, Major Jeff Cummings (Marshall Thompson), downing a fistful of amphetamines. He’s in charge of a radar test that’s going poorly and now he’s investigating the death near the base. His aide, Captain Al Chester (Terry Kilburn), fills him in on the dead man’s background and they go see Dr. Warren (Gil Winfield) about the autopsy. Turns out there wasn’t one; Mayor Hawkins (James Dyrenforth) claimed the body, along with the man’s sister, Barbara Griselle (Kim Parker). Colonel Butler (Stanley Maxted) and Jeff try to convince them, but the family insists there will be no autopsy. Barbara explains that their cows were not giving proper milk and her brother Jack was timing the overhead jets to see if there was a correlation.
Jeff runs a test on their new super-long range radar they’re developing to spy on the Russians.
They scan as far as Siberia, but then there’s some sort of nuclear power fade. The responsible use of nuclear power by the 1950s military is then demonstrated.
Jeff: “We want you to give us everything you’ve got!”
Nuclear technician: “But Jeff, we’ve already exceeded the design limits. Every time you take a test, you ask for more power. If I take any more of those rods out, the reactor’s liable to get out of control.”
Jeff: “Well, take some more out. We’ll have to risk it. We’ve got to have more power!”
The plane flights overhead are really bugging the locals. A farmer’s wife goes into their barn, where we hear the thump/squish sounds while the hay is disturbed by something unseen. Suddenly she begins to scream, grabbing at the back of her neck [she’s a great screamer]. When the farmer runs in, he gets the same treatment.
After Constable Gibbons (Robert MacKenzie) rushes into Jack Griselle’s funeral to tell the mayor about the farm deaths, the mayor calls the colonel to accuse the base of nuclear fallout or something adjacent. The constable will not let the military investigate the farm. However, they do get permission for an autopsy of the victims.
Al: “The brain…It’s gone.”
Coroner: “Yes, sucked out like an egg through those two holes.”
Jeff: “…It’s as if some mental vampire were at work.”
The Colonel orders Jeff to question the town folks and Jeff can’t think of anyone better to start with than Barbara. When no one answers he goes right into her house and surprises Barbara getting out of the shower in a [substantial] towel [a scene memorialized in the poster art], complete with wacky music. While she dons her robe, he picks up a manuscript by R.E. Walgate called The Principles of Thought Control. Barbara works as a secretary for Professor Walgate. The constable arrives to break up the little flirt session and he’s not too pleased. The two manly men proceed to have a fist fight and Barbara orders Jeff to leave.
That night, we hear the thump/squish outside the mayor’s house, as does the mayor. We see the signs of something invisible moving across the front of the house, knocking things over.
Whatever slid through the puddle cuts a hole in the door screen and lets itself in. The mayor sees a door open and indentations come across the carpet, along with the noises. The camera takes a leap onto the mayor’s neck as the creature does its thing.
The next morning, the constable gathers up some of the men. He scoffs at the radiation explanation, and proposes a crazed G.I. in the woods. Everyone grabs a gun and heads for the woods. It appears to be dusk.
Apparently meanwhile, but in the daytime, Jeff pays a visit to Walgate (Kynaston Reeves); Barbara acts displeased to see him. Jeff asks for help investigating the deaths. Walgate has guessed about the radar project and wonders about the expression on Jack’s face when he died. Jeff suggests there might be a supernatural explanation and Walgate gets agitated. He’s supposed to stay calm and Barbara once again throws Jeff out.
Meanwhile [in the dark], the constable and another man hear the thump/squish. They split up and the constable disappears. The men go out searching that morning, but nothing. They get the deputy mayor to call a town council meeting. The meeting includes Barbara and Jeff, who was invited because of suspicions about the air base. Jeff says there’s no radiation contamination but the others don’t buy it. Coming to his defense, Barbara explains that the cows were off their milking schedule because of the jet noises, which they are getting used to. Jeff also refutes the mad G.I. story. Things aren’t going his way when the meeting is interrupted by an unnatural moaning, sobbing sound. The constable lurches in, obviously mindless.
Later, Jeff confides to Barbara that he thinks Walgate is part of the explanation for the deaths. He tells her he wants to look around the cemetery [for no discernable reason]. We get your basic spooky walking-around-the-cemetery-at-night scene, but without any thump/squish, so it’s not particularly scary. Jeff sees a mausoleum and goes in. He finds the mayor’s coffin disturbed, and Walgate’s pipe nearby. While he’s down there someone closes and jams the door. Jeff beats on the door with his flashlight, breaking it [smart move], and sets about trying to pry the door open.
Al calls Barbara to check on Jeff and she takes him to the graveyard. Good thing, because Jeff is running out of air [??]. They rescue him in the nick of time.
Jeff goes to confront Walgate, wondering if telekinesis would be possible with atomic power. Walgate acknowledges that he closed Jeff in the mausoleum after he examined the mayor’s body “to find out the truth.” About then the monster noises start and Walgate collapses. He frantically tells Jeff to shut down the reactor.
The Colonel isn’t keen on the suggestion, but Jeff points out that all of the deaths occurred near peak reactor output. The colonel agrees but then they discover at the plant that all of the containment rods have been destroyed. They order new rods from Hanford but that will take several hours. Now the main players will gather at Walgate’s house.
Walgate exposition-dumps about his interest in thought materialization. He tried unsuccessfully until one night lightning struck his equipment and he was able to turn a book page with his mind. He then figured out how to divert atomic power between the plant and the jets during radar tests.
Walgate: “I began to devise a being into which the thought, once released, could enter and preserve itself for all humanity. I envisaged something akin to the human brain, with life and mobility, but without the limitations of man’s body.”
He finally succeeded in releasing a thought, but when he returned to the lab, his equipment was trashed and his notes destroyed.
Walgate: “I knew now that I created a fiend. There was no other explanation [really?].”
Walgate could hear the sounds in his lab and suspected there was more than one invisible fiend. The fiends started to tap into the reactor energy supply and escaped from the lab. After Walgate examined the mayor’s body, he knew he had created “a mental vampire.”
Mostly the listeners scoff, but then the thump/squish starts. They can tell something invisible is moving around outside and Sargeant Kasper is grabbed through the French doors. They start to barricade themselves in.
Cut to the atomic plant, where the technician sees the power levels rising and gets gotten by a fiend. Suddenly the monsters become visible.
Back at the house, they discover that there are dozens of fiends visible outside, of all sizes. They scoot along like inchworms, but guns do them in. The cowardly deputy mayor gets gotten by one that comes down the chimney.
Turns out axes work fine too; it’s not a pretty sight. Walgate insists that the only way to stop the fiends is to shut down the atomic plant. Jeff suggests blowing up the control room with dynamite [so much for understanding how nuclear energy works]. He takes off to do so and gets a smooch from Barbara. Walgate sneaks out to provide cover, hoping he can somehow control the fiends. No, he can’t, and they swarm him, but Jeff gets away.
Jeff grabs the dynamite and enters the reactor control room. Everybody’s dead. Back at the house, the fiends pry the boards from the windows and attack. It’s a fiend bloodbath, but Al and the colonel are running out of bullets.
At the nuclear plant, Jeff lights the dynamite. He shoots a fiend, who then crawls over to the fuse to try and extinguish it before dying. Awwww. The control room blows up and the creatures die in puddles of slimy goo, including one that grabbed Barbara.
Jeff returns after a nice long drive in the woods. He and Barbara embrace as everyone lives happily ever after, until the nuclear plant turns into Chernobyl. The End.
Thoughts: It is worth putting up with the stock footage and underdefined characters just to watch the last 13 minutes of the movie, which is a delightful explosion of gonzo fiends. Fiend Without a Face is considered to be one of the goriest science fiction/horror movies of its time. However, all of the explicit violence is done to the fiends, not the humans who inflict the damage.
The director, Arthur Crabtree, felt that monster movies were beneath him [I wonder what he thought he signed up for], so he constantly complained and sometimes didn’t show up for filming. According to leading man Marshall Thompson, he finished directing the movie himself. Producer John Croydon has said that he himself had to direct some of the scenes, since Crabtree did not know how to blend the live action and stop motion footage. However the work was divided, the movie is consistent in look and tone until the last few scenes when the stop motion takes over. There is some fine, moody lighting and the invisible attacks are creepy.
The monster design and stop motion animation were carried out by Baron (for real!) Florenz von Nordhoff and Karl-Ludwig Ruppel, respectively. They deserve a lot of credit for the success of the movie. As Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen have demonstrated, stop motion animation is a great medium for imparting personalities to non-human entities, and these fiends are part of that tradition. They have an idiosyncratic way of inching along, cocking their, uhh, brains when “looking” at targets, and leaping through the air onto their victims. They are rather endearing, actually, especially the fiend in the nuclear control room who tries to extinguish the fuse. They really are defenseless when facing armed humans, and their only strength is in numbers.
The movie wisely keeps the fiends invisible until the very end. While the animation is great, these are, in final analysis, brains inching around on spinal cords. They are dispatched quickly enough that we don’t have a chance to contemplate how ludicrous the concept is until after the movie ends. However, one has to wonder where little fiends come from…
The other MVPs of this movie are Peter Davies, the sound recordist, and Terry Poulton, the dubbing editor. One would be hard pressed to come up with more disgusting sounds than found in this movie. The thump/squish sounds are distinctive and in truth, it takes away from the suspenseful scenes when we don’t hear the telltale noises; we know the invisible monsters are not there. That’s not to mention the sucking sounds when the fiends fasten onto their victims’ necks, or the squirting sounds they make after they’ve been shot. It’s a tribute to Davies and Poulton that when the British censors cut most of the gore scenes out, they also insisted that the filmmakers tone down the noises.
Fiend Without a Face is certainly one of the more interesting science fiction/horror movies of the 1950s, so much so that there is a high quality Criterion Collection DVD release. The movie suffers from the stock footage and padding that are characteristics of the genre in this movie era, but the eerie attacks are well-dispersed along the running time and help to maintain interest. I recommend this for a rainy afternoon; no crowd required.
Quick bits:
- Fiend Without a Face was the second half of a successful double feature with The Haunted Strangler (starring Boris Karloff!!!). The two movies were shot back-to-back.
- The screenplay by Herbert J. Leder was based upon a 1930 short story The Thought Monster, by Amelia Reynolds Long, one of the first female science fiction writers to be published.
- At one point Jeff says that Walgate is interested in the field of “sib-o-netics.” I thought that Marshall Thompson simply mispronounced “cybernetics,” until later, when Jeff has a copy of Walgate’s book, Sibonetics. Try finding that one in a dictionary.
- There was a brief discussion in British Parliament denouncing the gore in this movie, which was already significantly cut down for the British release.
Suggested double feature: It has to be The Brain From Planet Arous (1957).
Tagline for Coming Attraction: “HE TURNS THEM ON… HE TURNS THEM OFF… to live… love… die or KILL!”
