MOVIE REVIEW: The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)
During the global Cold War between the United States and the USSR, many movies were made to get people ready for the possible war to come — a way to justify the planned failures of their leaders. The Fifth Column was the true enemy, and they could strike in any way, at any time. This was used to justify all kinds of governmental attempts to “purify” its nation — from the Pink Scare to the Red Scare. One of the fears of the time, aside from nuclear annihilation, was some sort of enemy superweapon independent of the atom to kill every American, then take over the infrastructure in an uncontested invasion. That’s exactly what happens in The Earth Dies Screaming, but it ends up being more of an apocalypse than an attack — because almost everyone on Earth is affected, Capitalists and Communists alike.
I say “almost” because a select group of people are holed up in the English countryside from the horror: Professor Nolan (Willard Parker, Kiss Me Kate), Mr. Taggart (Dennis Price, The Adventurers [1951]) and his wife Peggy (Virginia Field, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court [1949]), Mr. Otis (character-actor Thorley Walters, The People That Time Forgot), his wife Violet (Vanda Courtland, Konga), and two young people coming up from London named Mel (David Spenser, Battle Beneath the Earth) and Lorna (Anna Palk, Fahrenheit 451 [1966], Jason King [TV]), his pregnant girlfriend. They gather as survivors and look to gather more to re-establish society. The all have one thing in common: each of them was isolated from open air in what Prof. Nolan assumes was a “gas attack”, saving them from the dispassionate deaths of bystanders shown in the opening scenes. He then wrongly assumes a rogue nation on Earth is responsible.
Prof. Nolan is soon proven wrong when men in space suits show up, wandering the land through the piles of corpses. Vanda dies trying to communicate them through some sort of extra-normal action that sets her head on fire and drops her on the spot. In response, our survivors open fire with found weapons…but bullets do nothing, not even pierce the suit! Who (or what) are these invaders? WHAT DO THEY WANT? And how are the suddenly-risen legions of walking dead involved?
In watching this film, I couldn’t help but be drawn to parallels with AMC’s flagship action/survival horror program “The Walking Dead”. The survival horror portion and reanimated corpses of The Earth Dies Screaming may have been a partial influence on George Romero’s 1968 seminal work Night of the Living Dead, and ultimately all the works aping the latter film’s success. The robot invader-drones and alien enemy? Not so much. But there’s a more recent sci-fi idea there which leads to another classic sci-fi property; let me explain.
It’s not the craziest sentence I’ve ever written, but there we go.
In looking at the description Mr. Taggart gave of the reanimated Vanda, he said “she had no eyes, just gray blobs”. Gray blobs make me think of nanites and the “gray goo” idea of an apocalypse marked by a self-replicating nanobot fueled by any matter which it comes into contact. If the gas was not gas at all but low-particle nanite clouds that kill and can reanimate at the controller’s will, that would work.
Then there’s the idea of the mechanical drones. How are those made into humanoid forms? Granted, I’m aware the limitations of costuming and special effects limited robots into humanoid forms (for the actors’ sake), but did they have to look so much like Cybermen from BBC’s Doctor Who? In actuality, The Earth Dies Screaming is a costume design precedent to the costume design of the Cybermen (who showed up in the 1966 Doctor Who episode “The Tenth Planet”). In any case, those robotic drones could have been advanced versions of the humanoid cyber-zombies, reanimated by alien nanobots living in their eye sockets. It’s not the craziest sentence I’ve ever written, but there we go.
Outside of all my speculation and ideas for improvement, this movie is OK — not the best, but just okay.
CHOICE CUTS <SPOILERS AHEAD>:
- The pregnancy plot with Mel and Lorna. Eventually the child is born in this strange new world, but will they be able to adapt?
- Mr. Taggart is straight-up scum, from his obsession with money (in a world which has no use for it, no less!) to his willingness to abandon his fellow survivors to the walking corpses plaguing the world.
- The lighting is nice, with shadows used to full effect to present the risen dead in the harshest lighting possible.
- At one point in this black-and-white film, descriptions of color are used. This is a clear example of how people in the past were ultimately forced to use their imaginations when watching movies. It was a MUCH different time than when we now live.
- In another situation, the survivors had to manually triangulate a location based on signal reception. They had a map and a ruler, and their wits. The last time I saw something like that was Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and I love the process of tool-based manual calculation every time I see it used.
- A Soft Focus™ lens used on Peggy when Prof. Nolan Looks at her? But she’s married to Mr. Taggart! In real life however, the actors for Peggy and Prof. Nolan had been married since 1951. That, and the characters Taggart and Peggy aren’t married — their arrangement was a survival tactic.
