Monsters and Matinees: Spending quiet time with ‘The Earth Dies Screaming’

In a quaint English village, people are sitting in a parlor by the fire doing what proper Brits do: elegantly smoking and drinking tea. It’s all so genteel inside, yet outside the situation is dire as “The Earth Dies Screaming.”

That’s the excellent name of a 1964 film that is much
quieter than the title promises. Directed by Terence Fisher, this non-Hammer
film is a taut sci-fi thriller that clocks in at a crisp 62 minutes.

It gets right down to business by putting viewers directly in the middle of some strange happenings without introduction: a train going off its track, a car crashing into a brick wall, people dropping to the ground.

Add an ominous pall to the usually postcard- perfect English village thanks to the black and white photography, then throw in a few lifeless bodies strewn about and it’s eerie and quiet. Something is very wrong.

A car pulls into the village driven a sturdy looking man with a rifle. He stops at a deserted shop and takes a radio, but leaves everything else. This guy has scruples. Meet American test pilot Jeff (played by Willard Parker) who’s such a sensitive bloke he picks a dead bird up off the ground and gently moves it to where it won’t get stepped on.

In a nearby inn (it’s too homey to be called a hotel), Jeff’s uneasy solace is interrupted by the arrival of Quinn Taggart (played by Dennis Price) and Peggy (Virginia Field).

There’s something unsettling about Taggart who immediately pulls out a gun so tiny it looks like a toy. (I snickered, but it does work on the bad guys.)

“None of us know who our friends are,” Taggart says as his excuse. He has a point – this is the first time they are seeing another person alive since “the event.”

Soon they’re joined by Ed Otis (Thorley Walters) and his wife Violet (Vanda Godsell) dressed in evening attire for his office party. They’re quite hospitable even if Ed drinks quite a bit to soothe his nerves.

So now there are five people in the inn trying to figure out what happened. There’s nothing on TV or radio, just an odd hum that modern viewers will know is not good (cue the aliens).

Jeff quickly becomes the voice of reason and the one who
will help the story move along as he realizes there’s a connection between the
survivors.

He was in the air when the disturbance happened before landing to find everyone dead. Peggy was in an oxygen tent at a hospital. Ed and Violet spent the night in a laboratory at the office to play kissy face away from the party. Where was Taggart? He deftly changes the subject and doesn’t answer. (But where was he? I want to know what he’s all about. There are a few loose ends in his story which makes me wonder if some of his scenes were cut for time.)

They come up with the reasonable explanation that there was a gas attack. Any doubts about that theory vanish with the arrival of a young couple who are so broke that they spent the previous night in an abandoned air raid shelter. (I did not make that up.) Mel (played by David Spenser) is a “cheeky kid” who will grow on you, and sweet Lorna (Anna Palk) is very pregnant and wants to get to her mother’s house before she gives birth.

Finally we get a clue about what’s going when two figures in “space suits” are spotted out the window and mistaken for soldiers by one of our new friends. These tin foil-suited figures slowly walk and appear to be in a zombie-like state, but they have some sort of death touch that creates eyeless creatures who also act, well, like zombies.

But this isn’t a zombie apocalypse via “The Walking Dead.” These guys are slower than molasses, easy to hide from and you can even outrun them. Just wait until they are only steps away from humans and there’s still enough time to sit and have a cup of tea. (Then again, the humans often just stand there, so it’s anyone’s guess on who will move first.)

Since Jeff has scientific training and can work his way around radios and transmitters, he hatches a plan after he realizes what we, the viewers, knew all along: that sound on the radio was an alien rallying cry!

Not a lot happens in this film plot wise, but Terence Fisher layers short, tense moments to keep the film moving and the viewer on edge in quiet moments.

He plays the inn like a haunted house mystery where characters skulk about at night making the viewer question what they’re doing. Even getting a glass of milk is suspicious.

Fisher takes advantage of the fact that our humans create a lot of self-inflicted problems by leaving doors open, lights on and making loud noises like beeping the car horn. (Then there’s the clip-clopping of high heels.) All of that would get you killed in a real alien or zombie apocalypse, but Fisher uses it to build his tension.

In one scene, lights are turned on in the kitchen, giving a foil-wrapped alien a clear view of the human inside. What will happen?

Later, a character hides in a closet (never a good choice) from an alien who reacts in a strange way that again allows the tension to mount.

And a corpse rising from beneath a sheet is one of those “what’s going on moments?” that should make the viewer and characters scream.  

Oh wait, there’s a baby to be born, too.

Can you ever really live up to a fantastic title like The Earth Dies Screaming? Probably not. But the film’s compact run time and Fisher’s deft direction make it well worth watching. Heck, at 62 minutes you’ll have time to see it twice.

TRIVIA

Off-screen romance: Virginia Field and Dennis Parker were
married in real-life from 1951 to 1992 when she died, which explains the easy
chemistry between them on screen.

Setting and
music: It was filmed at
Shepperton Studios, with location shooting in the village of Shere in Surrey. One
of the buildings is the Manor House Lodge, designed by the father of the film’s
composer Elisabeth Lutyens. Her avant-garde scores were heard in multiple 1960s
British horror films including some for Hammer and Amicus like Dr. Terror’s
House of Horrors, Terrornauts and The Skull.

New studio: In the 1960s, Fisher made a few movies outside of Hammer studios including The Horror of It All (1963) with Pat Boone and The Earth Dies Screaming both for the American film and distribution company Lippert Pictures. Fisher did direct other films for Hammer in the ‘60s including the great The Gorgon (my favorite) and Dracula: Prince of Darkness.

– Toni
Ruberto for Classic Movie Hub

You
can read all of Toni’s Monsters and Matinees articles here.

Toni Ruberto, born and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., is an editor and writer at
The Buffalo News. She shares her love for classic movies in her blog, Watching Forever and is a member
and board chair of the Classic
Movie Blog Association. Toni was the president of the former Buffalo
chapter of TCM Backlot and led the offshoot group, Buffalo Classic Movie Buffs.
She is proud to have put Buffalo and its glorious old movie palaces in the
spotlight as the inaugural winner of the TCM in Your Hometown contest. You can
find Toni on Twitter at @toniruberto and Bluesky at @watchingforever.bsky.social