It's almost a Quatermass film but not quite. Originally intended by Hammer to be a sequel to the previous year's successful The Quatermass Xperiment, writer Nigel Kneale refused permission for the character of Bernard Quatermass to be used. Instead we get Dean Jagger playing the role of Dr. Adam Royston in a terrible tale of an ancient horror emerging from the Scottish moorland with a hunger for radioactivity. The monster manifests itself as a huge slab of glowing radioactive mud and goes on the rampage. Featuring some gruesome special effects that were pretty strong for the period (a hospital radiologist is melted down into a gloopy mess), some effective scares and a characteristically menacing score from James Bernard, X The Unknown is jolly good fun. It may not have been as commercially successful as The Quatermass Xperiment, but it was nevertheless a significant film for Hammer steering them towards Gothic horror, and also cementing within British cinema a trend for science fiction/horror hybrids.
Review of X the Unknown
