The Earth Dies Screaming (Lippert Pictures, Shepperton Studios, 20th Century-Fox, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Wednesday, March 5) my husband Charles came home from work relatively early and ultimately I showed him a movie from YouTube: The Earth Dies Screaming, a 1964 British-made production directed by Terence Fisher (who mostly worked at Hammer Studios on their remakes of the Universal horror classics) from a script by Harry Spalding. There’s an imdb.com “Trivia” item in which Spalding allegedly said that the title was a joke suggested by a friend, and it stuck despite his not liking it. It certainly is a misnomer because, while it’s an alien-invasion movie, it’s a surprisingly decorous one (especially given how much sex and gore Fisher put into his Hammer films!) and virtually no one screams. It’s about an American pilot, Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker), who’s doing test flights in Britain on the same sort of exchange program that sent Col. Mandrake (Peter Sellers) to the U.S. in Dr. Strangelove. When he lands his plane, he discovers that everyone around him has suddenly died except for a few people who, like himself in his pressurized cabin, were in hermetically sealed environments. Among the survivors are Quinn Taggart (Dennis Price), the film’s human villain (and when we discussed the film Charles mentioned that he was the only survivor whose survival method was not explained by Harry Spaldiing); Peggy Hatton (Virginia Field, Parker’s real-life wife), who’s being held hostage by Taggart and forced to pose as his wife; local hotel and bar owner Edgar Otis (Thorley Walters); his wife Violet Courtland (Vanda Godsell); and young J.D. type Mel Brenard (David Spenser) and his pregnant wife Lorna (Anna Palk). The action stays so resolutely within the hotel – it cuts outside only occasionally – I found myself wondering if Spalding had originally written it as a stage play and then adapted it for film. The aliens turn out to be two robots – there are supposedly more, but on a Lippert Films budget they obviously could afford only two robot suits – who annihilated most of the human race, or at least most of it in the north of England, with a poison gas attack. Then they started walking around and picking off the few survivors. (Charles also noted the resemblance between the robots in this film and the Cyber-Men on Doctor Who.)

The robots also have the power to put humans under mind control, and the indication that they’ve done that to someone is their eyes are replaced by solid white globes in their sockets. Violet is taken over in this fashion and Quinn shoots her in self-defense, naturally pissing off her husband Edgar. Later Quinn also gets transformed into an alien-controlled person, and what’s left of the human race appears to be doomed until Jeff figures out how to defeat the aliens. He realizes that, as robots, they’re all being controlled by a radio signal, and if he and the remaining good guys can blow up the transmitter that’s sending the signal (represented here by a model of unwitting tackiness), the robots will collapse and become just useless hunks of metal. That duly happens, though in the final frames, as Lorna finally gives birth to Mel’s baby (thereby symbolizing that Life Will Go On despite the catastrophe), Jeff warns that Earth may not have seen the last of these alien invaders. Though by then the aliens-invade-Earth trope had hardened into cliché, The Earth Dies Screaming is actually pretty good. At just 62 minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome (and YouTube blessedly showed it with no commercial interruptions at all, a far cry from what they and their algorithms had done to The Hangman Waits when Charles and I had watched it the night before), and there are just enough conflicts between the human characters to keep it interesting without letting it become annoying. And besides, I’ll admit it, it was lots of fun to watch David Spenser exude male sexuality as Mel, especially since wardrobe supervisor Jean Fairlie found him a pair of white pants that did a great job of showing off his assets. Also noteworthy was that The Earth Dies Screaming’s musical score was composed by a woman, Elisabeth Luytens, described on imdb.com as as “avant-garde composer … whose father, Edwin Lutyens, designed Manor House Lodge in Shere, Surrey, a small property which features prominently at several points in the film.” Though her credits look pretty minor-league (her best-known film is probably Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, made by the British Amicus studio in 1965 with Hammer refugees Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee), it’s still nice that this early a woman was finally able to break the glass ceiling and get a job as a film composer!