The Quatermass XPeriment: The Creeping Unknown (1955)

The giant teddy bear is not in the movie.

The Quatermass XPeriment: The Creeping Unknown (1955): adapted by Richard Landau and Val Guest from the BBC miniseries by Nigel Kneale; directed by Val Guest; starring Brian Donlevy (professor Bernard Quatermass), Jack Warner (DCI Lomax), Margia Dean (Mrs. Carroon), David King-Wood (Dr. Briscoe), and Richard Wordsworth (Astronaut Victor Carroon): 

Moody, atmospheric Hammer Studios science-fiction/horror adapted from the hugely popular Nigel Kneale BBC miniseries. The studio wanted an American to play Professor Quatermass, so the brusque Brian Donlevy plays the Professor as a brusque, semi-sociopathic scientist. He's pretty good, though I prefer Scottish Andrew Keir's more thoughtful Quatermass of Five Million Years to Earth, a dozen years later from Hammer.

Quatermass and his British Rocket Team (The Ministry of Space?) send three British astronauts into space, apparently without securing any government approval. The ship comes back. But only one astronaut is on board, and he's almost catatonic. Oops.

What follows is escalating horror, for the most part deftly done within the censorship and visual effects limitations of 1955. Nonetheless, The Quatermass Xperiment got an 'X' rating from the British censors for being too scary for children; Hammer simply altered the title to capitalize on this fact. In the US, the movie would be called The Creeping Unknown, another good title.

The actors have that committed, mostly low-key quality peculiar to the British. Even what appears to be a comical moment with a thickly accented pseudo-Cockney turns suddenly to dread and horror. Donlevy is good as Quatermass, who has to save humanity from the peril he himself has put it in.

Val Guest really achieves multiple creepy moments by emphasizing the aftermath of a monster's rampages, especially in the ruins of a London zoo. It's a worthy piece of horror, with Quatermass' final words supplying an augmentation of that horror which further Kneale serials and Hammer adaptations wouldn't follow: Quatermass would be humanity's defender after this, a sort of human, proto-Doctor-Who figure. Highly recommended.