The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
- Andrew Smith
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
"Watch out! The Beast is coming!"
Plot
A prehistoric monster is thawed out of its frozen state by atomic testing in the Arctic and then proceeds to go on a destructive rampage in New York.
Review
The first of the wave of 1950s ‘atomic monster’ movies which featured radiated monsters going on destructive rampages throughout various cities across the world, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a landmark film in the genre. Marshalling the paranoia about atomic weapons that had festered itself in society since the end of the Second World War, the film goes about setting up a series of tropes which would become the norm by the end of the decade. To really understand why this premise resonated so powerfully with audiences in 1953, you must put yourselves in the shoes of a theatre goer in that post-Second World War era – the dawn of the Cold War and the birth of the atomic age. The atom bomb was a terrifying apocalyptic reality but also entirely abstract for the average citizen. People were living with this festering paranoia, doing duck and cover drills in schools, hiding under desks, putting mattresses up against windows and all that. They were worrying about a threat they couldn't see or touch – you can't punch atomic radiation. It is an invisible existential dread, an anxiety that just hangs in the air. What The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms did and what made it the absolute landmark first entry in the massive wave of 1950s atomic monster movies was to give that invisible fear a tangible physical form. Suddenly it wasn't just abstract physics, it was a giant, irradiated, prehistoric lizard tearing down buildings in Manhattan. It’s terrifying, but also something you can point a gun at and see. It provided the audience with a way to process their very real, modern anxieties through the safe fantastical lens of a monster movie. Take something we are all secretly terrified of in the real world and project it onto a giant stop motion creature on a movie screen so we can watch it be defeated. It's very cathartic. And in doing that, the film ended up establishing a series of cinematic tropes that would absolutely dominate the rest of the decade. It's uncanny when you map out the plot structure as it feels like literally every single monster movie made since, from Godzilla to Pacific Rim.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms plods along quite slowly and develops the formulaic structure to the letter: a few small incidents and reports about a monster; scientists sent in to investigate; monster reveals itself; army is called in to try and stop it; scientists struggle to come up with alternative as monster arrives in populated areas; monster caused chaos; leading to the final confrontation between science and nature. It seems to take ages to go anywhere but at least the monster is revealed almost straight away so there’s no partial reveal or slow burn. There is too much padding and character development and the scenes of characters discussing and arguing about the monster are drawn out for way longer than they need be. After all, we’ve come to see the giant monster on the poster, not hear about how Scientist A is falling in love with Scientist B. The whole thing didn’t cost too much money to make and Harryhausen’s techniques were notorious for taking a while to finish (not his fault, just the way stop-motion worked) so the film needs to pad itself out as much as it can without showing anything expensive.
The casting tropes established here are just as rigidly defined, and frankly, just as boilerplate as the plot structure. The cast really matters very little to the eventual outcome of the story. The scientists are uniformly played by older, serious-looking actors in lab coats. The leading men are your classic square-jawed, stoic heroes who never seemed to break a sweat, while the female characters, unfortunately reflecting the era, are explicitly there just to fall in love with the hero. They are given very little agency outside of being a sounding board for the male leads. Rounding out the ensemble, the military guys are uniformly depicted as shoot first, ask questions later, types who just want to blow things up who became the absolute standard makeup of characters for the genre for decades.
Kenneth Tobey, the lead from 1951’s The Thing from Another World, takes a bit more of a back seat here as far as casting goes. He would also pop up in another Harryhausen atomic monster movie, It Came From Beneath the Sea in 1955, in a similar military man role. A young Lee Van Cleef would pop up in a small role very early in his career and in something of an ironic nod to his future fame, he would play the sharpshooter tasked with taking down the monster. Director Eugène Lourié would visit the giant monster movie well a few more times in later years, bringing the world Gorgo and The Giant Behemoth, virtually the same film as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms only set in England. But this, his first foray into the giant monster world, is his best work by a long shot.
Thinking about the rest of this genre, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms would have just been another generic 50s B-movie if it weren’t for the superb stop-motion effects by the maestro of modelling, Ray Harryhausen. This was Harryhausen’s first solo film so he’s a little rusty here, but the monster is one of his most memorable (and he would base the dragon from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad upon the model he made here). It was a made-up dinosaur called a Rhedosaurus, created especially for the film but based the description of a prehistoric sea monster that author Ray Bradbury conceived for his short story The Fog Horn. Harryhausen felt audiences wouldn’t fear dinosaurs that they’d already been exposed to so tried to create something a little more terrifying. He conjures up some fantastic images of the monster, particularly a great silhouetted shot of the creature as it destroys a lighthouse (which is a scene pulled from Bradbury’s story). The monster’s rampage through New York in the finale and then the final showdown inside an amusement park are both sterling pieces of work, really showing audiences something they’d rarely seen before outside of King Kong. Black and white really gives the creature a film noir vibe and use of lighting and shadow inside the park at the end is a real testament to the genius that was Harryhausen. The scene where it attacks the rollercoaster still looks great to this day, with the skeletal structures of the rides casting jagged shadows across the creature.
Final Verdict
The special effects are the sole reason why The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms has become such a ground-breaking film. The Rhedosaurus would become one of the most influential and iconic fictional monsters in the history of cinema, inspiring Godzilla and Gamera, whilst the story and narrative structure would become the blueprint for almost an entirely new sub-genre of science fiction. This classic monster movie making at its 50s finest and Harryhausen would go on to bigger and better things in the field of special effects.
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The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms Director(s): Eugène Lourié Writer(s): Lou Morheim (screenplay), Fred Freiberger (screenplay), Ray Bradbury story ("The Fog Horn") Actor(s): Paul Hubschmid, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey, Donald Woods, Lee Van Cleef, Steve Brodie, Ross Elliott Duration: 80 mins |  |
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