Fiend Without a Face (1958)

directed by Arthur Crabtree

UK

74 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This movie belongs solidly to the mid-20th-century "nuclear paranoia" subgenre, which is one of my areas of interest not only as it pertains to genre cinema but in general. Although many non-genre films were made that deal with anxiety over a nuclear future, it must be said that combining that with the concept of some awful mutated creature makes for great cinema. I think I was mostly watching this because I had some vague notion that it would be similar to Toho's The H-Man - with some radiation-mutated human as the killer - but it turns out it's more like Secret of the Telegian instead. More on that later (with spoilers for a 64-year-old movie).

Like many horror films you've undoubtedly seen, Fiend Without A Face starts off when a military base gets a little too comfortable doing nuclear-power tests in a small, rural community. The locals try to bring up the damage being done to their livestock from the noise and their suspicions that more may be going on, but are mostly dismissed, and anyway, at the same time, people are turning up dead in the woods with bizarre wounds that no one can explain. Their brains and spinal cords appear to have been sucked out through a small puncture wound in the base of the skull, leading one scientist to coin the term "mental vampire". Later, we the viewers witness some of the attacks that leave these mutilated bodies behind, but we don't yet see the killer - it's invisible! We watch a poor farming couple get sucked dry by some unknown force, helpless before a terror they (and we) cannot see! I am surprised at how unsettling this movie manages to be even before it explicitly shows us its titular creature. It should be mentioned that this is in the Criterion Collection, which I found to be a bit strange, but Criterion is nothing if not known for occasionally throwing out titles that make at least some subset of film fans think "well, that's a bit strange".

At 74 minutes, I do struggle a bit to come up with things to talk about, and the movie itself seems to struggle a bit to even reach that running time. There is a romance inserted between who we might call the "main" military character and a local woman whose brother was killed by the "fiend", and to me it felt awkward, with a very stiffly-acted scene where he walks in on her fresh out of the shower serving as our signal that something's going on between these two. I can't criticize romances too much even though I generally find them to feel very shoehorned-in most of the time, because on the other hand the characters would feel pretty inhuman and shallow without something like that. I guess a silly, trite pairing like this one is better than everybody acting like robots, and it also is a good showcase for tropes of the time. Nothing is ever shown, all modesty is preserved, but it's remarkable how the context of the film and the time period it was released in somehow makes seeing a woman totally covered up in a towel feel more scandalous than if she had been partially or fully nude.

I'm pulling out the L-word (Lovecraftian) to describe this film, because I feel like the story itself ticks some of the boxes: Creatures that are incomprehensible to the human mind and drive witnesses insane, latent mental powers running wild, things with tentacles, etc. A distinction should be made here that when the creatures drive a person insane, they do so in a purely physical manner (I.E. removing the brain stem and turning a person into what really is an awful spectacle that is fairly offensive and probably wouldn't be filmed today), not via some inherent quality of their appearance as is typical for Lovecraft. They are very goofy-looking on their own, and without background would be pretty laughable, but the concept behind their creation is layered with so many individually disturbing elements that it still works. After quite some time has passed, the force behind the mysterious deaths is found not to directly be the military's experiments but the experiments of a lone scientist working to enhance his own brain power, who accidentally unleashed a physical entity (an armada of them, actually) that fed off of the nearby radiation. Or at least that's what I got out of it, anyway. There's one big exposition dump that provides most of the backstory and then everything after that is just assumed. I have to say, though, even on their own without any backstory I still do love the fiends. There's something about how often the image of an ambulatory brain with spinal cord attached pops up that I really love - it's strangely endearing to me that humans have looked at our own anatomy and thought "I bet if a brain could move, the spinal cord would be like a little tail" not just once but multiple times.

I think where this movie excels is in its marriage of giving backstory on the creature with showing the creature on screen. It does the right thing in immediately showing us how gruesome the killings are, establishing that first before we fully know what's going on, and then giving us some explanation for it more slowly. This way we're hooked, and the movie has more freedom to kind of do whatever it wants because, wow, we've already seen an invisible force suck some folks' brains out. Like the confused, terrified farmers, we'll pretty much accept any explanation for that after we've seen it happen a couple times. And although this all is rooted in what we would now call bunko science, it reflects fears of the time. I do not in any way want to laugh at or minimize horror films that arose from fears of as-of-yet difficult to understand concepts like nuclear energy. The military acts towards the locals the way I think a lot of people would act towards this film today - "we're not dropping atom bombs on them, it's just tests for clean energy, why are they so worried?" Movies like this are important because we have to remember the actual dangers of these kinds of things; we can't get complacent just because we think we're at the top of our game with regards to scientific understanding of nuclear power.

I can't really tell what tack the movie itself is taking on that front, to be honest - the military are presented as at least somewhat responsible, but the way they lament the public always blaming everything on them seems a little too "poor, pitiful trillion-dollar superpower" to be fully serious. In any case, the final explanation shifts the blame mostly onto a single individual, whose actions, granted, wouldn't have been possible without the nuclear tests going on nearby, but the end message seems to be that none of the actors involved really knew what would transpire.

This is getting longer than I intended and so I'll stop here, but this is overall an interesting movie. Maybe not the best thing if you're looking for something truly macabre for your Halloween parties, but there's still a sense of dread to it that lingers. It isn't terribly deep, and the science isn't up-to-date if that's something that bothers you; it even just invents a field of study - "sibonetics" - whole cloth. I still enjoyed it and its fiends. They make a sound that is very horrible and I would love to know how it was achieved. To me it sounds exactly like a person undergoing liposuction, but that was not invented until a couple of decades later, so I assume it's some other medical procedure or possibly just something getting sucked up through a tube. We care about the important stuff here at the film review depot.