Quatermass and The Pit (film) - Legacy

Legacy

The film was a success for Hammer and they quickly announced that Nigel Kneale was writing a new Quatermass story for them but the script never went further than a few prelimininary discussions. Kneale did eventually write a fourth Quatermass story, broadcast as a four-part serial, titled Quatermass, by ITV television in 1979, an edited version of which was also given a limited cinema release under the title The Quatermass Conclusion. Quatermass and the Pit marked the return to directing for the cinema for Roy Ward Baker and he went on to direct such films as The Anniversary (1968), Moon Zero Two (1969), The Vampire Lovers (1970), Scars of Dracula (1970), Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) for Hammer. He also directed Asylum (1972), And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973) and The Vault of Horror (1973) for Hammer's rival, Amicus Productions.

Quatermass and the Pit continues to be generally well regarded among critics. John Baxter notes in Science Fiction in the Cinema that “Baker's unravelling of this crisp thriller is tough and interesting. The film has moments of pure terror, perhaps the most effective that in which the drill operator, driven off the spaceship by the mysterious power within is caught up in a whirlwind that fills the excavation with a mass of flying papers.” John Brosnan, writing in The Primal Scream, found that, “As a condensed version of the serial, the film is fine but the old black-and-white version, though understandably creaky in places and with inferior effects, still works surprisingly well, having more time to build up a disturbing atmosphere. Bill Warren in Keep Watching the Skies! said, “The ambition of the storyline is contained in a well-constructed mystery that unfolds carefully and clearly”. Nigel Kneale had mixed feelings about the end result: he said, “I was very happy with Andrew Keir, who they eventually chose, and very happy with the film. There are, however, a few things that bother me... The special effects in Hammer films were always diabolical.”