Reception
The Abominable Snowman was released on 26 August 1957, with an 'A' Certificate from the British Board of Film Censors, as part of a double bill with Untamed Youth, starring Mamie Van Doren. In the United States it was released under the title The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. Reviews were mixed: Derek Hill of the Evening Standard found it to be "among the best of British science-fiction thrillers". Derek Prouse in The Sunday Times welcomed that fact that "for once an engaging monster is neither bombed, roasted nor electrocuted". By contrast, Robert Kennedy of the Daily Worker said, "The film gets bogged down in its own contradictions, including the notion that the Yeti are at the same time horrific and super-sensitive". William Whitebait in The New Statesman said, "The film lacks grip… the most authentic thrills are of men going mad and stumbling off into the snows where dead mens' voices join the wail of the Yeti". The critic in the Monthly Film Bulletin said the film was "on the whole a disappointingly tame and ineffectual screen version of Nigel Kneale's intriguing TV play".
The release of the film was overshadowed somewhat by the huge success of Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein, released the same year, and it was a relative financial failure, a fact Val Guest attributed to the intelligence of the script, saying, "It was too subtle and I also think it had too much to say. No one was expecting films from Hammer that said anything but this one did… audiences didn't want that sort of thing from Hammer. This was the last film Hammer made in association with Robert L. Lippert; following the success of The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer was now in a position to be able to deal directly with the major American distributors.
Critical views of the film in the years since its release generally consider it to be one of the lesser films in the Hammer and Nigel Kneale canon. Critic Bill Warren finds its to be "an intelligent but commonplace adventure thriller with the Yeti little more than background fugures… a little too ponderous and hence unexciting". Similarly, John Baxter felt that "in recreating a peak in the Himalayas, the set designer had more control over the film than the director, and despite some tense action the story drags". Baxter acknowledged however that the film exercises "a certain eerie influence", a view echoed by Hammer historians Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes that "the film conveys a taut, paranoid atmosphere; set largely in wide open spaces, it's remarkably claustrophobic in scale". Nigel Kneale's biographer, Andy Murray, finds the film "eerie and effective" and also suggests the scenes of the expedition members calling out to their lost colleagues across the wastelands influenced similar scenes in The Blair Witch Project (1999).
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