Man, talk about memories. This was my FAVORITE horror/sci-fi film growing up in the 60's and 70's. I'll always appreciate my mother who, although being religious enough to send me catechism classes on Saturdays, always (I mean always) let me skip it when one of my favorite monster movies was airing at Noon (and a second one at 2:00pm). She was really cool about that. This movie and another, The Monster of Piedras Blancas, were my favorites. Every week when TV Guide hit the stores, I made sure to grab one. I'd spend about an hour thumbing through it looking for horror/sci-fi programming on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons. What a great time to grow up. It! the Terror from Beyond Space was the scariest and most suspenseful, IMO. My favorite horror flicks were always the ones with the monster being a bi-ped humanoid creature. But I think my next favorite sci-fi film was Beginning of the End, 1957.
Thanks for posting this. It’s always enjoyable to hear John Carpenter talk about films he loves. What he said about the films we see in our formative years tending to stick to us is true. I saw his films growing up in the late 70’s and early 80’s and am still a fan.
So awesome - growing-up in the 1960's and 70's, I was part of that generation who got to watch a lot of the sci-fi and horror movies from the 1950's and 60's after they had long-since made their run at the theaters back in their day, before my time, and we would eventually watch them during their TV runs on the classic Friday and Saturday night horror host type local TV shows - "Creature Features", "Nightmare Cinema", "Shock Theater", etc, etc (UHF-VHF) during the late 60's through the 70's. Oddly enough, two of my favorite sci-fi/horror movies from the 50's just so happened to be "It! The Terror From Beyond Space" and "Curse Of The Faceless Man", both of which were put out by Vogue Pictures and were on the same bill as a double feature back in the 50's. Jerome Bixby was genius.
Spoilers: You've got to love the self-satisfied expressions the crew of the ship gave one another after exploding a dozen grenades (not to mention firing countless live rounds -- including firing haphazardly at a nuclear reactor) on a compact vessel and at no point assessing the damage.
It's wonderful hearing a talent like John Carpenter discuss his admiration for this film which has always been one of my favorites. It's such an entertaining monster movie plus it has a monster suit that is one of the best of the era!
I used to watch the original "The Thing From Another World" which was the film that Carpenter remade in the 80's & my dad showed me the original*The Thing* (1950's version) & always told me about this film *IT* & said it was even better than the original *The Thing* movie that we watched all the time because it was always on TV's monster vision during the weekend evenings in the 90's when i was a little kid & while *The Thing From Another World* came on in the evening & i we watched it all the time , *It : The The Terror From Beyond Space* was a late night (midnight movie) film that never came on TV & if it ever did back then in the 90's , it was always the last movie of the night which only came on once in a blue moon & it didn't ever air till about 2:00 or 3:00 am in the morning when i was already fast asleep so i never got to actually see it as a kid so i dedicate this film to my father that literally made it into like almost a urban legend back then that i still remember today because ive seen every single 1950's Sci Fi film ever made but it was tge 1990's so theres no internet to just pick & choose wat u want to watch & it was definitely the rarest of B movies of that kind to find back then unless u stayed awake late enough to catch it so i love this film just for tgat effect on my ,90's childhood that it had on me alone & this is around tge same years tgat i was already a huge fan of tge Alien Trilogy & Carpenters The Thing remake so this is so amzing to watch as a grown adult finally & see the late night Sci fi legend that i never could as a child lolz
I watched this again last night. I never noticed this until now, but in one of the final scenes, right before they go down to get more blood from the storage locker, just as they're opening the hatch - the director's entire right arm is visible on the left side of the frame, frantically signaling to someone. I believe it's at 57:39 if you want to take a look.
I was probably 5 when I saw IT. The only two things I remembered 60 years later was the movie name and the scene where It picked up a guy over its head and snapped his spine backwards.
i saw this movie when i was around 6 years old. terrified me. i had nightmares for days over it. the biggest logic flaw in the movie is how the monster is killed. letting the air out of the space ship. mars has no atmosphere. there is no air on mars. the monster would not breathe air. so letting the air out of the space ship would have no effect on the monster. the movie still gives me chills when i watch it. great low budget science fiction terror movie.
I don't think you can label as "flaws" the mores of a particular time. That's just the way things were (vis-a-vis women serving coffee, everyone smoking etc). And, as far as the use of grenades and firing weapons: This is not uncommon in SF movies. The logical assumption is that the crew wouldn't do that if they knew it would damage the hull of the ship. Might have been good for the screenwriter to mention that, but....not necessary. That's what I assumed;/presumed when I saw IT in the theater as a 10 year old on its original release re: grenades etc.
Queen of Blood (1966),had a female space vampire aboard a spaceship that drained the crew of their blood and was harvesting eggs. Her children, which would if they reached maturation, would land on Earth and feed off mankind, like prized cattle!
It always pisses me off when a guy like John Carpenter who was still a baby when Jerome Bixby wrote "It the Terror from Beyond Space" finds "flaws" in this Jerome Bixby movie. Jerome Bixby the prolific Writer of "It the Terror from outer space" was born in 1923 and was a writer for many Hollywood movies & T V. He wrote 4 episodes of Star Trek & "It's a good Life" for the The Twilight Zone where Billy Mummy would put you out in the cornfield. And he did them all with out any graphic Violence. Some thing John Carpenter after all his movies has yet to do.
Alien was basically an updated version of “it”.... if you really think about it the premise of the movie was the same....And alien life form gets on the ship and starts killing the crewmembers.... of course how they got on the ship was very different and very graphic at least in aliens case...But again the overall concept of the movie is very much the same
Horrors! They were smoking in a spaceship. Yeah, but so was Cain in Alien. Jerome Bixby is the first screenwriter whose entry on IMDb I remember being accompanied by a photo.