It! The Terror from Beyond Space is an independently made 1958 black and white science fiction film that was written by Jerome Bixby (who wrote such things as the short story on which The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "It's A Good Life" was based and the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Mirror, Mirror"), produced by Robert Kent, directed by Edward L. Cahn, and released by United Artists.
On the then-far away future of 1973, an atomic rocket, the United States Space Command Challenge 141, has crashed on Mars, all hands believed lost. The second expedition to Mars, Challenge 142, has been sent to search for survivors, finding only one: Colonel Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), the leader of the expedition, who says that a monster killed the rest of the crew. Believing that he was the one to perform such a massacre, the crew of the 142 arrested Carruthers and is going to bring him back to Earth, to face a firing squad.
Unfortunately for them, Carruthers is not lying, and the proof of his claims is the Nigh-Invulnerable monster that managed to sneak onto the Challenge 142 before its lift-off and is now killing the crew one by one...
If any of this "monster-on-a-spaceship" sounds similar to several plot points that would later be explored in Alien, it's not a coincidence. Scriptwriter Dan O'Bannon was a fan of this movie.
No relation to the Stephen King novel It.
This film provides examples of:
- 2-D Space: Averted with the space walk—the rocketship is shown vertical and the crew walk straight down the side of it.
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The film was produced on 1958 and the events of it happen in the then distant 1973.
- Affectionate Nickname: Van Heusen, who is romantically involved with nurse Ann Anderson at the start of the movie, calls her "chicken." Yes, "chicken."
- Air Vent Infiltration: No-one can find Kleinholz until they look in the vent marked Air Generation and Moisture Recovery Section. Jack then enters another vent to see if Gino is there and finds him barely alive, but trying to signal him to leave. Turns out the creature is there as well and Jack barely makes it out alive, having to leave Gino behind in doing so. However unlike other versions of this trope, the creature never uses the vents to access the rest of the ship, implying that the vents in that area are a closed system.
- Artistic License – Physics:
- Exploding grenades produce quite a shockwave of compressed air (as well as a good amount of shrapnel.) It is never taken into consideration just how bad an idea it is to set off grenades in a spaceship, where the shrapnel will almost certainly destroy something vital and the overpressure will rupture your hull...
- Likewise when the bazooka is fired inside the ship it's treated just like a BFG, with Missing Backblast (the venturi is pointing at a vital panel of instruments) and no concern about the high-explosive armor-piercing warhead such a weapon fires.
- As You Know: The opening briefing scene on Washington DC, explaining why is Carruthers being arrested/rescued.
- Artificial Gravity: The usual throwaway line to explain why they're not floating around in zero-G. As most of the action takes place in space, it could be the pseudo-gravity created by the thrust of the atomic engine.
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: Averted Trope. It is this, the creature's only apparent weakness, that allows the crew of the Challenge 142 to kill it off.
- Barehanded Bar Bending: When the crew first arm themselves and go to confront it, the creature snatches an M1 rifle and
bends it like a rubber prop. - Barrier-Busting Blow: The creature tears through several of the ship's doors (the interconnecting hatches to each level of the rocket and the door to the atomic reactor). Every time it does so it elicits an understandable Oh, Crap! reaction.
- Big Bad: The Martian terrorizing the ship.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: The creature. Nigh-Invulnerable, breathes in a lot of air to compensate for how little there is on Mars, sucks out all the oxygen and fluids from human bodies by osmosis, and is full of alien bacteria that can have a leukemia-like effect on the human body and makes claw strikes very dangerous.
- Book Ends: The two press briefings in Washington D.C.
- Captain's Log: Subverted; the movie opens with Carruthers narrating but he's not The Captain, but Colonel Van Heusen. Carruthers is under detention pending his court-martial back on Earth.
- Cassandra Truth: Carruthers and his statement that a Martian killed his crew. Obviously, the rescue crew and the people on Earth don't believe him, and even think that he made the story up to not Go Mad from the Isolation.
- Casual Interplanetary Travel: Interestingly averted. There is repeated mention that the flight from Earth to Mars and back again will take four months on each direction.
- Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: As the monster tears through the ship towards the control level, the crew realise they need to change into their spacesuits which they do in a single cut, despite the fact that two of those people were wounded and would have to be helped to get into theirs.
- Closed Circle: The ship, en route to Earth from Mars—a flight that will take several months.
- Cold Equation: The supposed motive behind Carruthers massacring his crew: with the Challenge 141 crashed and no way of knowing how long it would take for rescue to come (if ever), the supplies would last him about 10 years if he's the only one alive.
- Colonel Badass: Colonel Edward Carruthers. Final Guy of the first-ever (and doomed) Mars expedition, surviving alone for six months on Mars, and Shell-Shocked Veteran member/prisoner of the second. Colonel Van Heusen of the second expedition, try as he might, doesn't quite reach this.
- Curiosity Killed the Cast: Kleinholz hears the creature rummaging around in C Compartment and goes to investigate the noise. In fairness he has no reason not to, given that they're in Outer Space and they all think Carruthers made up his story anyway.
- Dwindling Party: Of 19 men and women on two Mars expeditions, only 6 people make it back to Earth.
- Everybody Smokes: Regardless of being on a spacecraft. Gino even gets killed when he turns back to get a cigarette packet from the storage room.
- Friend or Foe?: Van Heusen produces a skull with a bullethole in it as proof that Carruthers is lying about how his friends were killed. Carruthers admits that everyone was firing blindly when the monster first attacked them in a sandstorm, so the victim would have been killed by a stray bullet, which might well have been a mercy.
- Future Primitive: The crew theorizes that the monster could be part of the remnant of a Martian civilization that somehow destroyed itself and returned to prehistoric barbarism.
- Government Agency of Fiction: The United States Space Command, sender of both expeditions. Or at least it was fictional at the time the movie was made. There really was a U.S. Space Command in operation from 1985 until 2002 when it was merged with U.S. Strategic Command.
- Go for the Eye: Calder is stuck in a place where the monster finds it difficult to reach him, and is able to repeatedly hold it back by waving a welding torch at its eyes, despite it being Nigh-Invulnerable to everything else.
- Hero of Another Story: The tale of the near-Total Party Kill of the Challenge 141 expedition, leaving Carruthers as the Final Guy and forced to survive on Mars alone for six months, happening before the events of this movie.
- Heroic Sacrifice: During the final confrontation with the creature, the airlock controls are within arm's reach of it and anybody who goes for them will surely be attacked. A semi-delirious Van Heusen goes for them and opens the airlock, and the creature attacks him as a result.
- Implacable Man / Immune to Bullets: The creature. Make that Immune to Bullets, Bombs, Gas, Electricity and Radiation.
- It's Probably Nothing: Carruthers is the only one to respond to the sound of Kleinholz getting killed, as he's understandably more on edge than the others, who only respond to stop Carruthers calling out for Kleinholz because they think he'll wake everyone else up. Though when Kleinholz doesn't respond to an intercom call, they do a proper all-hands search.
- I Will Fight Some More Forever: Justified Trope in that it's either kill the monster or die. The creature needs to kill them for sustenance, and as it will take months to get back to Earth and the creature can rip through the hatches, they can't just barricade themselves off and wait it out.
- Last Stand: What the crew sets up on the upper control level of the rocket after the beast wrecks his way through the rest of the ship and they have just about run out of ideas. Thankfully, their discovery that the creature breathes in enormous amounts of air leads to the necessary "Eureka!" Moment to turn things around.
- Love Triangle: Carruthers, Nurse Ann Anderson and Van Heusen.
- Married to the Job: Ann says she dedicated herself to Science after a bad marriage; though given how touchy-feely she is with Van Heusen and Carruthers, one gets the impression that she's still on the hunt for a husband.
- Men Are the Expendable Gender: While it's not known how many (if any) women were on the Challenge 141, none of the women of the Challenge 142 are killed.
- Missing Backblast: A crewmember fires a bazooka at the alien monster, even though he's inside the spacecraft with the venturi pointed at a panel of instruments which had just been demonstrated to have dials that monitored crucial life support functions.
- More Dakka: .45s, grenades, gas grenades (MacGyvered by one of the crew members as a Properly Paranoid joke), rifles (M1 Garands), a bazooka... for a rescue/exploration expedition, the crew was pretty heavily armed.
- Motive = Conclusive Evidence: The military court back on Earth (and Van Heusen in the ship) just assumed Carruthers decided his survival superseded his crew's on account of there not being enough rations for everybody. At least it is supported by one of the dead bodies's skulls having a bullet hole on it (they didn't have time to search for other bodies).
- Non-Indicative Name: Needless to say, Mars is not "beyond space".
- No One Gets Left Behind: Averted.
- Gino is found half-dead in an air vent, but the monster is also there and attacks his would-be rescuer Jack. Bob is furious that they left his brother behind, but when Jack says there was nothing that could be done, Bob says he doesn't blame anyone for the decision—he just hates the fact that it was made.
- Calder breaks his leg and has to be left behind by Carruthers, but when a delirious Van Heusen accuses him of having left Calder behind as bait for the monster so he could escape, Calder (still alive but trapped in another part of the ship) gets on the intercom to defend his action. Bob is later killed trying to rescue Calder because he was reluctant to leave him behind.
- Recycled In Space: Inverted trope. The story has so many similarities to Ridley Scott's "Alien" that some people say this is a possible prototype to it. There are plenty of differences (well-armed government astronaut crew on this film vs Action Survivor "space truckers" on the other film, for example), but Scott concedes that there are similarities—although it could be both drawing from one of the first "spaceship crew trapped with murderous alien" stories, The Voyage of the Space Beagle.
- Red Shirt: Kleinholz and Gino, in order of death. Kleinholz didn't even get a mention on the roll call "name check" at the beginning nor any scenes before getting killed by the monster.
- Science Hero: The whole crew, making theories about the creature and trying to find a way to kill it.
- Smart People Play Chess: The men of the crew play chess to pass the time while Kleinholz is being killed. Interestingly, Carruthers is winning.
- Smug Snake: Van Heusen at the beginning of the film, sure that Carruthers is guilty and trying to get him to confess.
- Space Is Noisy: Averted for the spacewalk. Which is just as well as they're trying to sneak past the alien.Trailer: In the silent void of Outer Space, puny Man matches his cunning against a monster from Mars, running rampant!
- Space Suits Are SCUBA Gear: No, here they look like hazmat suits. Unfortunately there's a moment where Ann helps someone put on the suit by tucking in his helmet hood, without any sign of a seal.
- Stay in the Kitchen:
- Zig-Zagged Trope: although the women on the ship are the ones that handle the dishes on the dinner scene, they are the ship's medical officer and her assistant and as such make an analysis of the creature's methods of killing, run an autopsy of one of its victims, and patch up the wounds of the crew.
- It doesn't help that their role is ambiguous. Both women wear different colored coveralls from the men, which could be due to their job but they may also be members of a Women's Auxiliary Corp, or civilian medical specialists attached to the military mission. Ann appears to be a nurse but she talks of dedicating herself to Science after a bad marriage, so she may be trained as a lab technician as well.
- Survival Horror: A very old example of it.
- Thrown Out the Airlock: Variant: the crew opens the airlock to vent the air out of the ship and suffocate the monster.
- Trapped-with-Monster Plot: And the added problem of the monster being damn near unkillable.
- Two Girls to a Team: As opposed to the usual all male or token female cast you'd expect from a Fifties sci-fi movie.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: James Calder, by leaving one of the ship's airlocks open after ditching some empty crates on Mars, allowing the creature to enter the ship.
- We Need a Distraction: Two crewmen put on spacesuits and go outside the spaceship, entering another airlock to get behind the monster. The creature is currently on the deck below their own, so they tell the others to just walk around and talk normally, in order to keep its attention but not get it agitated.
- What Happened to the Mouse?:
- One of the crew develops an infection after the creature's claws gash his leg and no antibiotics seem to affect it. We never learn if he recovered, died, or brought back an incurable alien plague to ravage the Earth.
- There's also Calder, who would have been exposed to "enough radiation to kill a hundred men" when the monster tore open the door to the atomic reactor.
- Women Are Delicate: When a delirious Van Heusen starts shouting loudly (attracting the attention of the monster) and goes to turn on the atomic reactor (endangering the lives of his fellow crewmates), the ship's doctor and nurse act like he's a disturbed patient who needs to be coaxed back into bed instead of trying to physically restrain him.
