Day 90: Fiend Without a Face (1958)
What’s scarier than seeing a monster? Never seeing it. With “Fiend Without a Face” director Arthur Crabtree delivers a classic B-movie tale the defies, for at least most of the film, the typical horror movie need of showing a big bad creature to its terrified theater audience. Instead, we are given an invisible terror who, when it finally does appear in the flesh, it is made up of things familiar, though deformed, and is less a “creature from another world” and more of the outcome of humanity’s own misuse of power.
In the film, the action takes place in and around an American airbase in rural Manitoba, Canada, where a nuclear power reactor is in use. When a base guard dies mysteriously and is found in the autopsy to be unharmed but without his brain or spinal column, the Army is up in arms and, when two local farmers are found dead the same way, the nearby town believes its due to fallout from the base’s nuclear energy. While the upper brass don’t believe this to be the case, Jeff Cummings (Marshall Thompson), an Air Force major, grows suspicious of Professor Walgate (Kynaston Reeves), a British scientist who has been experimenting with telekinetics, and its soon revealed that Walgate’s experiments have been successful and, due to the nuclear reactor, have turned, from simple thought, into a new violent invisible creature.
As this unseen being continues to multiple with every new victim and their feeding on the nuclear energy makes them stronger, they finally gain a physical shape in the form of the mutilated brain and spine of their victims and their attack on the Army base grows even more vicious. If Jeff hopes to survive, he’ll have to think fast on his feet and find a way to take out both the creatures and the base’s nuclear reactor before its too late.
With “The Blob” featured yesterday on “The Criterion Summer” and now “Fiend Without a Face,” it could be said the Criterion Collection has something for creatures without characteristics, but, unlike that big pink ooze taking over a small American town, “Fiend” takes the idea of an unidentifiable evil to a whole new level. It was once said of the work of Alfred Hitchcock that the most terrifying aspects of his films were not those shown to the audience but left in shadows unseen, allowing the viewers mind to create the worst possible creature. In “Fiend Without a Face” we see the same concept used as victims scream out in terror and try desperately to unravel the invisible monster wrapped around their neck. Without an understanding of what we should see, and only a soundtrack of creature noises to aid in the terror, the worst possible creatures comes to our minds and that is far scarier that what eventually appears an hour into the picture.
When finally visible, the creatures have taken the form of their victim’s brain, with the spine now attached as a sort of whipping tale. Though this is of course goofy looking, especially to modern audiences, this imagery does help in our understanding about who really is the “monster” of the film- ourselves. Conceived by a thought and empowered by the misuse of nuclear power, these creatures embody both our human external actions (the spine) and our internal decisions (the brain). Created the same year as “The Blob,” this film touts a more evident depiction of the world’s nuclear fears as it concentrates on showing how such disasters don’t have to come from space or another world but can simply occur because of both how we think and how we act. A rather self-reflecting tale for any movie, much less one that spends it’s third act shooting hoards of living brains.
“Fiend Without a Face” is certainly a forgotten B-movie gem whose subtext of our own choices causing horrendous disaster is just as relevant today and when it scared the bobby socks off of teenagers so many decades ago.
To learn more about “Fiend Without a Face,” check out Criterion’s page here.
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