Eyes on the Trollenberg: What’s in a title?

By Christopher Stewardson

Low grunts reverberate in the mist. A monstrous shape emerges from the haze. A single, unblinking eye stares right at you. 

This is The Trollenberg Terror, a film about alien creatures hiding within a seemingly static, radioactive cloud on the south side of the Trollenberg mountain in Switzerland. The script teases these details effectively, sending more men up the mountain’s slopes only for them to return in pieces or under the control of the mystery beings inside the cloud. And it isn’t long before those beings descend ever closer to the village at the Trollenberg's base. 

I quite enjoy The Trollenberg Terror, but I much prefer its US release title, The Crawling Eye. Its original, UK title is, I think, rather stuffy. Originally, a company named Dominant had picked up both The Trollenberg Terror and The Strange World of Planet X (both financed by Eros Films) for US release under the titles “The Crawling Terror” and “Creatures from Another World”, as confirmed in issues of the Motion Picture Exhibitor trade magazine. Whether the films actually received any US exhibition under these titles is unclear, but it is nevertheless true that Distributors Corporation of America (DCA, which had seen phenomenal success when distributing the King Brothers’ 1957 localisation of Toho’s Rodan to US theatres, a fact stressed in their advertising) ultimately picked up the package. The films were then retitled again as The Crawling Eye and Cosmic Monsters and released to the American market. I think the better title prevailed.

There’s something sensational about “The Crawling Eye”. It’s the sort of title one would hear as a joke in Ed, Edd n Eddy, another outlandish movie that Ed would reference while contorting his body to resemble the titular monster. That may lead you to believe I like the title because it seems self-parodic. Far from it; I like the title because it’s weird and strange. The Trollenberg Terror could be anything from a British quota-quickie detective thriller to a sensationalised war story. But The Crawling Eye instantly conveys its science fiction/horror centre with a deliciously pulpy aplomb that teases gore and viscera. And to its credit, the film does contain a decent degree of on-screen bloodshed with decapitations aplenty. 

Of course, the film’s alien creatures are not actually gigantic eyes; they merely resemble them. Nevertheless, when taken together, that title and these creatures inform a film that’s both unique and deeply intertwined with its genre contemporaries. 

Screenplay duties went to Jimmy Sangster, a reliable hand behind the scenes over at Hammer Films. Hammer had already produced several TV serial film adaptations by the mid-1950s, reaching influential heights with 1955’s seminal The Quatermass Xperiment. In between their first and second Quatermass films, Hammer had approached the character’s creator, Nigel Kneale, to use the Bernard Quatermass figure in an original story. Kneale declined, but the film went ahead anyway as X The Unknown (1956), which was Sangster’s first screenwriting job for Hammer. Indeed, X The Unknown is unmistakably a Quatermass story in everything but name, featuring Dean Jagger as a Quatermass stand-in who faces a lump of deadly radioactive slime bubbling up from a fissure in rural Scotland. The film’s basic elements (an isolated, rural setting, deadly radioactivity, and a steadily unfolding narrative structure) would all turn up in The Crawling Eye as well. Indeed, The Trollenberg Terror is another TV-to-film adaptation, therefore sharing much with its Hammer brethren. The film’s alien creatures, with their single, unblinking eyes and vine-like tendrils, are also reminiscent of Victor Caroon’s final, monstrous form in The Quatermass Xperiment. 

Other similarities to Hammer lie in the adaptation process. The serialised version of The Trollenberg Terror was broadcast in six parts between 15 December 1956 and 19 January 1957, directed by Quentin Lawrence and starring Laurence Payne in the lead role. Lawrence would also direct the filmed version with Payne carrying over, though the lead role was instead given to American actor Forrest Tucker, much as Bernard Quatermass went from Reginald Tate and John Robinson in the BBC serials to Brian Donlevy in the films. At the time of this writing, no episodes of the Trollenberg serial survive, but newspaper listings and reviews suggest the filmed version may have followed the serial relatively closely, unlike the more serious alterations between Kneale’s and Hammer’s Quatermass versions. Indeed, whether or not any viscera was actually shown, it was certainly suggested in the TV original. Commenting on the serial’s second episode, John Rees, writing for Leicester Evening Mail on 24 December 1956, said, “Holding a vacuum flask which some mysterious creature of stupendous strength had torn in two, the astronomer hero gazed down on the corpse which viewers were not allowed to see and said: ‘They’ve done the same thing to Dr. Dewhurst.’ So we had the horrific vision of the corpulent doctor torn in two like a Christmas cracker.” In the filmed version, Dewhurst is decapitated offscreen, though we see his headless corpse. 

Looking ahead, the idea of alien creatures hiding amongst mountain clouds obviously recalls Jordan Peele’s sensational Nope (2022). And much like “Jean Jacket” in Nope, the beings of The Crawling Eye are marvelously strange. Many reviews and retrospectives of The Crawling Eye often deride or dismiss the film’s special effects. On the contrary, I believe they’re quite effective. When we finally glimpse the alien creatures that have spun such mystery around the Trollenberg, these pulsing, groaning, staring beings are suitably eye-catching (sorry) and bizarre. I find it hard to understand the criticisms of the special effects as they pertain to the film’s aliens, because they appropriately and effectively convey otherworldly beings. And their accompanying sound design (an echoing, laboured grunting) is a fabulously unsettling touch. 

Reviews and listings at the time of the original serial suggest that the alien creatures were withheld until the final episodes. On 19 January 1957, a piece in the Manchester Evening News briefly mentioned how the fifth episode had ended, “with one tentacle round the neck of Sarah Lawson.” With the BBC’s Quatermass Experiment, we are lucky that at least one photograph of the mutant Victor Caroon has survived, giving us a useful comparison point. By contrast, no photos of the alien creatures in the serial version of The Trollenberg Terror have presently surfaced, though the mention of tentacles in the Manchester Evening News piece certainly suggests that they may have resembled their later film counterparts. 

And those alien beings help to make The Crawling Eye an engaging science fiction thriller. Future home video releases would do well to include both the UK theatrical and US release versions, providing the original serial adaptation and the sensationally titled US release. The former can be watched in tandem with Hammer’s Quatermass adaptations whilst the latter works in a lineup of American creature features. Alternatively, if you’re anything like me, the US version also helps to recreate TV monster marathons like AMC’s Monsterfest ‘99. But in either format, it remains a fascinating TV adaptation with truly wonderful creatures. To conclude, perhaps I can offer another title that combines the two: The Eyes of Trollenberg.

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