It! The Terror From Beyond Space

by Jack Hagerty, LUNAR #002

[The following article is excerpted from the upcoming Saturn Press release Spaceship Handbook which should be out at the end of the year. © 1998 ARA Reprint Services, all rights reserved.]

Film producers are a shameless lot, especially those of low budget films. George Pal worked with Robert Heinlein on their epic Destination Moon (1950) and they hired Chesley Bonestell to both do the background paintings and help with the design of spaceship Luna. Bonestell offered them a design which was a mild reworking of the Transcontinental Transport, but for reasons that must have seemed good at the time, the producers rejected the design. Destination Moon was a huge success both critically (it won the Academy Award for Special Effects) and at the box-office. Naturally, all of the exploitation film makers started lining up to do low budget knockoffs, including Flight to Mars (1951) which provides an interesting footnote in the evolution and use of the "winged rocket" concept. One of the producers of FTM had worked on Destination Moon and knew of the discarded Bonestell design. Since it was already paid for, he was able to put a genuine Bonestell design into his film for only residuals!

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Photo 1. Frame of rocket in flight from Flight to Mars.

The rocket from Flight to Mars wasn't quite done with it's travels to that planet. Seven years after that worthy effort, it resurfaced in the Sci Fi/Horror film It! The Terror From Beyond Space. Genre buffs will recognize this 1958 cheapie as the inspiration for the 1979 hit Alien. A deep space mission is returning to earth with a crew of five men and two women. Unknown to the crew, a hostile alien has gotten aboard and proceeds to dispose of the crew one-by-one, starting with the captain in one of the ventilation ducts. All efforts to kill the thing fail until someone notices it's an air breather and thinks to open a hatch. If you're a bit confused as to which film we're discussing, that's because the above description applies to both of them!

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Photo 2. Lift-off shot of rocket from It!.

For the exterior shots of the Challenge 142 [a name chilling in its similarity to another spacecraft crewed by five men and two women which suffered a horrible, non-fictional fate] we find the already-once-recycled ship from Flight to Mars. It is unmistakable with its ogive hull, three-stick landing gear and with the area under one of the legs filled in to form a single fin. Director Edward Cahn, though, was quite stingy with his SFX shots and there are only two scenes showing all of the ship's exterior: one of it taking off from Mars at the beginning of the film (with a huge display of sparks and smoke) and a "coasting" shot of the rocket from a considerable distance drifting from the bottom to the top of the frame. This latter shot is repeated, without variation, no fewer than 10 times throughout the film any time the director wanted to fade between scenes.

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Photo 3. Coasting shot of rocket from It!.

Additionally, there is a gratuitous space walking sequence where two crew members try an "end run" around the monster by going out one of the upper level airlocks, walking down the ship to a lower level airlock. Mostly what this does, in the one medium shot of the exterior, is establish that the rocket is riddled with airlocks, at least 10 of them, since they are necessary to the plot.

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Photo 4. Space-walk scene from It!.

One curiosity concerning the treatment of the model in this film is that, apparently, the director didn't like the idea of a winged rocket. After all, both the Soviet Union and the U.S. had orbited satellites by the time this film came out, an none of the "real" hardware had wings. Therefore, in all three scenes showing the exterior, the model is held with the right wing square to the camera such that the tip and root chords (which lie on top of one another from this viewpoint) just look like pieces of plumbing running down the side.

Vehicle Morphology ......... BFNC
Year ....................... 1958
Medium .......... Theatrical Film
Designer ...... Chesley Bonestell
Length ............ 142 ft (43 m)
Max Diameter ...... 13 ft (4,0 m)

Information date: May 9, 1998 lk