Night of the Reds: Communist Threat and Night of the Blood Beast
By Christopher Stewardson
By 1958, American International Pictures (AIP) was firmly on the map. The independent outfit had asserted itself in the wake of the Paramount ruling, which divested the major studios of their cinema chains and triggered a decline in production. AIP’s winning double bill strategy, pairing two low-budget pictures for the price of one, suited product-starved exhibitors. And within four years, AIP had flooded the market with teen-oriented exploitation fare, often made in under ten days and sporting sensational titles like It Conquered the World (1956), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), and Night of the Blood Beast (1958).
In particular, Night of the Blood Beast is an interesting case. Its monster suit also appeared in another AIP teen movie, Teenage Caveman (1958), demonstrating the economic filmmaking of producer Roger Corman; one of its plot elements sees a test pilot impregnated with alien embryos, forerunning Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979); and its allegorical Red Scare connotations necessarily place the film in historical contexts worth consideration.
Indeed, a revived Red Scare had firmly gripped America by the time of the film’s release. Following the end of World War II, as the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) compiled lists of alleged communists and/or their sympathisers in Hollywood, a flood of anti-communist films entered theatrical exhibition. Many were low-budget B pictures with lurid titles like Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), Invasion USA (1952), The Red Menace (1954), and The Girl in the Kremlin (1957). Most are insidiously grotesque or laughably clumsy in their messaging and presentation – often both. Invasion USA is an example of the former, depicting a staggered Soviet invasion of North America, with “the enemy” (the film never directly identifies its invaders) unleashing a barrage of atomic bombs. Its attack scenes mostly use material from US atomic test films, but one instance employs footage of Fat Man, the 21-kiloton plutonium bomb that America dropped over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. To appropriate images of that atrocity, during which more than 70,000 people were killed, in the assembly of a propaganda piece about America facing atomic devastation is odious and disturbing, if not surprising.
These films, which often suggested imminent Soviet invasion, were produced at a time when the US was interfering overseas, occupying countries and/or overthrowing governments in the name of anti-communism – from Korea following WWII, Iran in 1953, and Guatemala in 1954, to the billions of dollars spent to help the French retain colonial control of Vietnam. The films form part and parcel of the same processes, feeding one another. Science fiction films of the decade were not free from these propaganda tendencies, with various entries evoking the trappings of the conventional Red Scare films but with extraterrestrial invaders instead of Soviet attackers. While Red Scare readings can sometimes run the risk of being somewhat reductive, occasionally overlooking the other ideas individual films are playing with, it cannot be ignored how thoroughly anti-communism had been baked into the fabric of American society by the 1950s – and beyond.
This brings us to Night of the Blood Beast, a film which deploys common Red Scare narrative tropes in particular ways. The film is about a rocket test pilot (Michael Emmet) who dies when crashing back to Earth. His body is retrieved from the wreckage by a military-scientific unit, which soon finds itself isolated when the radio cuts out at their remote station. The pilot, meanwhile, revives. We learn that an alien being came to Earth with him, and its offspring are growing inside his body.
For most of the film, the pilot insists that the creature is benevolent, and that it only wants to impart its knowledge to humanity. His fellow crew members, meanwhile, are sceptical, particularly after the alien snacks on one of their number – which, for the sake of exposition, is convenient because it allows the creature to use their voice to communicate.
At the film’s end, the pilot changes his mind, believing he’s been duped into giving his body for the first line of an invasion force. He kills himself as the alien is set on fire by his comrades. As it burns, the alien promises that although mankind is not ready, its species will still save us, and that further rocket-satellite tests essentially guarantee their return.
Several Red Scare titles use this framework, either for their leads (as in The Red Menace) or their secondary characters (1952’s Walk East on Beacon). People are depicted as having been seduced by the bright promises of communism, only to find themselves ensnared and unable to escape when they realise – all too late – that The Party is ruthlessly controlling and coercive. Usually, these characters are then killed by the nefarious communists before they can warn others. Michael Emmet’s test pilot follows this pattern closely, believing in the alien’s promises for mankind’s betterment until realising he’s been used.
The film’s focus on an invasion force gestating inside a man’s body is worth examining. When the pilot is still believed to be dead, the crew look at his tissue under a microscope, witnessing unknown cells consuming his blood vessels. Invasion is rendered on a cellular level, every fibre of the body – the individual’s body as evocative of the national body – at the mercy of takeover. That he eventually chooses self-destruction may have been intended to appear as a noble act of self-sacrifice, but, looking at the film as a Red Scare text and at the body’s national evocations, there is something salient about an American man choosing obliteration over the possibility of an alternative way of being.
That he’s a test pilot is also noteworthy. His test flights push the boundaries of American rocket science, a race for technology that is evidently at risk of outside obstruction or interference – represented here by the alien creature – and therefore easily placed within the historical context of the “missile gap” that followed the launch of the Soviets’ Sputnik 1, which had in turn superseded the “bomber gap”. Technological paranoias thus merge with bodily fears.
The film was produced by Roger Corman and his brother, Gene, and so it’s also worthwhile contrasting Night of the Blood Beast with It Conquered the World and War of the Satellites (1958) – both of which were produced and directed by Roger. War of the Satellites sees a UN satellite project receive threats from an alien power, warning that mankind should not venture beyond our sphere. The film’s implied Soviet stand-in urges compliance in opposition to the grandiose defiance of the Americans. The film was quickly put into production to tap into US panic over Sputnik-1 and was in release by the time Sputnik-3 captured headlines once again. Some of the film’s special effects footage – specifically of a rocket take-off – was then reused for the pre-title sequence in Night of the Blood Beast.
Meanwhile, It Conquered the World has a similar setup to Blood Beast: Lee Van Cleef plays a scientist who facilitates the arrival of a being from Venus, only to find that the creature has plans of conquest rather than salvation. Both War of the Satellites and It Conquered the World therefore address similar subjects and the contexts that informed them, namely the idea of mankind probing beyond our world and the possible consequences incurred. However, It Conquered the World is more interesting with its Red Scare allusions and is better for it. In the film, the Venusian invader places several humans under its command, some of whom are personnel at a rocket-satellite installation – another similarity to Blood Beast. The alien-controlled humans deliberately stoke fears that a communist uprising has taken place to throw the installation into chaos. This naturally complicates the usual Red Scare readings in its suggestion that the alien is well aware of American paranoia regarding Soviet attack and is using that panic for its own ends. It’s a small point in the film but one that carries Roger Corman’s knowing sense of humour.
Though not politically adept in the same way, there’s a sense of humour at work in Night of the Blood Beast, too. After the alien embryos are discovered, the pilot tells his colleagues that they cannot be destroyed. When the team asks him why not, he replies “that’s why not”, and the camera swings to the door as the blood beast smashes its way in. It’s a terrific little setup and payoff that makes for a memorable scene. Even earlier, the film gives a delicious chill when the body of the blood beast’s first victim is discovered. The body dangles from the ceiling in the foreground, the head turned away from us. As the characters rush in, their horrified expressions are complemented by the gruesome remark that “half his head’s gone”. The pool of blood growing on the floor is also a suitably grim touch.
Night of the Blood Beast was released by AIP on a national double bill with She Gods of Shark Reef, another from Roger Corman. The picture stayed in theatrical circulation for several years, often appearing in double, triple, or quadruple bills with a variety of other genre films – mixed and matched by individual theatre/drive-in circuit owners. In October 1959, for example, Night of the Blood Beast played third in a quadruple bill at the Crest and Riverside drive-in theatres in Kansas City, along with A Bucket of Blood (1959), How to Make a Monster (1958), and Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959).
Of that selection, Attack of the Giant Leeches is an appropriate film to pair with Blood Beast as it was also produced by Gene and Roger Corman and directed by Bernard Kowalski. Moreover, Giant Leeches recycles Alexander Laszlo’s entire musical score for Blood Beast, which would happen again for Corman’s Beast from Haunted Cave (1959).
Night of the Blood Beast isn’t one of the decade’s best science fiction-horror chillers, nor is it one of Corman’s most effective works, but its central idea of alien gestation inside a human body is both unique for its time and connects the film to later genre works. The details of its story and characters also position the film’s Red Scare allusions in specific and direct conversation with the more overt anti-communist films of its time. The very presentation of bodily invasion and manipulation, as indicative of national fears of communist infiltration, in turn reflect the insidious, creeping violence of anti-communist American ideology itself – both within and beyond America’s boundaries. And as part of a triple bill with Corman’s own War of the Satellites and It Conquered the World, the film interacts with the filmmaker’s wider understanding, use, reflection and replication of these contexts.
Christopher Stewardson writes about mid-20 Century horror and science fiction films and has been published in Little White Lies, Fangoria, Dread Central, Arrow Video, Eureka Entertainment and elsewhere.
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