- Original theatrical poster - image courtesy of Wrong Side of the Art
How I wish I’d seen Fiend Without a Face for the first time as a kid – a desire that points to my masochistic cinematic tendencies as much as my love for conceptually driven sci-fi.
The menace of the title is a force unseen until a sly plot device allows them to materialize for the climax, during which the film gets the most bang for its special effect buck. The image of the fiends is a potently weird one, and by relegating it to the dramatic high point, there’s no time for them to normalize.
Those who remember the film tend to do so for the nightmares it gave them after the fact, but this is also a smart and charismatic movie that’s earned its place in history. The danger of the fiends is preceded by a preexisting conflict between the rural Canadians and the American servicemen whose military research base resides on the outskirts of their town.
Atomic testing has the locals concerned, as their farming patterns have been disrupted by the influx in aerial activity overhead, but that’s soon to be the least of their worries.
The film opens with the first in a series of gruesome, seemingly inexplicable deaths, each of which is preceded by a singularly weird sound – kind of a slurpy, crunchy heartbeat – before the victim is dispatched in a matter of seconds, a look of absolute terror on their now-frozen faces.
An autopsy on one of these victims reveals a most bizarre set of circumstances. Through a pair of holes in the back of the neck, the brain and spinal cords of the victims have been removed entirely, like an egg sucked out through a tiny puncture in the shell. A shocked aside proves the best description of the unseen force at work: a mental vampire.
Preexisting tension between the townsfolk and the men at the base understandably grows, even though it’s obvious that this is no mere side effect of radioactivity or fallout. As the situation escalates, a guilty scientist residing in town confesses to the series of experiments he undertook that developed the first of the fiends.
Attempting telekinesis, the doctor inadvertently created a physical manifestation of thought, a new organism in the form of a human brain, and one that quickly grew, learned, and escaped to feed on the living and multiply its ranks.
Although it's well made and smarter than your usual monster movie fare, what sets Fiend Without a Face apart from the herd is the chilling, advanced special effects work used to create the monsters, who take on a visible form when the nuclear power that is their life force is escalated to dangerous levels by a saboteur in their ranks.
Equipped with tentacles, spinal chord tails and antennae, the creatures prove adept at manipulating human tools, flying through the air at their victims with a frightening poise.
The sound effect used for the fiends is a similar masterstroke, all the more so in that it suggests their presence long before the film shows them outright. The human cast is uniformly game and the direction by Arthur Crabtree evokes dread out of the ordinary with relative ease, but the peculiar effectiveness of the film largely comes down to the ingenious design of the titular monsters. As far as mad scientist byproducts go, they’re a juggernaut.
Fiend Without a Face. Dir. Arthur Crabtree. Perf. Marshall Thompson, Kynaston Reeves, Michael Balfour, Kim Parker, Terry Kilburn, Gil Winfield. MGM, 1958. Running Time: 77 min.
