The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
| The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms | |
|---|---|
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| Directed by | Eugène Lourié |
| Produced by | Jack Dietz Hal E. Chester |
| Screenplay by |
Fred Freiberger Eugène Lourié Louis Morheim Robert Smith |
| Based on | "The Fog Horn" (short story) by Ray Bradbury |
| Starring |
Paul Christian Paula Raymond Cecil Kellaway Kenneth Tobey |
| Music by | David Buttolph |
| Cinematography | Jack Russell |
| Edited by | Bernard W. Burton |
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Production
company |
Jack Dietz Productions
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| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
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Release date
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Running time
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80 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $210,000 |
| Box office | $5 million |
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a 1953 American black-and-white science fiction monster film from Warner Bros., produced by Jack Dietz and Hal E. Chester, directed by Eugène Lourié, that stars Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, and Kenneth Tobey. The film's stop-motion animation special effects are by Ray Harryhausen. Its screenplay is based on Ray Bradbury's short story "The Fog Horn", specifically the scene where a lighthouse is destroyed by the title character.
The storyline concerns a fictional dinosaur, the Rhedosaurus, which is released from its frozen, hibernating state by an atomic bomb test in the Arctic Circle. The beast begins to wreak a path of destruction as it travels southward, eventually arriving at its ancient spawning grounds, which includes New York City.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was one of the first atomic monster movies which helped inspire a generation of creature features.
Far north of the Arctic Circle, a nuclear bomb test, dubbed "Operation Experiment", is conducted. Prophetically, right after the blast, physicist Thomas Nesbitt muses, "What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell". No sooner said, the explosion awakens a 30-foot (9.1 m) tall, 100-foot (30.5 m) long carnivorous animal known as Rhedosaurus, thawing it out of the ice where it had been held in suspended animation. Nesbitt is the only surviving witness to the beast's awakening and is later dismissed out-of-hand as being delirious at the time of his "sighting". Despite the skepticism, he persists, knowing what he saw.
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Wikipedia