Night Caller from Outer Space

The Night Caller is a low-budget British ‘B’ movie that I repeatedly revisit. Partly due to 
the nostalgia factor – I first saw this as a schoolboy in the seventies, only being allowed to stay up late once a fortnight to watch horror films on TV. It reminds me of the excitement and anticipation I felt for horror films back then – they certainly weren’t as easy to see as they are today.

More objectively, I think it's still enjoyable for the mid-sixties London vibe, the tight direction and effortless perfromances. It’s shot in crisp black and white with a creepy use of shadows and ‘dutch’ (slanted) angles when it gets a little crazy! This is before TV’s Batman wore out the technique the following year.

Starting with a UFO landing on wasteland just outside London. The army track it down and bring in three scientists from a nearby Government research facility. Convinced that it was a spacecraft, they're surprised to discover a small sphere, the size of a football, sitting on the ground. There’s no crater, so it must have been guided down. They hold it at their lab for further tests. Surrounded by the army, the scientists discover that, late at night, the object glows intensely and a dark, clawed figure appears.

In the panic, the figure disappears with the sphere, as do dozens of young women a few weeks later. Thinking that they’re going for an exclusive modelling job in the heart of London’s seedy Soho, they don’t realise they’re meeting the monster from the lab. As the kidnappings continue – how can the scientists help the police stop the creature from space?

I forgive the rubber claw that signifies the alien for most of the film. But when it's standing in the shadows completely swathed in rubber, the Soho connection takes dark new meanings. The slightly fractured narrative also logically and faithfully keeps to the original novel ‘The Night Callers’ by Frank Crisp, first published in 1960.

Its many moments of suspense are conjured up by the actors and the intense close-ups, rather than by showing much. Even with so little explicit terror, the film still warranted an X certificate in 1965. (This is a British 'X', only for over-16 year olds, rather than an American 'X' meaning hardcore porn).

Strangely, there’s a scene in the film, ‘blocked' (similar shots, action and set layout) the same way as one in Hammer’s later The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) – where Drac poses as a millionaire in a swish futuristic room, backlit by anglepoise lamps so that his face can’t be seen. The same ‘long room and back-lighting’ subterfuge is used halfway through The Night Caller. I've been confusing these two very similar scenes for years without connecting the two.

Director John Gilling peaked in the mid-sixties with this and his Hammer horrors Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile, which he shot back-to-back.

Hard to credit who the actual star is, with the story constantly shifting between characters dealing with the alien, though every actor plays this invasion-from-outer-space plot deadly seriously. A youthful John Saxon heads the cast, years before Enter the Dragon and Battle Beyond the Stars, or as cops in Argento’s Tenebre, Black Christmas (1973) and several Nightmare on Elm Streets. He’s accompanied by frosty blonde Patricia Haines, who I’m surprised didn’t make more movies. She worked steadily in top British TV series, including three episodes of The Avengers.

The third scientist is the stalwart Maurice Denham, whose most famous role was probably as the panicky recipient of ‘the runes’ in the opening sequence of horror classic Night of the Demon (1957).

Heading the police is Alfred Burke who recently passed away. He specialised in hard-boiled detectives on British TV, notably as the star of Public Eye for ten years. You might have seen him in Children of the Damned, in a very similar role. His last role was in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

There's a star cameo by Aubrey Morris as a creepy porn-merchant, flirting with a granite-faced Burke, "magic seeing you again”. Morris later played the abusive probation officer in A Clockwork Orange – talk about typecast. More recently he cropped up in Babylon 5 and Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood!

Another bit part has the always excellent John Carson representing the army. Carson played Dr Marcus in Hammer's Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter, and the squire in Plague of the Zombies.

For fans of John Cleese's Fawlty Towers, there's a rare straight role by Ballard Berkeley – the only time I’ve seen him onscreen where he's not the alcoholic 'Major'. (Black Hole Reviews)