The Guests

The Outer Limits (1963)

The Guests, directed by Paul Stanley.

The convertible driving hipster -- "Drifter", they call him -- turns out to be ok because he stops to help a very old man -- Burt Mustin -- who has collapsed on the road. We have seen the man desperately escaping from an old mansion which sometimes looks like a giant brain on the hillside.

When Drifter goes to the house for help the story becomes something like experimental theater. Four eccentric residents in antique clothes who can't leave, or don't want to. Upstairs is a blob monster scientist -- recycled from The Mice -- researching human beings, trying to balance an equation.

What is that human emotion that cannot be calculated, the one that orders all the others and harmonizes two people? What's that called again?

Doorways and windows come and go and the house has strange geometry. The eerie implication is that the mansion is inside the blob's brain and the residents are now just dream people who cannot exist outside -- for very long.

And how much of the story is inside Drifter's mind? We have much confusion of inside and outside.

Our star this time is Gloria Grahame, playing a silent film star from decades past.

Luana Anders is our love interest and wears 19th century clothes. I remember her from Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and she had a prominent role in Dementia 13 (1963).

Returning: director Paul Stanley from Second Chance.

Ominous pounding score, like a headache or being stalked by a large invisible being.

Photographed by Kenneth Peach.

On the Blu-ray Craig Beam and David J Schow provide a chatty commentary track about the production and cast and crew.

We have no Control Voice opening or closing narration; they suggest this is because the blob scientist explains everything.