It Crawled Out of the Woodwork
The Outer Limits (1963)
It Crawled Out of the Woodwork, directed by Gerd Oswald.
The whimsical title has a cute opening: it's the cleaning lady's fault. She shouldn't poke at that unknown mass in the corner. Could be a deadly, unstoppable energy being.
Not so funny after that. Staff at the research lab are paranoid and in despair. A lot of deaths. They all wear little electronic boxes under their clothes: you won't believe what those are for.
A reasonably straightforward SF thriller with a little psycho-drama between the brothers. The smoke/shadows/electricity energy menace is at once a rudimentary effect and really quite effective. It lives in "the Pit".
The closing narration tells us it is a metaphor for various human powers, but particularly that of controlling the atom:
quote
Control Voice
The Conservation of Energy Law — a principle which states that energy can be changed in form but that it cannot be either created or destroyed. And this is true of all energy — the energy of genius, of madness, of the heart, of the atom. And so it must be lived with. It must be controlled, channeled for good, held isolated from evil… and somehow lived with, peaceably.
We have a rich set of familiar faces:
Kent Smith as the head honcho, always handsome and dull, remembered from earlier thrillers like Cat People (1942), The Curse of the Cat People (1944), and The Spiral Staircase (1946). Here he has a giant photo of a mushroom cloud on the wall behind his desk. The man knows what he wants.
Ed Asner as the police detective.
Michael Forest who I remember as the god Apollo in Star Trek Who Mourns for Adonais?
Barbara Luna was all over TV back then, again in Star Trek as Kirk's consort in the alternative universe Mirror, Mirror.
The great Ted de Corsia has a small part as a gate guard. He was doing a lot of TV around then.
Photographed by Conrad Hall.
No Blu-ray commentary track for this episode.
