The Crawling Hand, d.
Herbert L. Strock (1963)
Here with a super low
budget film which uses the space race to colour a fairly traditional horror
story. A moon shoot ends in disaster when, on the return journey, the
rocket goes haywire. Despite having run out of oxygen some twenty minutes
previously, the Astronaut's frightened (and frightening) face appears
on the mission control monitors, alternately hissing ‘kill!’ and ‘press the
red’, i.e. the button that will destroy him and his ship. As the ship is about
to crash into a populated area, mission control press the button and the ship
explodes, showering debris all over the coastline including, on a secluded
beach, the Astronaut’s arm, sheared off at the elbow, but still wearing its
glove and spacesuit sleeve (I was reminded of J.G Ballard at this stage, although
it’s too early for his work to have been an influence. Perhaps Ballard saw this
film?)
A
brilliant but brooding young science student (‘I’m going to the top – and I’m
making it on my own!’) discovers the severed arm, wraps it in a shower
curtain and takes it back to his digs where it promptly strangles his
landlady and then takes him over, forcing him to do bad things until he gets
flu and his high temperature weakens the arm to the extent that he can break
the link and stab the severed limb repeatedly with a broken bottle.
Hungry junkyard cats finish the job. Or do they? No, not really. The
uncanny is not so easily disposed of.
There is probably a monograph to be written about crawling hands in the movies,
from The Beast
With Five Fingers through to The Evil Dead and beyond. They're
mainly horror films, of course, severed hands don't normally creep around in anything
else.
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