Quatermass and the Pit

Workers extending the Underground at Hobbs End find skulls, then a metal hull. Quatermass works out that the object is five million years old, that the insects inside it are Martian, and that they were performing selective breeding on early humans.

Nigel Kneale's idea, which the film delivers with total seriousness, is that every piece of European demonology, the horns, the goat legs, the racial purges, is a genetic memory of the Martian cull.

Hammer had made two previous Quatermass films and this is the best of the three, and one of the smartest scripts in British film.

The pit itself, an excavation with a hull in it, is the whole location for most of the running time and never gets dull.

The ending, in a burning London street with a shape over it, is achieved on a small budget and works completely.