The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) on Netflix
Approved19531h 20mHorrorSci-Fi
An atomic test in the Arctic thaws a carnivorous dinosaur frozen in ice for millions of years. Physicist Thomas Nesbitt, the only surviving witness, cannot convince anyone of what he saw.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb6.6/109,797 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes91%
Trailer
Plot summary
A nuclear test called Operation Experiment is detonated near Baffin Bay, and the blast thaws a carnivorous dinosaur that had been held in the ice for millions of years. Physicist Thomas Nesbitt is the only surviving witness to the creature's awakening, and in New York his account is dismissed as a hallucination caused by shock. Colonel Jack Evans tells him that searchers found no trace of the beast. At a university, paleontologist Thurgood Elson hears him out but doubts a creature frozen so long could survive.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- During production, Ray Bradbury visited his friend Ray Harryhausen at the studio and was invited to read the script; when Bradbury pointed out the similarities to his own short story, the producers quickly bought the rights to it.
- Its successful release, along with RKO's re-release of King Kong, spawned the giant monster film genre of the 1950s, and it is considered the first live-action film to feature a giant monster unleashed by an atomic bomb.
- According to author A. T. McKenna, plans for the Beast to snort flames were dropped before production because of budget restrictions; the idea was used on the film's poster and allegedly inspired Godzilla's atomic breath.
- According to numerous retrospective sources, Ishirō Honda's Godzilla (1954) was heavily inspired by The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms; Godzilla's initial proposal was allegedly titled The Giant Monster from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Shigeru Kayama's original story had Godzilla destroying a lighthouse.
SPOILER
The climactic roller coaster scenes were filmed at the Pike in Long Beach, California, featuring the Cyclone Racer; Harryhausen used split-matte, in-camera effects to combine the actors with stop-motion animation of a miniature coaster.- The dinosaur skeleton seen in the museum sequence was a real prop, obtained from RKO Pictures' storage where it had been built for the studio's 1938 comedy Bringing Up Baby.
- Warner Bros. replaced Michel Michelet's original score with a new one by David Buttolph; Ray Harryhausen had hoped his film music hero Max Steiner, then under contract at Warner Bros., would write the score instead.
- Because Eugène Lourié had not named his collaborator on the script, retrospective sources assumed a blacklisted writer worked on it during the HUAC hearings of the early 1950s; film historian Bill Warren identified him as the blacklistee Daniel James.
