The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955) on Netflix
Approved19551h 15mHorrorSci-Fi
Allan Kelley farms dates in the desert, far from any town, and the harvests have been poor for years. His wife Carol can barely stand the isolation when something comes down.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb3.8/102,066 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
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Plot summary
Allan Kelley works a date ranch in the California desert with his wife Carol and their daughter Sandra. The harvests have been bad for years, Carol resents the isolation, and Sandra's one comfort is her boyfriend Larry Brewster. The ranch also shelters a hulking mute called Him, who works for his food and bed. One afternoon a whirring thing passes overhead and crashes far out in the desert; soon after, the family dog attacks Carol and the other animals around the ranch grow aggressive.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film began as a non-union shoot of a script called The Unseen, with Lou Place set to direct, but after one day's filming the union threatened to shut the production down unless everyone joined the Guild. Roger Corman then took over directing, replaced the cinematographer with Floyd Crosby, and took no screen credit.
- When the film was first shown, distributor Joseph E. Levine offered James Nicholson $100,000 to junk it and make a new one more in line with the advertising campaign, according to Alex Gordon. Nicholson instead spent two weeks scratching the negative to make it seem like lightning strikes.
- The tiny budget meant the music credited to "John Bickford" was actually a collection of public-domain library cues by classical composers Richard Wagner, Dimitri Shostakovich, Giuseppe Verdi, Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, used to avoid paying for an original or copyrighted score.
- Effects man Paul Blaisdell was paid a meager $200 to build a three-foot-tall spaceship with its "beast" alien. The art director, Albert S. Ruddy, then a USC student, designed a monster for $50, and it was Blaisdell's first monster made for the movies.
- Roger Corman was attracted to the project because the monster in the original script draft was invisible, which meant the film could be made cheaply, but executive producer Sam Arkoff insisted on a visible monster and spaceship that the budget could barely cover.
- The Beast with a Million Eyes was the third film in Roger Corman's three-picture deal with the American Releasing Company, and cost over-runs on the earlier Five Guns West left only about $29,000 to make it.
