It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)

It! The Terror from Beyond Space is an independently made 1958 American black-and-white science fiction film produced by Robert Kent, directed by Edward L. Cahn, and starring Marshall Thompson, Shawn Smith (Shirley Patterson) and Kim Spalding.The film was distributed by United Artists.

The plot involves a rescue mission to Mars that finds the sole survivor of a previous Earth expedition. The survivor, the expedition's former commander, claims that his crew were killed by a hostile Martian life form. The rescue ship's captain does not believe him, surmising that they were actually killed for their provisions so that the commander could survive. He confines the commander to quarters after the rescue ship launches for Earth. The same hostile Martian creature, now a stowaway and immune to the crew's few weapons, begins another human hunting spree.

The premise of a hostile alien creature hunting a spaceship's crew as it returns to Earth was the inspiration for screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's screenplay for Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien.

Synopsis

In 1973 a nuclear-powered spaceship is perched on the cratered surface of Mars, sent to rescue the crew of a previous, ill-fated mission. The sole survivor of that crashed ship, Col. Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), is suspected of having murdered the other nine members of his crew for their food and water rations, on the premise that he had no way of knowing if or when an Earth rescue mission would ever arrive. Carruthers denies the allegation, attributing his crew's deaths to a hostile alien life form encountered on Mars.

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