Love Spielberg's 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'? This Sci-Fi Classic Turns First Contact Into Pure Unease

Steven Spielberg‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind asks for a kind of faith that later sci-fi took without questioning. It wants you to believe that the lights in the sky mean something generous, and that even when people abandon families, or drive off highways toward nowhere in particular, it’s all in service of a revelation that will justify the damage. That instinct shows up again in Arrival, where communication is bound up with loss and patience, and in some episodes of The X-Files, when Mulder (David Duchovny) keeps believing even as everyone else rolls their eyes. In those stories, contact isn’t treated as a threat so much as a benevolent gesture.

Quatermass has no interest in that reassurance. From the start, contact isn’t a summons or a mystery to decode, but a problem that’s already slipped containment. This is much nearer to The Andromeda Strain than Close Encounters, and it shares DNA with television like Shaun Cassidy‘s Invasion, where systems unravel without warning. Whatever returns from space isn’t wiser or evolved, just wrong in ways that can’t be undone. Quatermass stays away from awe, but is stuck in checklists and fear.

What Is ‘Quatermass’ About?

quatermass-guy-infected — A man infected in The Quatermass Experiment.

Quatermass started on British television in 1953, when Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment went out live on the BBC and immediately treated space travel as something that could go wrong faster than anyone would admit. Hammer Films picked it up a couple of years later with The Quatermass Xperiment, then kept returning to the character in Quatermass 2 and Quatermass and the Pit, continuing the notion that whatever comes back from space brings problems no one’s equipped to clean up.

These stories open with the fallout: A rocket comes back wrong, crew members are missing, and one survivor staggers out alive, and even that turns out to be a temporary condition. From there, the focus stays stubbornly practical. Who’s responsible? Who failed oversight? Who cleans up what space left behind?

Mike Vogel as Ricky Stormgren with his rifle on a tractor on the poster for 'Childhood's End'

This Overlooked Alien Sci-Fi Miniseries Has One of the Most Uncomfortable Endings Ever

You may not see this ending coming…

Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) isn’t chasing communion or answers about humanity’s place in the universe. He’s chasing time because his job is to slow the spread, limit exposure, and keep institutions from collapsing under their own optimism. Instead of opening doors here, space exploration punches holes.

In ‘Quatermass,’ Bodies Are the Battleground

A man infected in The Quatermass Experiment.

Unlike the clean abstraction of lights in the sky, Quatermass puts the cost of contact inside human bodies. Infection, mutation, absorption. Flesh becomes evidence that something has gone very wrong, and there’s no reversing it once it starts. The fear doesn’t come from what the alien intends, but from watching a human body stop behaving like one — little by little — and it is irreversible.

The camera hangs back just long enough for the dread to take hold and as a person starts drifting out of themselves. The people watching cling to procedure, professionalism, and the hope that staying clinical might still be enough.

Quatermass never blunts the process, and that’s where it drifts away from the more hopeful strains of science fiction. There’s no suggestion that humanity will adapt gracefully. Contact doesn’t expand consciousness, but corrodes it.

‘Quatermass’ Reminds You To Question Authority

Man with a mask from Quatermass 2 — A masked scientist in Quatermass 2.

One of Quatermass’ sharpest instincts is its distrust of institutions without turning them into cartoon villains. Government officials aren’t evil, and scientists aren’t acting carelessly. They make measured decisions, follow procedure, and still find themselves in grave trouble. Paperwork, jurisdiction, and ego slow things down at exactly the wrong moments. In Quatermass and the Pit (1967), Colonel Breen (Julian Glover) refuses to believe that what he thinks is a leftover German bomb from WWII is actually an alien craft.

Quatermass himself isn’t presented as comforting. He’s direct to the point of discomfort, indifferent to reassurance, and backed only by expertise. That lets him name the threat, but not command the structures that would rather debate than accept failure.

The result is a kind of procedural dread. You’re watching people argue about responsibility while the clock keeps moving, and the film never pretends that the right call will arrive in time just because someone deserves it.

‘Quatermass’ Ends on an Eerie Note for ‘Sci-Fi’ Fans

Where Close Encounters ends with transcendence, Quatermass ends with exhaustion. Problems are solved, but nothing feels fixed. The implication is always that another launch will happen, another mistake will follow, and humanity will keep learning lessons it doesn’t retain.

There’s no victory lap and no sense that curiosity has been redeemed. Quatermass walks away not because he’s satisfied, but because there’s nothing left to say once containment is achieved. That’s why Quatermass is still unsettling. First contact isn’t presented as a moment so much as an aftereffect. Rather than scaring the audience by escalation, it scares by implication, and it never offers the relief of believing that next time will be different.