ABSTRACT
In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), scientist George Ritchie is taken with the awesome power of the nuclear bomb test he has just observed: ‘Every time one of those things goes off, I feel as if we were helping to write the first chapter of a new Genesis’, he muses. The project’s lead scientist, the handsome Professor Tom Nesbit, is more cautious: ‘Let’s hope we don’t find ourselves writing the last chapter of the old one.’ In the film, both possibilities are explored. The atom bomb test awakens a prehistoric and frantically dangerous and aggressive ‘Rhedosaurus’ that wreaks havoc first in the primitive geography of the Arctic and then in New York City. ‘This is full scale war against a terrible enemy such as modern man has never before faced’ the radio newscast explains. In gothic fashion, the dream of reason, of harvesting the power of nuclear technology, has, literally, begotten a terrible monster. However, the solution to the problem is the same as the cause: an experimental, nuclear weapon fired into the dinosaur.
