The Yeti never served as a great subject for great movies. The notable exception being 1957’s The Abominable Snowman (released in the U.S. as The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas). Don’t let the schlocky title put you off. This is an intelligent, stirring, and disturbing monster movie.
Produced by British company Hammer Films, the movie stars Peter Cushing (known to future generations as Governor Tarkin in Star Wars) as Dr. John Rollason, a botanist visiting a Himalayan monastery with his wife (Maureen Connell) in order to study the local plant life. When a group of adventurers, led by an obstreperous American (Forest Tucker), arrives at the monastery, Rollason joins their quest up the mountains in search of the legendary Yeti, known to his friends as the Abominable Snowman.
Rollason wants to test the scientific possibilities of such a creature living in the harsh terrain, but his fellow trekkers have less than noble reasons for finding the Yeti. The higher up they trek and the less oxygen there is, the more their paranoia, fear, and hysteria worsen.
Much like Jaws decades later, the movie works best as a horror of the unseen. Apart from a few scant glimpses of the Yeti’s hands and arms, the creature is rarely visible. Director Val Guest allows the audience’s imagination to conjure their own mental images of the monster. Nigel Kneale’s screenplay taps fear and terror from off-screen sounds and hulking shadows that lurk just beyond the camera lens. His screenplay is literate, introspective, and chilling. Rare for a monster movie, the main characters are fully dimensional.
Guest manages to “open up” a story that could very easily feel talky and stage bound (odd for a mountain climbing movie but this film did originate as a live BBC television play written by Kneale and also starring Cushing). Guest also deftly blends second-unit footage shot on the snow-blanketed Pyrenees mountains with fake-snow-blanketed sets filmed at Pinewood Studios.
Cushing became a major star for Hammer, most notably as Dr. Frankenstein in a series of Frankenstein pictures and several appearances in their equally popular Dracula movies featuring Cushing’s good friend (and also a future Star Wars alum) Christopher Lee as Count Dracula. Cushing is a sturdy centerpiece to the band of travelers and American actor Tucker more than hold his own as the bombastic monster hunter who searches for fortune and fame as well as Yetis.
The Abominable Snowman has the look, tone, and manner of a great Twilight Zone episode. Like that series, this film is a morality play masked as speculative fiction, and most terrifying when the monster is not creeping about in the darkness, but living and thriving within us all.
-T.Z.
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