This entry wraps up our “Christmas Apes” month, and is also the last New Creature Canon post of 2019. You’ll be seeing more early in the new year, don’t you worry. Anyway, let’s get into the most seasonally appropriate ape of all.
A lot of very important monster history is to be found in 1957’s The Abominable Snowman (which sometimes has Of the Himalayas in the title): it’s one of the notable Hammer Films thrillers released before they went all-in on lurid Gothic horror in the late fifties, and it’s also another Hammer production co-written by legendary British television writer Nigel Kneale, based on his own earlier BBC drama, after the studio found success adapting Kneale’s Quatermass stories. Kneale produced some incredibly influential pieces of television and film science fiction and horror from the fifties to the seventies, stories with sober intelligence and fascinating existential themes about humanity and its place in the universe. Abominable Snowman is another example of that, taking the search for the elusive Himalayan hominid (which was in the public consciousness again in the fifties after the Everest climbs of Eric Shipton and Sir Edmund Hillary and the accompanying footprint photographs) and using it as a vehicle to examine the nature of our own species. This is a deliberate and atmospheric movie, one that actually takes the implication of the subject matter seriously.
The movie is anchored by two Hammer stalwarts: director Val Guest (who had also directed the earlier Quatermass movies) and Peter Cushing in the lead. He plays Dr. John Rollason, who has journeyed up the Himalayas for some scientific research alongside his wife and fellow scientist, as well as his assistant. They are staying at a Buddhist monastery as guests of the lama (played, of course, by a white guy), and we learn that Rollason has had an alternative motive for being there: he is expecting to meet up with the crew of American explorer Tom Friend (played by Forrest Tucker from F Troop, a show whose existence I have no reason to know except that it shows up in old entertainment trivia a lot), who is out to find the abominable snowman itself and bring it back alive. Rollason agrees to go with them, despite the protestations of both his wife and the lama (who clearly knows more than he’s letting on.) During the initial climb, we learn the motivations of most of the expedition crew: while Rollason is driven mostly by scientific curiosity, Friend is a borderline con artist who just wants prove that he can do something right (while raking in the fame and fortune of bringing back the monster), and their photographer is simply obsessed with finding the yeti after a previous experience years earlier. Tensions grow as the crew argue over Friend’s methods and motives, the locals attempt to sabotage their search (including their own porter, who tries to trick Friend into thinking a normal monkey is a small yeti), and then when strange things begin to happen around them before and after the groups’ resident trapper actually manages to shoot and kill a yeti.
We don’t actually see much of that dead yeti, which in microcosm reflects how this movie handles its monster. The decision to not show any of the titular creatures fully until the very end gives them a larger and eerier presence—for most of the movie, we only ever see a single arm or hear its haunting cries in the distance, but that is enough to demonstrate how physically imposing it is, at least. For the most part, the presence of the yeti is only suggested, such as when we see the physical evidence of their activity, and by the end when the crew becomes paranoid that the things are stalking them in order to retrieve the body of their fellow yeti, that suggestion becomes borderline psychological horror. This tone works really well with the starkness of the setting, with its endless white mountaintops and barren caves and ragged campsites creating an aura of foreboding throughout. The creatures’ mysteriousness also allows for the movie to create a gradual build-up for the audience—Cushing, upon seeing the dead yeti, rather poetically describes it as exuding a humanity even through its animal size and features, and the sympathy he shows provides a contrast to long, creepy monster hand that we see, meaning that there is more to this creature that we don’t see. When we finally do get to see a few live yeti—in shadows, but still fairly visible—they not only live up to the massive size we’ve heard about it, but in a brief flash of one’s face, we also get a chance to witness the intelligence that was described to us.
Cushing really sells his character’s personal and moral dilemmas as the plot progresses—his reasoning for being part of the search seems to be more than just expanding scientific knowledge by finding a mystery animal (like the other crew members think), but to seek out what could be another intelligent, human-like species, which puts him increasingly at odds with his cohorts. He’s the one who posits the potential evolutionary history of the yeti, how it branched off before the development of both humans and other apes, and slowly comes to understand something the lama told him before he left, which seems to be that the yeti are not just intelligent, but more intelligent than humans, and are simply hiding out in seclusion while our species destroys itself (Friend even suggests that they’re just waiting for The Bomb to go off, placing it in a very contemporary context.) That is much more a science fiction idea than one would expect, and while some aspects of the yeti seem to border on supernatural (their apparent psychic abilities, able to make people hallucinate) or even spiritual (the monks very clearly see them as sacred, higher beings), it does seem to be posing questions about why another humanoid species would be hiding from us in such a desolate place for so long.
Part of making the yeti seem simultaneously more alien and also less monstrous is how they protect themselves utilizing their apparent psychic-powered presence, which is never fully explained. Although clearly powerful in many ways, the creatures never actually do anything violent, and when bad things start to happen to the crew, it is entirely of their own doing, with the yeti seemingly only bringing out their own self-destructive natures. The photographer, who has full-on visceral physical reactions when the yeti are near, is killed by his own obsessive need to find them; later, the trapper, who is tasked with luring another yeti, dies of a heart attack because Friend filled his gun with blanks to prevent him from killing it. When Friend realizes it was his fault, he slowly unravels until he himself is killed off, driven to it by his guilt. Forrest Tucker’s portrayal of Tom Friend makes his final moments work—he could have easily just been a self-interested and uncaring antagonist, but Tucker gives a rationality and nuance to him, making him just as much a tragic figure as the others. Cushing, for the most part, is forced to confront his own misgivings in going on the expedition in the first place, and how his own motive for looking for the yeti wasn’t necessarily all that much purer than the others’. Even though he does accomplish what he set out to do by seeing that the creatures are real, by the time he comes back to monastery (after being found near-catatonic by his wife and assistant), he renounces their existence—possibly due to the yeti’s own power, or maybe because he finally understands why they should be left alone.
The story of Abominable Snowman could have fallen into the standard “things man was not meant to know” cliche of some older science fiction and horror, but I feel like both Kneale and Guest offer something more subtle and complex. This applies to both the themes and to the portrayal of the yeti themselves, which could have been either purely monstrous or overly anthropomorphic, but ends up finding a middle ground that keeps them interesting. Importantly, even if the more supernatural angles to the story are left a little vague, they are used well to bring something ineffable to it. The idea here seems to not just make the yeti sympathetic, but also to preserve their enigmatic allure, the whole reason people would be interested in them in the first place. The intriguing implications of big mystery apes like them (and how they reflect on our own species), are almost more meaningful than the actual reality of their existence. I think the movie understands that, which is why it’s important that the things maintain some unknowable quality, and have a reason to stay hidden.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 