Back in 2017, I was introduced to the works of Nigel Kneale. He’s not the best-known horror writer, at least in the United States, but he made a major splash in the U.K., writing TV scripts for the BBC starting in the 50s.


He got the job on the strength of his only short story collection Tomato Cain and Other Stories from 1949. Stephen King listed this one as a recommended read in his study Danse Macabre. Although not completely a horror story collection, several of the stories are. “The Pond” is a nasty tale about the fate of a taxidermist who has hunted an entire pond’s worth of frogs. “Minuke” is about a belligerent poltergeist haunting a house that a real estate agent is trying to sell. “Curphey’s Follower” is about what befalls a farmhand who is being constantly followed by a one-eyed duck. “Peg” is about the isolation of a ghost who haunts a fairground and is unable to interact with any living people. “The Patter of Tiny Feet” is a subtle ghost story and one of the best stories in the book. Not every tale in the book was to my taste, but Kneale knew how to write short fiction well. He also knew a thing or two about implying the actions of his characters so that you have to pay attention to what isn’t described by him to fill in the blanks.


Kneale was highly influential in introducing mature science fiction to television audiences. America still wasn’t taking science fiction very seriously, at least in the televised medium, but in England during 1953, Kneale wrote The Quatermass Experiment, introducing the scientist Quatermass, who becomes the central protagonist in a story about an Earth rocket landing in England and the horrifying mutation that the surviving crewmen bring back with them. I haven’t seen the surviving episodes of the tv mini-series, but I saw the movie that was adapted from it a few years later and read the script in book form. The original broadcast caused quite a stir in its time and fought for the attention of viewers at the time when Queen Elizabeth’s coronation was broadcast as well.


The success of the first Quatermass series spawned sequels, such as Quatermass 2 and Quatermass and the Pit. I haven’t seen either yet, but I saw the Hammer movie version of Quatermass and the Pit from the 60s (I also read the script which appeared in now-scarce paperback editions). In that one, workmen in the neighborhood of Hobbs Lane find what is believed to be an unexploded bomb underneath the city. As it turns out, it is an alien spacecraft. Quatermass’ investigations lead him to conclude that the aliens from the spacecraft spawned mankind and that the aliens programmed humans to destroy each other. Kneale provided a unique explanation of ghosts and psychic phenomena that tied into the alien programming, reinventing the ghost story and combining it was a dash of Lovecraftian horror. This was quite an accomplishment, and he did this all originally in the 50s. Aside from this, he also wrote the famous BBC tv adaptation of 1984, starring Peter Cushing that not only launched him into stardom, but shocked the nation as well. I still need to see this one.


Another Kneale film I’ve watched is The Stone Tape from 1972. In this one, technicians working on inventing a new recording medium realize that their testing area is housing a ghost. The main character realizes that the past of the building is recorded in its walls. This was his last major work with the BBC, but he continued his work for television for many years afterwards.

He also contributed to the making of Halloween III. To me it’s a decent film if you base it on its own merits and not expect it to be a continuation of Michael Myers’ story. Modern day writers like Stephen King are influenced by Kneale’s work. John Carpenter was heavily influenced by Kneale as well, which is reflected in his film Prince of Darkness.


I feel like I’m only scratching the surface with what I’ve covered here. I’ll be revisiting this topic after I’ve seen and read more by him. Nigel Kneale is one of those writers that have layers to their work, and it will take a little while to peel them away. More on this some other time.


Aside from the scripts, short story collection, and the few films I’ve seen, I would also like to acknowledge the short documentary The Kneale Tapes as a source for this article.

Written by Nick Montelongo

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