Quatermass and The Pit - Other Media

Other Media

As with the previous two Quatermass serials, the rights to adapt Quatermass and the Pit for the cinema were purchased by Hammer Film Productions. Their adaptation of the serial was released with the same title as the original in 1967, directed by Roy Ward Baker and scripted by Kneale. Scottish actor Andrew Keir starred as Quatermass, becoming the role for which he was best remembered, being regarded particularly highly in comparison to the previous film Quatermass, Brian Donlevy. The film, made in colour, is regarded by many commentators as a classic of the genre. The film has been released in DVD and Blu-ray formats. In the United States the film was retitled Five Million Years to Earth.

A script book of Quatermass and the Pit was released by Penguin Books in April 1960, with a cover by Kneale's artist brother Bryan Kneale. In 1979 this was re-published by Arrow Books to coincide with the transmission of the fourth and final Quatermass serial on ITV; this edition featured a new introduction by Kneale. The theatrical company Creation Productions staged a live adaptation of Quatermass and the Pit in a quarry near Nottingham in August 1997.

The BBC made Quatermass and the Pit available to buy on VHS videotape in the 1980s, edited into a two-part compilation format. This was a new compilation made from the episodic film recordings, which had optical sound and telecined film inserts; for unknown reasons the BBC chose not to master it from the existing 1959–60 compilation, which had magnetic sound and film inserts reinserted from the original shoot (see information on box set remastering below). This version was re-released on VHS by budget label Paradox Video in 1995, and later put out again, this time by Revelation Films, on DVD. The full, unedited, episodic version of the serial was released on DVD by BBC Worldwide in 2005, as part of The Quatermass Collection box set. Also included were the existing first two episodes of The Quatermass Experiment, all of Quatermass II and various extra features.

For the box set release, Quatermass and the Pit was extensively restored. A process called VidFIRE was applied to all of the scenes originally broadcast live, restoring the fluid interlaced video look they would have had on transmission, but which was lost during the telerecording process. For the pre-filmed scenes, most of the high-quality original 35 mm film inserts still existed, as they had been spliced into the 1959–60 compilation repeat version in place of the lower-quality telerecorded versions of the same sequences. As this compilation also survived in the BBC archives, these film sequences were able to be digitally remastered and inserted into the newly-restored episodic version for the DVD release. The compilation used a separate magnetic soundtrack, and although the original had decayed a safety copy had survived. This yielded better sound quality than the optical soundtracks accompanying the original episodes, and was therefore the main source for the audio remastering except in the case of scenes that were not in the compilation, and in a few cases where faults on the magnetic tracks necessitated their replacement by the optical versions.