The Trollenberg Terror

Plot

On Mount Trollenberg in Switzerland, a climber is killed, his head torn off. She insists they get off at the next stop. UN troubleshooter Alan Brooks, traveling with them, heads to the observatory to meet Professor Crevett.

Crevett reports a stationary radioactive cloud on the mountain's south face and a series of climbing accidents with no bodies found. Brooks links this to similar incidents in the Andes three years earlier, where a radioactive cloud vanished and locals believed something lived in the mist. At a hotel, Anne gives a mind-reading demonstration and sees two men in a base camp hut.

One man, Brett, walks outside under mental compulsion as the cloud envelops the hut; Anne faints. Brooks phones the hut; Dewhurst screams, then the line goes dead. A rescue party climbs to the hut. Anne, in a trance, urges them away.

Inside, everything is frozen solid, and Dewhurst's headless body is under a bed. A spotter plane sees a man half a mile away. A rescuer finds a rucksack with a severed head, then is killed by Brett, who also kills the second rescuer.

Reception

The Monthly Film Bulletin noted that several sequences are genuinely alarming but felt more could have been made of dramatic moments, and that the film appears shot and edited in a hurry, with an addiction to close-ups of severed heads and melting flesh. Richard W. Nason of The New York Times wrote that The Crawling Eye and its double-bill companion did nothing to advance science fiction. The Radio Times Guide to Films gave it 2/5 stars, calling it efficiently suspenseful but marred by awful special effects, noting that cotton wool on a mountain photo stands in for snowy landscapes. Leonard Maltin considered the film okay if predictable, hampered by low-grade special effects and showing its origins as a TV adaptation.

In popular culture

The 1979 album Greatest Science Fiction Hits V by Neil Norman and his Cosmic Orchestra included the main title music from The Crawling Eye. John Carpenter's 1980 horror film The Fog drew inspiration from The Trollenberg Terror. In Stephen King's 1986 novel It, the character Richie Tozier is frightened by watching the film, and a crawling-eye creature later appears as a form of Pennywise.

A brief scene from the film appears in the 1998 movie Small Soldiers. The Freakazoid episode "The Cloud" parodied the film's opening credits and key plot points, but turned victims into clowns. The Misfits' 1999 album Famous Monsters features a song titled "Crawling Eye" with lyrics that directly reference the film's story. MeTV's Svengoolie aired the film on November 26, 2022.

In the 2023 Riverdale episode "Betty & Veronica Double Digest," a 4D screening of the film is used to attract customers to a failing movie theater. Under the title The Crawling Eye, the film was the first episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 after the series moved to The Comedy Channel, airing on November 25, 1989. Shout! Factory released this episode on the Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XVII DVD collection on March 16, 2010, which also includes the film's original theatrical trailer.

Did You Know?

• The Trollenberg Terror was the final film shot at Southall Studios, one of the earliest pioneer film studios in the United Kingdom.
• Anton Diffring was originally cast in Mitchell's role but pulled out at the last minute.
• The film was one of the last released by Distributors Corporation of America.