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The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961): A Classic Sci-Fi Movie With Strong Horror Undertones

Editor’s note: All throughout October, the vibes get spookier and the nights get longer. It’s the perfect time of year to watch horror movies, whether you’re a year-round horror fan or you just like to watch horror flicks to get into the Halloween spirit. This year at Horror Obsessive, for our 31 Horror Classics Revisited series, we’re giving you one recommendation for a classic horror film each day throughout the month of October. What do you think—is this film a horror classic? What other horror films do you consider to be classics, and what films do you make sure you watch each October? Let us know in the comments below!


The Day the Earth Caught Fire may seem like a strange choice for Horror Obsessive and to a degree, I’d agree with anyone making that assessment. If you’ve seen The Day the Earth Caught Fire, you might be raising an eyebrow right about now, before heading to the comments section to question where any marbles I may have once possessed have buggered off to. After all, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is a sci-fi movie. Right? Well, yes. And no. The Day the Earth Caught Fire may very well be at heart a sci-fi movie, but the unfolding catastrophe and the huge sense of claustrophobia that is present throughout makes it—at least in my opinion—a sci-fi movie with strong horror undertones. It’s also going to be one of the more difficult movies that I’ve had to write about here on Horror Obsessive. Not because of anything specific in the film, but because a lot of what happens in The Day the Earth Caught Fire is more about a sense of feeling than it is about shock and awe. So whereas with something like Abby, I could explain what was going on and why I found it either great or at least funny, with The Day the Earth Caught Fire I’m not going to have a lot of that to rely on. Meaning that this could be a lot shorter than my normal rantings. Thank god for small mercies, eh, dear reader?

Peter Stenning walks the streets of a near desolate London, waiting for the aftermath of a move that could asve the planet in The Day the Earth Caught Fire

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

The Day the Earth Caught Fire starts with the lone figure of a man, Peter Stenning (Edward Judd), walking through the abandoned streets of London. Saturated in sweat, Stenning makes his way to The Daily Express newspaper headquarters where he gets someone on the phone to take his copy and starts reciting the events that brought him and the world to this moment in time. The opening shot—and the one at the end—is bathed in a sepia tone, while the rest of the movie was shot in black and white. The reason behind this is that the writer/director/producer Val Guest wanted the audience to realise just how hot the planet was and to differentiate between the before and after stages of the film. The choice of colour does this very well but also gives you a sense of being trapped along with everyone else in The Day the Earth Caught Fire. 

We discover that Stenning is washed up. One of the best and brightest of Fleet Street, his life and career took a nose dive after he discovered his wife cheating on him. She took their seven-year-old son and left, and he dove headfirst into the nearest bottle. Guest is clever here. It would’ve been very easy for him and co-writer Wolf Mankowitz to just bang out a bunch of one-dimensional characters, before getting on with the job of blowing up the world, but they realised that if we cared about those involved then the unfolding disaster would be far more impactful. All of the main players in The Day the Earth Caught Fire are fully fleshed out.

Stenning is a man with many, many demons. Eventual love interest Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro) is a strong individual who doesn’t take any rubbish from anyone, and Bill Maguire (Leo McKern) is a mentor and, quite possibly, the only friend that Stenning has. In fact, Maguire has some of the best lines in the film—simple ones that give you more background in a handful of words than most movies can deliver in two hours. For example, when he’s talking to the local barmaid, she makes reference to them coming home all hours of the night, to which he replies and during the daytime as well, and that one turn of phrase lets you know that Stenning had gone home early one day and caught his wife another man. It’s brilliant and incredibly effective. As is when later in the film he says he wants information on the boiling point of “everything from steel to my glass eye.” The actor who played the role, Leo McKern, actually had a glass eye.

The plot kicks off when it’s reported that the United States and Russia both detonated huge nuclear warheads simultaneously. It is these tests that start a chain reaction that sees temperatures sore through the roof. What is initially seen as just a freak heatwave suddenly becomes something far more sinister when heat mist pours through London, layering the city in almost smog-like conditions before a huge cyclone tears through the city, upending cars and busses, knocking down buildings, and generally making a huge bloody nuisance of itself. Guest used a lot of stock footage mixed in with special effects to achieve the utter devastation that starts to engulf the globe as The Day the Earth Caught Fire unfolds, but this mix doesn’t take away from the suspense of a planet trying to kill its occupants, even if it is obvious to the eye—at least nowadays—where the seams are.

It turns out that the reason for these global catastrophes lies squarely at the feet of humans. The two explosions managed to shift the planet 11 degrees off its axis, meaning that neither the North nor the South Pole is where it should be. The equator has moved, and everyone’s climate is messed up. As you can imagine, mankind deals with this about as well as you’d expect, and when word gets out: there is global rioting. The government tells us that there’s really nothing to worry about. We’re British after all, and we’re used to dealing with the weather, but it eventually becomes plain that there is more going on than meets the eye. This is revealed when The Express breaks the story that it’s not the axis that has been shifted but the whole orbit of the Earth around the sun, and a full 11-degree shift will take us so close to it that all forms of life will be wiped out within four months.

The powers that be get together and decide that the best way to deal with a problem caused by setting off bombs is to set off more bombs, in the hopes that that will push our doomed little globe away from the big, nasty firey thing in the sky. The end of The Day the Earth Caught Fire sees the bombs being set off and Stenning heading to his office to bring us back to the start.

Peter Stenning looks into the distance wondering if the world is going to end in The Day the Earth Caught Fire

“So. Where is the horror?” I hear you ask. The horror, dear reader, is in the atmosphere of The Day the Earth Caught Fire. It’s in the sense of imminent foreboding that fills the movie as mankind rushes headlong toward its doom, all because of its own hubris. It’s in the claustrophobia you feel for the characters, living on a planet that they can’t escape as it hurtles toward the sun. You know they are doomed, yet you still pray there is a way out for them, even if it’s by doing something as stupid as detonating even bigger bombs to try and put the planet at least out of the firing line.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is a clever film. It is a ban-the-bomb-before-we-blow-ourselves-sky-high statement which at the same time shows the worst sides of the human race—such as politicians covering the truth up, so their votes won’t be affected or gangs of youths roaming the streets, smashing up anything that isn’t nailed down while “having a ball”—leading you to think that perhaps we’d be better off if the attempt to save the Earth didn’t work, and the whole sh*t house did literally go up in flames. It would’ve been easy for Val Guest to have laid the first part of his message on thick here, without a counterpoint to suggest that maybe total annihilation wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all, but he was sensible enough to at least allow a few moments to slip through where we’re reminded just how rotten the human race can be when it puts its mind to it.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire ends with a simple shot of a clock tower. Now, in the American release, you hear the sound of bells chiming to signal that the plan had worked and that the Earth was going to be alright, but that isn’t the true ending. The true ending is that there aren’t any church bells. You don’t know if it has worked or if it hasn’t, and for me, that’s the best ending of all. You can make up your own mind. Did the human race pull off the unthinkable and divert itself from extinction, or did they fail and are now spinning very rapidly toward scorched earth? Personally, even though I’d like to think that in this kind of situation we’d have something up our sleeve to bail us out, I doubt very much that we would have, and we’d all end up barbequed.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire might not be a horror movie in the traditional sense—there are no scares at all, outside of the planet heading towards its death, there are no monsters, outside of the human race—but in the way Val Guest manages to draw every last drop of claustrophobic tension out of the film makes The Day the Earth Caught Fire one of the scariest movies you’ll ever see.

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Written by Neil Gray

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