music but, when he fell ill, Anthony Hinds asked conductor John Hollingsworth to recommend a replacement. Hollingsworth suggested James Bernard, with whom he had worked on a number of BBC radio productions. Bernard sent Hinds a tape of the score of one of these productions, an adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi, and was duly hired. Bernard watched the film a number of times, stopping after each reel to make notes and discuss where the music would be needed. Val Guest was not involved in any of the music sessions; Anthony Hinds supervised Bernard and made the final decisions as to where the music should occur. Bernard composed the music at his piano and then worked out the orchestration, which was performed by the Royal Opera House Orchestra. Hollingsworth restricted the arrangement of the score to just the string and percussion sections: Bernard recalled, "I had not written for film before and had only used strings for the BBC scores, so I think that John thought it would be better to see how I got on with these two sections before letting me loose with a full orchestra". The score runs to 20 minutes and uses a rising and falling three-note semitone throughout. Bernard's biographer, David Huckvale, argues that Bernard's use of atonal strings to create a sense of menace predates Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho (1960), which is usually cited as the first film to employ the technique. Remarking on the effectiveness of the score, the film critic John Brosnan said, "Of prime importance, is the contribution of the soundtrack, in this case supplied by James Bernard who never wrote a more unnerving, jangly score". Bernard went on to become Hammer's most prolific composer, scoring 23 Hammer films between 1955 and 1974. Several cues from The Quatermass Xperiment were released on CD in 1999 by GDI Records on a compilation titled The Quatermass Film Music Collection. Reception Cinema release As expected, The Quatermass Xperiment received an ‘X’ Certificate from the BBFC, restricting admission to persons over the age of sixteen. It was only the twelfth film to receive the certificate since its introduction in 1951. Whereas most other studios were nervous of this new certificate, Hammer, who had noticed the success of the similarly ‘X’-rated Les Diaboliques (1954), chose to exploit it by dropping the "E" from "Experiment" in the title of the film. "X is not an unknown