released in the US under the title Enemy From Space. Quatermass 2 received mixed reviews. Campbell Dixon in The Daily Telegraph found the film “all good grisly fun, if this is the sort of thing you enjoy”. The reviewer in The Times remarked that “the writer of the original story, Mr Nigel Kneale, and the director, Mr Val Guest, between them keep things moving at the right speed, without digressions. The film has an air of respect for the issues touched on, and this impression is confirmed by the acting generally”. On the other hand, Jympson Harman of the London Evening News wrote: “Science-fiction hokum can be convincing, exciting or just plain laughable. Quatermass II fails on all these scores, I am afraid”. Similarly, the reviewer in the Daily Herald felt “The whole thing is daft and full of stilted dialogue. [...] At the end a detective says: “How am I going to make a report on all this?” I felt the same way”. Legacy Although commercially successful, Quatermass 2s release was largely overshadowed by the box-office record-breaking performance of Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein, which was also released in May 1957. Upon this success, Hammer made its priority the production of Gothic horror films. For this reason, although Nigel Kneale had written a new Quatermass serial for the BBC, Quatermass and the Pit (broadcast December 1958 to January 1959), Hammer did not acquire the rights until 1961 and the film version did not appear until 1967. Quatermass 2 is notable, however, for being the first film Hammer pre-sold to a major US distributor, in this case United Artists. This new finance and distribution deal would become the norm for subsequent Hammer films and led to them eventually winding down their own distribution arm, Exclusive Films, in the mid-1960s. Critical opinion of Quatermass 2 in the years since its release remains divided. Writing in Science Fiction in the Cinema, John Baxter found the film “a faithful but ponderous adaptation of Kneale's TV sequel. There are effective sequences, director Guest and cameraman Gerald Gibbs shooting with light lancing up through the shadows in a manner reminiscent of Jacques Tourneur's Night (or Curse) of the Demon. Otherwise the film is indifferent”. Similarly, John Brosnan, in his book The Primal Screen, wrote that “Quatermass 2 isn't as good as the first one, despite a bigger budget. Again the theme is possession (all four