The first two minutes of The Tall Target are more inventive than the entirety of any average Best Picture Oscar winner. The credits creep slowly but surely, with a stately, methodical gait evoking both a reportorial matter-of-factness – a ripped-from-the-headlines present-tense – and a fatalistic timelessness, as though whatever is about to happen is on an inexorable march to eternity. This credit crawl tells not of a galaxy long ago and far, far away that still feels like the future but, rather, a century of American history compressed into the tightest cloister and pushing, like a piston, right up against America’s present.

The train on which the film is set functions as a kind of metaphor for modernity itself: an intersection of inevitability and contingency that marks the vehicle as both a beacon of an imminent, impending, unavoidable modernity and, paradoxically, a herald of an uncertain world and a country whose obsession with national redemption and unearned consensus had been fissured and cracked open.

The Man from Planet X is certainly not the greatest work of director Edgar G. Ulmer, but it may be his greatest work. The Black Cat and Detour are stone-cold minimalist masterpieces. The former is an enigmatic, lacerating post-mortem of World War I’s phantasmagorical hold on the 20^th century, a past that was no past at all. The latter is a soul-crushing existential excavation of an aimless present, a portrait of mid-century Americana going around and around to nowhere. Man from Planet X turns the dial forward to a new decade and a new set of concerns: a ‘50s film about ’50s anxieties done up in ‘50s Poverty Row ramshackle-ness, a sci-fi potboiler about an alien creature lost amidst foreign souls. This being, the titular Man from Planet X, has nothing to survive on: he can’t even communicate with anyone around him, yet he manages to command dozens of people nonetheless. This abject outsider, working with nothing yet exercising unexpected power nonetheless, could be a melancholic echo of Ulmer himself, and his alienated entity of a film.

Perhaps the most primordial display of his talents, The Man from Planet X stands, literally, on only Ulmer’s skill and nothing more. This film barely exists, and its bareness is poetic, a mise en abyme of reality laid bare, an abyss with absolutely nothing up its sleeve. “Yet they have a grim beauty of their own,” a character remarks, and you can see Ulmer’s dejection about his career trajectory slowly etch into a grin at a description of his own oeuvre.

The Black Pit of Dr. M opens on a scientist’s rotting manse, its architecture crumbled and malformed into forbidding Xs: a bare geometry of egotism brought to its knees. When we see the building in its prime, though, its pretensions already seem pathetic. Pivotal early shots of the scientist’s laboratory present the impossible-to-describe location with natural outgrowths hovering just into the frame, fraying the clean edges of this image of modern science failing to keep the forces of nature at bay. The clarity of the frame itself, or rather the lack of clarity, becomes an evocation of the film’s critique of scientific hubris, an insidious reminder about the dangers of “the impossible … always within the realm of the possible.”

When it begins, The Black Pit of Dr. M seems almost fearlessly classical. Its major theme is horror’s ur-concern: the exploration of scientists searching beyond the pale of knowledge. We begin with two esteemed men of science promising one another that when one dies, they will find a way to inform the other about the secrets of death, the mysteries of the universe itself, from beyond the grave. When Dr. Jacinto Aldama (Antonio Raxel) does indeed pass away, his first ghostly call is to his daughter Patricia (Mapita Cortés), a more intimate encounter that will only figure in to the story much later. When Dr. Masali (Rafael Bertrand) is finally visited, though, the elusive nature of their encounter comes with unexpected consequences that expose the fault-lines of his quest to frame the essence of life as a question of rote knowledge of death.

1968 was a year on the edge of eternity, a transformational vortex of social revolution and political stress. Hammer Horror was, to put it kindly, not a company fit to weather the storm. Their moral universe was mostly conservative (in the small “c” sense). Their films, skulking with fiendishly recalcitrant minor currents though they could be, were fundamentally about staving off the forces of darkness, typically equated with dissent. While their films drew new blood from old horror chestnuts, they were very much playing the classics. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, horror cinema became very much contemporary. Anxiety about nuclear catastrophe and new technologies of mass destruction produced modern-set horror films with distinctly present-tense fears. The late ‘60s, meanwhile, would thrash horror into the future: influenced by the post-modern fragments of shattered reality coming from Europe and the acid baths of ‘60s psychedelia, they erupted the social canvas rather than creeping in the background. Hammer Horror’s heyday was in between these channels, the late 1950s and early 1960s, racing against a tide of history that would wash the company into oblivion.

The company’s most adept conduit of that fear was director Terrence Fisher. One of his final films with the company, The Devil Rides Out, is perhaps the paradigmatic ideal of a mainstream British horror film negotiating the Apollonian pull of order and the Dionysian energies teeming underneath society. The film exhibits a brutal, stone-faced rigidity, the product of obvious fear about the world coming undone around it and its own attempts to straight-jacket those tremblings. In its fear, perhaps without intending to, it also gives voice to that uncertainty, becoming a herald of an unquiet society. That it can’t fully appreciate its own tensions, can’t quite admit to its own inner restlessness, is all the more potent a suggestion that it knows the complexities of the world around it, and needs to deny them to survive.