10 Monster Movies That Totally Screw With Your Brain

Perhaps better known as The Crawling Eye (although I much prefer The Trollenberg Terror as a B-movie title), Quentin Lawrence’s weird-!*$% story of alien antics, psychic shenanigans and zombie… stuff, is a surprisingly effective jolt of old school horror.

Radioactive aliens of monstrous aspect - crawling, slithering eyes - lurk at the summit of the Trollenberg mountain in Switzerland, kidnapping and decapitating climbers who trespass too close to their lair. Only psychic sensitives and clairvoyants can discern their presence - which is why the extraterrestrials possess the bodies of said trespassing climbers and send them in as undead assassins to tear the luckless psychics to pieces.

Moody, atmospheric and endlessly inventive for the time, The Trollenberg Terror (in the feature film format that best presents the story, the narrative having been retooled as a far less successful television serial too) is an awful lot of fun. The effects are clearly presented on a budget, but it’s a budget that’s been stretched taut around the creative application of lateral thinking, and the results are bloody impressive.

The aliens, in particular - pulsing brain-like organisms with dangling eyes lurching up at their hapless victims - are brilliantly realised. As paranoid Cold War foreign invasion horror goes, The Trollenberg Terror is less on the nose than the contemporaneous Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, and all the better for it.