A Sorrowful Swedish Snowman:
Terror in the Midnight Sun (1959)
by Weltraumbesty / KRP, 20th of December 2025
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An American figure skater and her space-scientist uncle join forces with the Swedish military and a lecherous handsome geologist to investigate the fall of a mysterious object in the isolated far north of the country in this sleepy Scandinavian sci-fi from ex-Universal International auteur Virgil W. Vogel (late of The Mole People and The Land Unknown, and destined for a prodigious career in television). Terror in the Midnight Sun turns out heaps of attractive location photography, a few sparse moments of exploitative excess and perhaps the most depressed giant monster in B-cinema history, all at the pace of drying paint. I think I love it anyway, perhaps for that strange novelty alone. After all, how often does a film come along that offers you a whole new perspective on the flow of time?
The story (courtesy of Arthur C. Pierce, Beyond the Time Barrier and Mutiny in Outer Space) is strictly paint-by-numbers, and broadly interchangeable with any number of other monster mysteries of the time. Character performer Robert Burton (diversely of The Big Heat and The Slime People) takes third billing as an exceedingly generic American scientist tasked by Swedish officials with investigating a supposed meteor strike. He spends most of his on-screen time managing top-billed Barbara Wilson (of Roger Corman’s Teenage Doll), here an impetuous figure skating ingénue who butts into the investigation early and often and variously faints, screams and injures herself for the trouble. She exits the picture in the arms of second-billed Sten Gester, playing the sometimes womanizer and ersatz hero of the film. Neither are terrible in their respective roles, and either might have made for a competent lead under more auspicious circumstances. Terror in the Midnight Sun gives them little enough to do, much less work with, and with writing like this staring back at them from the page it’s not difficult to see why neither was long for acting1. Gester followed this film with a pair of uncredited turns before retiring from the field all together in 1962. Wilson took on a few TV roles before quitting the industry after her brief, albeit memorable appearance in the cult classic over-achiever The Flesh Eaters.
There are some positive developments here and there — the midnight discovery of a host of slaughtered reindeer, presumed victims of the film’s eponymous Terror, is gruesomely effective and recalls, however briefly, the tone of Val Guest’s 1955 classic The Quatermass Xperiment — but they are few and far between, and largely owed to the better sci-fis from which they are derived. The entire inciting incident, in which shocked rural onlookers witness the crash landing of a brilliant geometrically patterned globular spacecraft, is lifted neatly from the 1953 Universal hit It Came From Outer Space, while the DNA of its eventual giant monster antics — which see the unnamed Terror dubiously toting star Barbara Wilson and wrecking a (very) small village — reaches as far back as the original King Kong. The dull conclusion, in which vengeful locals hound the Terror across a wintry landscape with torches, recalls James Whale’s Frankenstein and Arnold Franck’s The Holy Mountain all at once, albeit with a fraction of the drama of either.
As for the Terror, I’m hard pressed to explain what it’s even supposed to be within the context of the story. Perhaps it’s a loosed pet, lost by the film’s alien invaders upon their landing. Or maybe it’s some ancient Earthly beast, rudely awakened from its icy slumber by the explosive arrival of the extraterrestrial craft. Perhaps it was simply there. Whatever the case the film isn’t telling, so who the fuck really knows. One of the feature’s more amusing scenes does at least clarify that the visiting aliens, of a pale, big-headed and more or less human type, are looking for it. A trio of them corner Wilson in the icy repose within which the Terror has left her, pointing to the monster’s footprints and frustratedly bleeping at her like the forebears of the mutant subhumanoids of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Wilson screams and faints, and the matter goes unresolved through the picture’s conclusion; as the alien ship ascends to the heavens once more Burton’s scientist asks, “I wonder if they found out what they wanted to know?”
Me too, buddy. Me too.
Still. A good monster can make up for a world of ills, and sometimes all the more so a bad one. Terror in the Midnight Sun’s unnamed and unexplained creature certainly hews towards the latter, lanky and tusked and covered in overlong shaggy hair from the corners of its oddly balding forehead down to its massive bell-bottomed feet, but feels all the more curiously lovable for it. Though prefaced with the off-screen murder of countless reindeer and at least one frightened Swedish airman, close-ups of the creature’s face show it to be sad and confused, if anything. Vogel’s direction, which has the beast endlessly and listlessly wandering about its frozen wasteland home, does little to deter this impression. Indeed, when finally confronted by a mob of torch-toting villagers the creature just seems to give up, releasing the terrified Wilson out of sheer fatalistic resignation and allowing itself to be summarily destroyed. I would probably call it pathos if I had any idea why the hell any of it was happening.
There are some promising monster moments to be had in Terror in the Midnight Sun, though the film demands nigh-Herculean patience to arrive at them. The beast doesn’t even make an on-screen appearance until nearly an hour into the thing and, par for the course, it doesn’t really do much once it’s there. It mostly mopes about the landscape like a wayward puppy, frightening isolated pockets of humanity through little fault of its own and being incited to violent mischief by point of gunfire. Still, its vengeful razing of a small village, accomplished through acceptable scale miniatures and connected to the location photography with a handful of more-or-less competent traveling mattes, makes for a more memorable effects highlight than productions so lowly as this are typically in receipt of. That’s certainly not nothing, but it’s also not much.
Though Terror in the Midnight Sun saw some play in Europe and elsewhere in its sleepy and unexpurgated original version, the film would suffer a less auspicious fate upon import to the United States. Here the film’s co-producer is said to have made a quick buck for himself by selling the property to schlock wunderkind Jerry Warren, who transformed the already tedious picture into the far more tedious Invasion of the Animal People. The typical Warren touches are in full evidence — inscrutable editing, questionable new dramatic additions, and a significant amount of ill-scripted John Carradine (both on-screen and via narration). The result is one of history’s great unsolved mysteries; a fifty-five minute film that is somehow even longer than the seventy-two minute film it was cut from.
I can’t profess to ever having made it through the totality of Warren’s version, and I’ve tried once or twice, but Terror in the Midnight Sun remains something of a dreary Winter favorite. Sweden’s first sci-fi feature never adds up to anything or gets much of anywhere, but something in its variously silly, drab and melancholic intonation strikes an appropriate note for me this time of year, when the wind bites hard and the nights run long. This film finds itself in the player more often than anyone might suspect on these late chilly evenings, and I press play and I watch and I wonder…
I wonder if they found out what they wanted to know?
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For the rest of you who, for whatever reason, like this film, the 2020 blu-ray edition from Klubb Super 8 is worth tracking down. The all-region disc presents a strong 2019 restoration of Terror in the Midnight Sun by the Swedish Film Institute along with a nice slate of extras, including two standard definition versions of the Warren cut (the intractable 55 minute theatrical and debilitating 80 minute television) that no one should ever watch and both a commentary (shared with the old Image / Something Weird Video DVD) and a 16-minute on-camera interview with producer Bertil Jernberg. It’s far easier to recommend as a disc than as a film.
1Wilson had other reasons to be upset with the picture (per her 2022 interview in Classic Images). She would go on to sue Herts-Lion International, a Stateside distributor that made an unsuccessful bid for Terror in the Midnight Sun, in hope of having one of the film's few truly exploitative moments removed. The scene, which shows Wilson's body double disrobing and twirling about in a shower, was not included in Wilson's script and was filmed without her knowledge. The suit went nowhere and was eventually dropped. While the scene remains in the original version of the film, Jerry Warren — who brought Wilson back for a few new scenes — would (to his small credit) cut it for his theatrical and television versions.
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~ Weltraumbesty / KRP
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