It! The Terror from Beyond Space

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) is a black-and-white sci-fi horror you can watch online on iFILM. Director Edward L. Cahn packs the whole thing into a tight 69 minutes.

The year is 1973. The first Mars expedition has died, and a rescue crew finds a lone survivor — Colonel Carruthers (Marshall Thompson) — whom they suspect of murdering his own men. He keeps insisting a creature from the sand did it. The ship sets a course back to Earth, and before long the crew realizes something climbed aboard. The thing lives in the air ducts, there is nowhere to run, and weeks in a sealed tin can stretch ahead.

Cheap, fast and claustrophobic, this is B-movie filmmaking at its leanest — and the direct ancestor of Ridley Scott's Alien, which borrows the very premise of a monster picking off a crew one by one aboard a trapped ship. It earns its runtime on that bloodline alone, plus real tension wrung from spare change. Stream It! The Terror from Beyond Space online on iFILM.