The Unknown Terror

Infobox Film
name = The Unknown Terror
producer = Charles Marquis Warren
writer = Kenneth Higgins
starring = John Howard
Mala Powers
released = 12 August 1957
country = USA
language = English

The Unknown Terror is a 1957 science fiction/horror film. The film was written by Kenneth Higgins and produced by Charles Marquis Warren. The director and other cast and credits were here, too, until the first 2007 entry shown, which actually represents a complete erasure of the original entry.

The plot synopsis of the story consists in summary of an expedition into the jungles of Mexico, led by a woman to find her brother who disappeared on a spelunking trip connected to native legends of a "cave of the dead", where the souls of the departed can be heard groaning through crevasses in the earth. Deserted by their native guide at the village where her brother was last seen, the woman and her two male compatriots are taken in by a thickset, brusque fellow American who claims to be a researcher into local fungi. He tries to discourage the expeditioners from proceeding further, and dismisses the "cave of the dead" legend as just that, a legend. Things become tense when one of the expeditioners intervenes when their host becomes abusive of his native wife, and she transfers her allegiance to her rescuer. But the matter comes to a head when the girl arranges for the men to be led to a place where they can hear the voices of the dead crying from beneath the earth and, while they are gone, a grotesque, demented man apparently covered with a foamy fungus attacks the expeditioner woman and chases her into the jungle. This creature is run off, but the party determines to find a way to the source of the underground sounds. They do, and find a cave filled with a fast-growing parasitic fungus, some humans who have gotten in contact with it and been turned into monsters, and a stairwell leading to the house of the thuggish researcher, who in fact has created this monster-making fungus artificially and does not plan to stop experimenting with it.

References

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