Unburied Trailers: From Hell It Came (1957)

Here at Miskatonic Institute, we see a lot of “Attack of the Killer Whatever” movies. The best of them are beloved cheesy classics from the 1950s atomic / Cold War era, sometimes even with a few good scares. The worst of them are - how to be nice about this? - really, really, arfin’ stupid.

Novice zombies to our research facilities discover killer bunnies on their first day. We’re thinking of making that our freshman initiation hazing ritual. We’ve seen killer cats, killer bats, killer bugs, killer slugs. It gets you every time. You smack your forehead and say NOW I’ve seen the stupidest possible killer-whatever. That’s it, slugs are a pretty low bar! I dare you, I DOUBLE SAMUEL JACKSON DARE you to come up with anything stupider than killer slugs!

“Ah ha ha,” say the 1950s, “Hold my beer.”

From Hell It Came is a mighty weighty title for a horror movie. It invokes something pretty terrifying, doesn’t it? Whatever comes from Hell, it must be nasty to deal with. Well, it turns out this is a revenge plot, in which a South Seas island prince wrongly accused of witchcraft is executed, only to come back from the grave with a blast of gamma rays or something.

And he comes back as: A TREE!

You heard right. A tree. A walking, killing, vengeful tree. You got some kinda problem with that? Hey, it worked great in The Wizard of Oz. Albeit The Evil Dead pretty much tapped out the animated, threatening trees trope at its most petrifying.

Why just look at that trailer! That thing looks every bit as terrifying as any monster on H.R. Pufnstuf! You even see the natives try killing it with fire, and you can hardly blame them for thinking of that first. One might also suggest a pencil sharpener, a jar of termites, or a spray can of Pledge.

So there’s this, Evil Dead, and that anthology movie where Joan Collins loses a love triangle with a tree. Oh no! Are we actually going to need a list of killer tree movies???

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