The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
1953 horror film directed by Eugène Lourié, Ray Harryhausen
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a 1953 American independent monster film directed by Eugène Lourié, with stop motion animation by Ray Harryhausen. It is partly based on Ray Bradbury's 1951 short story of the same name, which was later reprinted as "The Fog Horn". In the film a giant dinosaur, the Rhedosaurus, is released from its frozen state in the Arctic by an atomic bomb test. Paul Christian stars as Thomas Nesbitt, the foremost surviving witness of the creature before it causes havoc while traveling toward New York. Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, and Kenneth Tobey are featured in supporting roles.
Jack Dietz and Hal E. Chester arranged the production of a monster movie in response to the successful 1952 re-release of King Kong (1933). While Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger were solely credited for screenwriting, many contributed to writing the film, including Dietz, Harryhausen, and Lourié. On an estimated $210,000–285,000 budget, principal photography occurred in New York from July to August 1952, under the title The Monster from Beneath the Sea. Harryhausen and Willis Cook created the special effects over roughly six months. In 1953, Warner Bros.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” is 1953 horror film directed by Eugène Lourié, Ray Harryhausen. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Beast, Fathoms and horror, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “1953 horror film directed by Eugène Lourié, Ray Harryhausen” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1888170. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 1951, 1952 and 1933.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.