My favourite Roger Corman – X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes

“Soon, I’ll be able to see what no man has ever seen.” – Dr James Xavier 

When the great movie producer and director Roger Corman died last year at 98, he left one hell of a legacy for film lovers, schlock fans, drive-in movie buffs and anyone who enjoyed the dirt-cheap, hugely entertaining corn he specialised in.

Everyone has their favourite Corman – my first was the Star Wars/Seven Samurai ripoff Battle Beyond The Stars, which was repeated endlessly on cable TV when I was a kid. There’s the colourfully gory adaptations of Poe tales starring Vincent Price. His producing the first films by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. The sexy trashy Big Bad Mama starring Angie Dickinson. The Ramones trashing the joint in Rock ’n’ Roll High School. Peter Bogdanovich’s startlingly still relevant Targets with Boris Karloff. The utterly insane Judge Dredd meets Mad Max dystopia of Death Race 2000. So much more, much of it sexploitation and exploitation and just general titillation.

But my favourite film Corman directed has always been the more restrained and oddly haunting X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes from 1963, starring one-time Oscar winner Ray Milland as a scientist determined to break through the barriers of dull ordinary human vision and see… well, everything. 

It’s got a big fan in none other than Stephen King, who wrote about it in his book Danse Macabre as “one of the most interesting and offbeat little horror movies ever made.”

X is typical Corman with a low budget and ultra-basic stripped-down production values, but there’s something about it that grabs me. It’s got your typical scientist who is determined to explore the unknown whatever the cost, with Milland as Dr James Xavier, whose research into unknown spectrums of vision (“I’m blind to all but a tenth of the universe!”) has him experimenting on himself with dangerous eye drops.

At first, Xavier gets X-ray vision just like in the comics (yep, there’s a goofily fun nude scene, one of the movie’s few lighter moments), but then things get … darker. It involves accidental murder, a sequence as a carny attraction (featuring a rare early serious supporting role by Don Rickles, of all people) and Xavier’s vision gradually changing, with sunglasses and freaky contact lenses giving us a hint of what must be going on behind those eyelids. 

The “special effects” that allow us to see the world through Xavier’s eyes are mostly dime-store gimmicks and blurry psychedelic colours, and yet, their vagueness allows us to imagine what Xavier is actually seeing out there. 

Milland, always a sturdy authoritative presence in movies, gives X a helping of emotional depth as the movie explores questions of morality, religion and hope in its brisk 79 minutes. While Corman’s movies are often a lot of fun, this is the one that always leaves me thinking a bit. What would it be like to see truly everything out there? How much of the world do we miss on a daily basis? And is there some things man is not meant to see? 

Spoiler alert: X ends on a famously bleak note with Xavier, unable to control his increasingly chaotic visions, tearing out his own eyeballs in a shock-cut freeze frame. The story jerks to a halt, the screen frozen in a moment of utter infinite horror. 

King in Danse Macabre went on to claim there was a great lost coda to that scene: “I have heard rumours – they may or may not be true – that the final line of dialogue from the film was cut as too horrifying. …. According to the rumour, Milland screams: I can still see!” 

Now that’s terrifying. Although, nobody has ever really confirmed it existed. Corman himself on the DVD commentary thinks he might have shot that ending, but then again he might not. It’s a cool idea, but even without that lost final twist of the knife, X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes is worth seeing. There’s been talk over the 60 years or so since it came out of a remake, but the creepy and sparse tone of the original is hard to imagine beating. Even the cheapness of the special effects adds something to it all. 

It’s that whiff of cosmic, unknowable horror that makes X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes linger in my mind, I guess. There is no true villain here and there is no hero. Only a strangely pitiable mad scientist, determined to broaden his horizons until he realises much too late there is no end to these horizons. 

“I’ve come to tell you what I see. There are great darknesses. Farther than time itself. And beyond the darkness… a light that glows, changes… and in the center of the universe… the eye that sees us all.” – Dr James Xavier