The first version of The Abominable Snowman is gone for good. Nigel Kneale’s The Creature aired live on BBC television on January 30, 1955, with Peter Cushing in the lead, but nobody preserved a recording and only a handful of tele-snaps remain. That makes Hammer’s film adaptation feel like something of a rescue operation even before you get to this new restoration.

Hammer bought the rights in November 1956, reuniting Kneale with Quatermass director Val Guest one last time. Botanist Dr. John Rollason (Cushing, The Curse of Frankenstein) is working at a Himalayan monastery when American adventurer Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker, F Troop) arrives with plans to hunt the legendary Yeti. The two men could hardly want more different things. Friend sees a prize, something to capture alive, bring home and put on display. Rollason wants knowledge. He believes there may be something out there worth understanding before anyone starts firing rifles at it. His wife Helen (Maureen Connell), added to the story at Cushing’s request and named after his own wife, understands something both men are ignoring: obsession usually sends someone the bill. Rollason goes anyway.

Tucker received top billing because Hammer’s American backers didn’t yet consider Cushing much of a draw. Dracula would take care of that the following year. Here, the contrast between them works beautifully. Tucker gives Friend the confidence of a man who thinks everything on Earth exists to be conquered, while Cushing makes Rollason curious, decent and increasingly uneasy about what they’re doing. Guest shot the picture in Regalscope, marketed by Hammer as Hammerscope, and wanted some of the immediacy he had brought to the Quatermass films. Despite the Himalayan setting, most of the production stayed much closer to home at Bray and Pinewood Studios. A ten-day second-unit trip to the French Pyrenees supplied the genuine mountain footage, with doubles standing in for the actors, while Bernard Robinson and his team created the frozen landscape back in England on wheeled rostrums using salt and polystyrene. On paper, that should look ridiculous but Cushing helps make every inch of it believable.

That may be the secret to the entire movie. Kneale isn’t especially interested in making the Yeti jump out from behind a snowbank every ten minutes, and Guest follows his lead. The creature stays largely out of sight, with actor Fred Johnson chosen in part because of what he could communicate through his eyes during the rare close encounters. The movie is much more interested in the people looking for the Yeti than the Yeti itself. Friend wants proof. Rollason wants understanding. The rest of the expedition brings its own combination of fear, greed and ego. The higher they climb, the more the search starts feeling like an excuse for Kneale to ask whether humanity is really the advanced species in this equation.

That restraint probably hurt the film in 1957. It arrived the same year as The Curse of Frankenstein, which had considerably more obvious ways to sell itself, and The Abominable Snowman is generally considered a box-office disappointment. Guest later blamed the reaction partly on the movie being too subtle, and you can understand both sides. Anyone waiting for 90 minutes of rampaging Yeti action is going to have a long climb ahead of them. The film is deliberate, talky and far more fascinated by paranoia than monster attacks. That’s also exactly why it has aged so well and it rightfully considered a Hammer classic.

Even the voices drifting mysteriously across the snow give the movie a strange psychological edge. In the commentary, Kneale biographer Andy Murray has suggested those sequences may have helped influence The Blair Witch Project decades later, and whether the connection is direct or not, the resemblance is easy enough to hear. and nearly 70 years later, the Yeti hasn’t exactly gone out of style. What makes The Abominable Snowman unusual is how little it needs the creature to stay interesting because Hammer built a monster movie around the idea that maybe the monster isn’t the problem.