EDITOR’S NOTE: The Crawling Hand was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 16, 1967 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, May 30, 1970 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, April 17, 1971 at 11:30 p.m.

If an astronaut crash-lands and says things like, “My hand… makes me do things…. kill…. kill!” At this point, you may say that perhaps this is not a lack of oxygen in the astronaut’s helmet, but rather that he may have a medical issue.

There’s also a medical student named Paul (Rod Lauren was a singer who released the song “If I Had a Girl” before acting; he moved to the Philippines, where he married actress Nida Blanca. He became the lead suspect in her death when she was stabbed in a parking garage, then fought extradition back to the country for years before jumping off a hotel room balcony; sorry to bring everyone down with who Paul really was, who finds the astronaut’s hand and well, keeps it. Because that’s what doctors do: keep desiccated hands that they see from space crashes.

Paul begins to use the power of his hand to attack people he dislikes, becoming increasingly obsessed with it. The police — led by The Skipper Alan Hale Jr. — try to catch him, and the space agency starts to realize that the fingerprints of the dead astronaut are all over the place. So Paul takes the hand to the beach and tries to destroy it, and some cats try to eat it, because that’s the kind of movie The Crawling Hand is.

Somehow, writer Rick Moody used this film as inspiration for his novel Four Fingers of Death, the tale of writer Montese Crandall, who attempts to get over the death of his wife by throwing himself into his work and writing a remake of The Crawling Hand.

Director Herbert L. Strock also made Gog and The Devil’s Messenger, and one of the co-writers was Joe Cranston, the father of Bryan. None of them noticed that at times, the crawling hand is a left hand a right hand at other times.