Villain(s)  Mind controlling alien

Actor(s):  Paul Birch, Lorna Thayer, Chester Conklin, Dick Sargent

Brief Description  The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955) is an independently produced, low-budget American science fiction film notorious for its production history, marketing misdirection, and its role as an early milestone in the career of B-movie legend Roger Corman. Originally conceived under the script title The Unseen, the movie is best remembered for a monster that is barely in the film, having been added at the last second to satisfy the demands of distributors.

Plot:
The narrative centers on Allan Kelley (Paul Birch), a stressed rancher struggling to maintain a failing date farm in the isolated California desert. Tensions run high within his dysfunctional family, including his unhappy wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) and their teenage daughter Sandy (Dona Cole). The family's domestic drama is shattered when a mysterious extraterrestrial spaceship crashes deep in the nearby desert. The unseen alien entity possesses a powerful telepathic mind capable of dominating other creatures. Because it uses the local desert wildlife—and eventually the weakest-willed humans—as its remote sensory organs, it declares itself to be a "beast with a million eyes".

Soon, a series of bizarre and violent events plague the ranch including Animal Attacks in which normally peaceful creatures turn vicious. The family dog turns on Carol, birds launch targeted attacks against humans, and a local cow goes berserk. Also human possession as the alien targets a mute handyman named "Him" (Leonard Tarver), controlling his mind and turning him into a murderous puppet. In Tom Filer's original script, the alien was an entirely incorporeal, invisible force. This design choice was favored by Corman because it cost nothing. However, executive producer Samuel Z. Arkoff and distributor James H. Nicholson insisted that audiences would feel cheated without a visible monster.

Armed with a shotgun, Allan tracks the psychic disturbance to its source in the desert. He discovers that the entity thrives strictly on negative emotions like fear, hatred, and malice. By rejecting these negative feelings and uniting in love and human resolve, the family manages to break the alien's psychic stranglehold. Deprived of its emotional power source, the entity's physical slave creature is destroyed, and the spaceship blasts off into space. With almost no budget remaining, special effects artist Paul Blaisdell hastily constructed a tiny, puppet-like creature nicknamed "Little Hercules". To make it look more formidable, Corman superimposed a floating, disembodied eyeball over the camera lens during its brief scene at the film's conclusion.