An astronaut, coming in for a crash landing, makes odd statements over the radio, including "my hand... makes me do things.... kill.... kill!" Strangely, by then, ground control was under the belief that he was already out of oxygen.
Later, Paul, a naive student, discovers a disembodied hand near the crash site and takes it home as a grisly souvenir. He is not aware that the hand is possessed by a strange, murderous alien.
The hand murders Paul's landlady. The sheriff, played by Alan Hale, suspects Paul, who begins to act more and more strangely as the hand begins to have more and more influence over him. The fictional federal agency responsible for space flight is called to the small town because fingerprints found at the first crime scene match the missing, dead astronaut.
Paul, now under control of the Crawling Hand, attacks other people around the town, including his own beloved girlfriend. Horrified at what he's been doing, Paul attempts to take the hand to the beach to destroy it, where he's confronted by federal authorities. The hand, now wounded, is held down by cats who try to eat it. Authorities capture the hand.
Paul, recovering in the hospital, appears to be forgiven.
Meanwhile the federales charged with transporting the offended appendage open the box used to confine the apprehended hand. The film ends with a quick zoom to the inside of an empty box as the words "the end" appear on black.
Note: character names are not indicated in on-screen credits.
Home media
The Crawling Hand was featured in Episode 6 of Season 1 of the TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000. This episode was released on VHS by Rhino Home Video in October 1999 and on DVD in June 2002, including the uncut film as a bonus feature.
In other media
Rick Moody's novel The Four Fingers of Death, released in July 2010 by Little, Brown and Company, is a metafictional novelization of an imagined 2025 remake of The Crawling Hand (which means that Moody's fictional 'novelization' is set in a future very different from that of the 1963 film).[5]
