Monster in the Night[2] and Stranger on the Campus) is a 1958 American black-and-white science fiction/horror film from Universal-International, produced by Joseph Gershenson, directed by Jack Arnold, from a script by David Duncan,[3][4] that stars Arthur Franz, Joanna Cook Moore, Nancy Walters, Troy Donahue, and Whit Bissell.

The film's storyline tells of a university science professor who accidentally comes into contact with the irradiated blood of a coelacanth, which causes him to "regress" to being a primitive caveman.

Blake teaches his students that man is the only creature that can decide whether to evolve or devolve and that "unless we learn to control the instincts we've inherited from our ape-like ancestors, the race is doomed."

Inside the lab, Blake scratches himself on the teeth of the partially-thawed coelacanth, accidentally sticking his bloody hand into the water-filled container which held the fish.

Eddie Daniels find a "deformed" handprint on a window and Blake's tie clasp in Molly's dead hand.

Lighting up and smoking, he immediately feels ill. As the dragonfly shrinks back to its standard size, a large, hairy hand reaches out and squashes the insect.

If so, then Blake has been reverting to a troglodyte with large hands, feet, dark skin, heavy body hair, and prominent brow ridges.

[2] The on-campus scenes of Dunsfield University were filmed at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, a suburb of Los Angeles, California.

The film was also released in the UK, Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Soviet Union, Argentina, and Brazil.

[12] According to Warren, there were few reviews of Monster on the Campus when it first came out because it was the "bottom half of a double-bill with the more colorful Blood of the Vampire".

[13] The reviewing division of the Catholic News Service evaluated Monster on the Campus in 1958 for its "artistic merit and moral suitability".

[8] Bryan Senn notes that keeping the monster off-camera until near the end of the film is a good idea, as it adds a "bit of build-up and mystery", but doing so "only makes the rubbery mask and hirsute padded shoulders (making him look like a simian linebacker) that much more disappointing when finally revealed".

Phil Hardy writes that "cinematographer [Russell] Metty and special effects man [Clifford] Stine make the most of the ape-man's path of destruction through the campus but the script lacks any sparkle".

[16] Senn calls the film "visually flat, with the 'action' taking place in labs, offices and cabins, and with exteriors consisting of one back-lot hillside".

The best [Arnold] can come up with is a swift glance the ape-man gives a mirror before smashing it and one shot of a woman dangling by her hair from a tree".

Prof. Cyndy Hendershot in 2001 wrote that the film examines "issues of conformity and individuality" through a "metaphor of monstrous transformation".

That is, "while Monster on the Campus adopts the typical sf/horror plot of the mad scientist versus the blind authorities", the film "frames the issue specifically within the world of the organization man".

[18] Also in 2001, Hendershot looked at Monster on the Campus as an exploration of a "wide variety of issues related to the emergence of teen culture in Fifties America".

He writes that Monster on the Campus was released just a few years after the 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

The Caveman is imaged as a racist caricature of the African American: bestial, violent and corrosive to the tenets of white society".

And at the end of the film Blake solves his problem: he "does not turn himself in but instead organizes his own lynch mob by purposefully (for the first time) transforming himself into the Caveman, thus forcing the police officers to shoot him".

[21] Universal Pictures released Monster on the Campus as part of a DVD boxed set called The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection, which features four other Universal films: The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Mole People, The Monolith Monsters, and Tarantula.

[23] In music, The Modern Airline, a neo-New Wave band from Brooklyn, New York, released a song titled "Monster on the Campus" in 2017.