The Lost World is a 1960 American fantasy adventure film directed by Irwin Allen, loosely based on the 1912 novel of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Shot in De Luxe Color and CinemaScope, the film's plot revolves around the exploration of a plateau in Venezuela inhabited by cannibals, dinosaurs, carnivorous plants, and giant spiders.

Professor Challenger, a celebrated biologist and anthropologist, reports to the London Zoological Society that he has discovered living specimens of supposedly extinct animals, including dinosaurs, on an expedition to the Amazon Basin and up a barely known plateau.

Also in the group is Zoological Society bigwig Professor Summerlee, helicopter pilot Manuel Gomez, and his sidekick Jose Costa.

As the expedition proceeds, Malone chases a primitive jungle girl through cobwebs to a giant spider, killing it and bringing her back to camp.

They encounter more obstacles — pursuit by the cannibals, spider plants, the "Graveyard of the Damned", and a dinosaur in a lava pit guarding the diamonds, which kills Costa.

[5] Special effects for the film were rather basic and involved monitor lizards, iguanas, and young crocodiles affixed with miniature horns, and fins.

Indeed, many people have never heard of the silent version (much less Arthur Conan Doyle’s book), and the negative qualities of this later film have done much to obscure the importance of the classic story…Irwin Allen’s version of The Lost World is an abominable travesty in every respect…”[6]Reemes added this caveat: “On the positive side, one might regard this film’s mere existence as a powerful incentive to create a new and definitive version of Conan Doyle’s original story.”[6] Irwin Allen utilized stock footage from this film for episodes of his various TV series, including Land of the Giants, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.