From attack, to bridgehead, to  conquest; that is the arc of Quatermass and the Pit (1967).  

A new Underground line is being dug under Hobb's End in London when the workmen uncover the skeletons of of a previously unknown prehominid creature dating back five million years.  Archaeologists investigate and hit what is thought at first to be an unexploded bomb.  The army moves in and when the "bomb" is dug out it proves to be not of this Earth, but from Mars and the ape men were its passengers as were the horned insect-like creatures found dead in the forward compartment of the thing, which is not at all inactive.

In this, the most successful, certainly the most suspenseful, of the Quatermass stories, we learn that five million years ago the Martians, aware that their planet was dying, took apes from the planet Earth and modified them through selective breeding and surgery to increase their intelligence with the idea of sending them back to Earth to establish a proxy colony to carry on the Martian way of life and one attempt ended up crashing into the primeval swamp of London.

Ultimately, the Martians failed in the colonisation, but their efforts survived in us as the source of all our superstitions, race hatreds, violence, warfare, and all the other evils that plague mankind and the seeds of our destruction. 

It's become a cliché of science fiction that we can look to the stars for deliverance from our base impulses.  The more enlightened beings that live there will give us a leg up and free us from ourselves.  Roddenberry, Speilberg , and Sagan looked at outer space and found hope in the guise of figurative angels.

 Quatermass did so and literally found the Devil.

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