The film seems to have come into existence initially for the purpose of filling out the lower half of a twin bill with the better-known, youth-targeted science fiction/horror movie, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, yet it is as well remembered today as virtually any SF film of the 1950s. Part of the reason this is so may lie in the fact that it is one of the few cinematic attempts to show the proverbial “Little Green Men” of science fiction literature—although the Little Green Men represented here are not green at all (of course, in a black and white movie that would hardly seem to matter). Based on “The Cosmic Frame,” a little-known short story by Paul W. Fairman (1916-1977), its script, by Robert Gurney, Jr. and Al Martin, once went by the intriguing title of Spaceman Saturday Night. The idea to make the movie came directly from James Nicholson who believed that no previous film had attempted to portray such a vivid and well-recognized genre icon. He was wrong, of course, for Edgar Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X (United Artists, 1951) had done precisely that six years earlier, and so had a handful of other films (such as Hodkinson’s 1923 3-D film Radio-Mania) going back to the silent era.
A flying saucer lands in Pelham Woods, a remote site outside the sleepy hamlet of Hicksburg. There’s a hangout in the woods known to the local cops, a cantankerous farmer named Old Man Larkin (Raymond Hatton), on whose property the woods are situated, and a gang of teenagers, who’ve transformed the area adjacent to a cow pasture into a lovers’ lane. Diminutive extraterrestrials invade the lovers’ lane, inebriate Larkin’s prize bull and contribute to the death of con man Joe Gruen (Frank Gorshin) by stabbing him with their alcohol-filled fingertips. Gruen had already been drinking heavily by the time of his alien encounter and the additional alcohol pushes him over the edge.
The film stars Steve Terrell as Johnny Carter and Gloria Castillo as Joan Hayden; love-struck teenagers bent on eloping, who inadvertently run down one of the aliens with their car. As the teens go for help, the extraterrestrials substitute the body of their fallen fellow with that of Joe Gruen and pound dents into the fender of the kids’ vehicle in order to frame them (hence the title of the original story); thus undermining the teenagers’ claims and diverting attention away from the aliens’ presence here on Earth.
Lyn Osborn plays Joe Gruen’s partner Art Burns, and he is also the story’s wisecracking narrator. Osborn, known to science fiction fans for his portrayal of Cadet Happy on TV’s Space Patrol (ABC, 1951), passed away shortly after the film’s release. In the end, no adult will believe the teenagers’ claims of alien invaders and so the youngsters have to take matters into their own hands. When Burns attempts to photograph a reanimated, severed alien hand that tries to attack Joan, Johnny and himself, the groping member disappears in a puff of smoke, revealing the aliens’ vulnerability to intense light. Thus, with headlights beaming, the rowdy teens surround the creatures with their cars and finally put an end to their plans of conquest.
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| Bob Burns and Paul Blaisdell. |
Bob Burns worked closely with Paul Blaisdell during this period and assisted him on the set of Invasion of the Saucer Men. Burns offers a fascinating first-hand account of the making of the film:
"If Paul did some sketches of the Saucer Men, I never saw them. He might have done some preliminary sketches that maybe he showed to Jim Nicholson, or something, but I never saw them if he did. The one that was used in [the magazine] Famous Monsters [of Filmland, vol. 1, issue 1, 1958] was a [drawing] he did specially for that.He did a “positive” sculpt and didn’t work from molds on them. He made a big brain pattern out of plaster over wire and for the face itself he made up a plaster form—he made an inverted pyramid-thing that became the base of the head from the top of the face where the eyes are, right down to the neck, and he would glue everything onto that; then he’d paint several coats of latex on top of it. Some pieces were a quarter inch thick in spots. There were five heads altogether—four costume heads and one “hero” head for the close-ups, which was like a puppet head. It was opened in the back so he could make the eyes move. The eyes were just Styrofoam balls that he got over at good ol’ Frye Plastics. He put holes in the back of them so he could put his fingers in them to make the eyes move around. We never really got a chance to do that in the film. The fact that he made each one in that very special way, rather than creating a universal mold so he could just stamp them out, is why they’re all so different. Each one had its own personality because they were all separately built.The veins were really cool. He took a piece of glass and he got a cake decorator and he thickened the rubber—I think he may have used talcum powder, at least it looked like talc to me—and he’d squirt those out onto the glass, let them dry, then peeled them off. They were flat on the bottom so it was really easy to glue them onto the masks. If you look at all the Saucer Men stills, you’ll see that they’re all different."
The brains themselves were Fiberglas. He made a Fiberglas shell from his plaster molds and glued the rubber on top of that. And, of course, there was the problem with the big, oversized brains that are in all the publicity pictures. Then you see the cabbage heads in the film—they’re really noticeably different. He just cut a pie-shaped wedge out of the Fiberglas when they told him the heads were too big, and pushed them back together. That’s all he could do—there wasn’t time to do anything else.
In a very effective sequence following the automobile accident in which Johnny and Joan run down a Saucer Man, the creature’s hand detaches from its body and seems to take on a life of its own. Outfitted with its own eyeball, the hand first disables the teenagers’ car by puncturing a tire, then makes its way into the passenger compartment where it attempts to attack them by working its way up the back of the seat. Burns explains how the hand was constructed and manipulated and provides some interesting insights into how this sequence was shot:
"The [hands] were built over gardener’s gloves. They’re kind of squared off. He did the fingertips, I think, out of cardboard as a form and he painted latex on top, and then slipped them off. I’ve got a picture somewhere, where the fingers are drying on a wooden frame.The hand used in the car was a puppet hand, really. Paul’s hand fit inside of it from underneath and the cut-off part of the wrist extended out over it. He was completely dressed in black. The part where the hand was climbing up the side of the car was just a double-exposure. They shot the car first, I believe, then covered it with black Doutene, then Paul, all dressed in black, went in and teetered the puppet hand on the window and acted like it was falling inside the car. Now there’s one real fast scene at the very end of that take where you can almost see his form—the shadowy form of his arm. It’s so quick you don’t see it much.Inside the car—[the budget was so low] they couldn’t use a cutaway car that you could take the back off of, or whatever—so we shot that in a real car. I sat for something like an hour and a half doubling for Steve Terrell, and sat with the gal that doubled for Gloria Castillo, while Paul was like a pretzel in the back seat trying to climb that hand up the back of the seat. It was hot in there because they had these big lights hidden inside and poor Paul was in the back so he wouldn’t be seen. I had the easiest job in the world, I just sat there with my arm around a girl—simple, you know—but he had to do all this climbing up and all that kind of stuff. But the outcome was amazing! I thought the scene he did when the hand crawls across the road and [punctures] the tire was incredible—I thought that looked so cool!The eyeball in the [puppet] hand could move, but they really didn’t use it in the film that much—in fact, I don’t think they used [it] at all. [The eyeball] was on a stalk underneath. It had a little dowel that Paul could use to make the eye move around.The needles in the fingertips were just a [puppet hand] mounted on a little plunger. By pushing the plunger in there, little metal rods would come out. Paul had an ear syringe filled with water with tubes running to the hand and could squirt it and the water would come out to represent the alcohol. For that one close-up that they repeat in the film to show the needles coming out, he took straight pins and he figured out a way that when the water hit, it would push the pins to the surface and they would look really sharp."
When asked about the censorship of the time, and particularly how they got away with a graphically violent scene in which one of the Saucer Men grapples with and is gored by Larkin’s bull, Burns offered the following explanation:
"The only way we got away with doing some of the gory special effects—like the Saucer Man getting his eye gouged—was because they were not human. They still even cut that, though. The way it worked in that particular scene with the Saucer Man and the bull, was that it was a Styrofoam eye and Paul drilled a hole in it and covered the hole with wax to blend it in. He was behind the [Saucer Man] head with a grease gun full of chocolate syrup. I had a fake bull’s head—it was just on a rod—and I took the horn and just pushed it into that hole that you couldn’t see because of the wax. I could see it, but no one else could. And I just wiggled it around a little bit and Paul squirted that gun and it just came gushing out, so they cut it. You see it start to gush, and then they cut away to something else. They thought that was a little too much. It really gushed out of there at first and just looked God-awful. Today anything goes, but that was 1957.We got away with a lot if you think of some of the things that happened in the film, like the monster slime when the Saucer Man is under the front of the car. In that close-up [of the hand covered with slime from the dead Saucer Man] that’s not Frank Gorshin, that’s actually Paul’s hand. The slime was made out of Wild Root Cream Oil, which was a hair preparation at the time, chocolate syrup, lime Jell-o and glitter. That’s what he made the slime out of—and it looked great! Wah Chang—they were at the insert stage over at Howard Anderson’s [Studio]—he was shooting the close-ups for The Black Scorpion [Warner Bros., 1957], and he borrowed some of that slime and an ear syringe from us, because he forgot to bring some. So that stuff dripping out of the giant scorpion’s mouth was some of our slime. It was pretty neat when you think about it—”Oh, my God, it was in another movie!” Paul was a great one for using glitter to get the little highlights and weird effects. Do you remember Paul Dubov [as Radek] in Day the World Ended? He had that big, weird-looking streak on his face. That was just duo [surgical] adhesive—the kind of thing you use to put on false eyelashes—and Paul put some glitter on it to give it that kind of weird-looking texture. He was really good at figuring out that kind of stuff."
Being an extremely low budget affair produced on a constricted time schedule, most of it was filmed on a single soundstage. Bob Burns again provides the details:
"If you didn’t look up into the grid and see the lights, you’d have really thought you were in the woods somewhere. The ground was uneven; they had those broken fence pieces. It was great. And they had risers that they built up so it had little uphill parts to the terrain. It wasn’t just a flat stage. It was filmed over at ZIV [Studios], on the biggest sound stage they had. The farmhouse was actually in the middle of the stage like it was suppose to be. In one corner of the stage were the police station and the café. They were right next to each other. The only thing that was on another set was the inside of the general’s apartment. That wooded area looked so neat, because it had all those trees and stuff, that it really looked like honest-to-God woods. It was the best indoor set I’ve ever seen of an outdoor [location]. The only outdoor shots were stock shots and shots of the cars driving by."
Today the concept of government secrecy and high-ranking cover-ups is something of a staple in American cultural mythology, but in June of 1957 when Invasion of the Saucer Men was released, the notion was relatively new. In the film, when the army fails to gain entry to the alien ship and instead blows it to smithereens by igniting a hidden fuse, the soldiers work diligently through the night to conceal the evidence of the alien presence. It would be sometime in the 1970s before UFO enthusiasts would, to any great degree, point to government conspiracies as a convenient rationale for why so little physical evidence survives to support the belief that UFOs are the vessels of visiting extraterrestrials. In this one regard, at least, Invasion of the Saucer Men was a film ahead of its time.
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| Earth vs. The Spider. |
1958 was nearly as busy a year for Paul Blaisdell as the previous one, but just when his career was seemingly at its height there were signs, even for these marginal productions, that science fiction films were beginning to run out of steam. In 1958 Blaisdell’s work appeared in four films for AIP: the aforementioned War of the Colossal Beast (which was actually contained in footage recycled from The Amazing Colossal Man), Attack of the Puppet People, Earth vs. the Spider (a.k.a., The Spider) and How to Make a Monster. The first three were produced and directed by Bert I. Gordon and follow Gordon’s principle preoccupation with the theme of scale: giant people, little people and giant insects. The last one, How to Make a Monster, was produced by Herman Cohen and directed by Herbert L. Strock, and tells of a disenfranchised make up artist named Peter Drummond (Robert H. Harris) who gets booted out of his job at a film studio when the new management decides that audiences are no longer interested in monster movies. Using a special chemical in his make up base to gain hypnotic control over two young actors who’ve previously portrayed the teenage Frankenstein’s monster and the teenage werewolf (Gary Conway and Gary Clarke, respectively), Drummond uses the actors to kill off members of the studio’s new regime.
During the finale—the only scene of the film lensed in color—we see some Blaisdell’s own creations: Beulah, Cuddles, the Cat Girl, the Saucer Man and a Mr. Hyde mask that he created for Attack of the Puppet People, go up in flames. Not wanting to destroy his original masks, Blaisdell made wax castings of the particular characters that were earmarked to be photographed while on fire. His original mask for Cat Girl, however, was accidentally set ablaze by a technician, but the burning of the mask was not captured on film. More important than this regrettable loss, however, is how real life would eventually come to mimic the plotline of this film in its foretelling of the demise of Blaisdell’s own motion picture career.
Paul Blaisdell worked on a fifth film released in 1958, It! The Terror from Beyond Space. With its intense, compelling story of astronauts within the confines of a spaceship pitted for survival against an unseen alien menace, it may well be the best motion picture of any with which Blaisdell’s name has been associated. Edward L. Cahn, with whom Blaisdell had worked on three previous pictures for AIP, directed the film, but the production crew was largely unknown to either of them. It! The Terror was made for Vogue Pictures, a tiny production company under the supervision of Robert E. Kent, and the movie was set for release by United Artists. Kent had also talked UA executive Edward Small into co-financing and releasing another SF/horror film, Curse of the Faceless Man, with which It! The Terror was later double-billed. This second feature was also directed by Eddie Cahn and scripted by Jerome Bixby, but the costume for its title monster, a two thousand year old resurrected slave from ancient Pompeii, was designed and built by Charles Gemora, the Phillipino artist who had created the three-fingered Martian for George Pal’s science fiction classic, The War of the Worlds (Paramount, 1953).
While AIP had been exceedingly frugal, and at times frustratingly schedule conscious, to stalwarts like Eddie Cahn and Paul Blaisdell there had at least been a compensating sense of family. Blaisdell found that these new circumstances afforded little by way of camaraderie and the experience at UA had been sufficiently unpleasant for it to have been a factor in eventually souring his attitude toward the motion picture industry.
It! The Terror from Beyond Space was release on August 7th and it came and went without much fanfare, but it would be cited in discussions in the late 1970s as the inspiration for the hit movie, Alien (20th Century-Fox, 1979) and would subsequently enjoy a minor renaissance in a variety of home video formats. While there is little question about the affinity between the two, no one associated with the making of Alien has yet publicly acknowledged the connection. It! The Terror was produced on a veritable shoestring, yet it is superior in some ways to its famous—and vastly more expensive—offspring.
Scripted by the noted science fiction author Jerome Bixby (1923-1998), the movie tells the tale of an ill-fated expedition to Mars and of a recovery ship that ventures to the Red Planet to retrieve the mission’s sole survivor, Lt. Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson). Carruthers, a pioneering figure in space exploration, claims that his crew was savagely attacked and slain during a sandstorm in the Martian desert by a strange, shadowy figure. Finding no evidence of the creature, the crew of the recovery ship packs up and heads for Earth unaware that the alien, or another of its species, has stowed away onboard. Carruthers, now under suspicion of having murdered his fellow crewmembers, is brought back under custody. That is, until the return voyage when something largely unobserved begins to systematically kill off members of the crew by making its way through the ship’s ventilation system. The victims are found with their bones pulverized and are completely drained of all bodily fluids. On the arid deserts of Mars, the dominant species has evolved into a race of moisture vampires with an indiscriminate craving for liquids. They also possess massive lungs to breathe the thin air of their home world, and the alien’s consumption of the ship’s oxygen supply gives the surviving crewmembers a clue to eventually overcoming the intruder.
Marshall Thompson was the film’s sole bankable star (though most of his career had been limited to small supporting roles in big pictures and starring roles in “B” films and on TV), but the supporting cast—with the exception of Kim Spalding as the rescue ship’s commander, Col. James Van Heusen—is comprised of solid character actors, such as Ann Doran and Dabbs Greer. They portray the husband and wife science team of doctors Mary and Eric Royce. The noted athlete and stuntman Ray “Crash” Corrigan (1902-1976), who had at this particular point in his life yielded to the deprivations of acute alcoholism, portrayed “It.” Corrigan’s passive-aggressive behavior and difficulties in navigating around the set in costume while intoxicated, threatened to slow down production, but were apparently not sufficient to get him fired off the picture. As a result, a few flaws made their way into the final cut of the film.
One of these flaws came early on when Corrigan refused to don the restrictive headpiece of the monster costume for a scene in which only the creature’s cast shadow on the ship’s bulkhead would be seen. The silhouette of Corrigan’s unmistakably human head does not match that of the creature’s when the creature’s appearance is finally revealed to us about halfway through the film. Bob Burns, who again assisted Paul Blaisdell during his limited access to the set, tells of another moment that remains immortalized in celluloid:
"Corrigan was looking up at the camera in one of the film’s few close-up shots of the monster, and he’s supposed to be listening to the people up in the top deck. He’d been in the suit about an hour, and with his chin actually sticking out, when he would move that mouth at all it would start to pull the eyeholes away from his eyes. Eddie [Cahn] shouted out to him, “Lift your head. I can’t see your eyes, lift your head up!” Corrigan took it literally and you suddenly see this big claw come up and he lifts the [monster mask’s] head up! They just left it in the film!"
Burns refers to Corrigan’s chin sticking out through the creature headpiece. This situation arose when the producers failed to inform Paul Blaisdell that he would not be donning the monster suit himself, but that Ray Corrigan had instead been hired for the role. Burns elaborates:
"Paul had real problems with It! The Terror, since that was a totally different studio, and the only person he knew there was Eddie Cahn. That was a whole different thing and that was a very, very sad and nasty experience for him. He was not happy with that at all. They treated him like dirt there. He didn’t want to go back. In fact when they told him they really didn’t need him on the set and he left, then two days later he gets this call: “Oh, my God! You’ve got to come back! We can’t get this guy into the suit! We don’t know how to fix him!”—and, of course, the head not fitting on [Corrigan] right and all—so he had to go back over and do it. And he would, because he was a credible man. He wasn’t going to let it go bad.When Paul first started sculpting the head he thought he was going to play the monster as he always did, and that’s why he used Jackie’s cast of his own head. By the time he got it just about done, just about ready to make a mold of it, that’s when he heard, “Oh, no, we’re using ‘Crash’ Corrigan.” Oh, that’s nice! Crash was half again as big as Paul. Eddie Small, the head of [UA’s] production company, just wanted to use [Corrigan]; just wanted to give him some work. They’d been old buddies from way back, I guess. Eddie Small…was a typical, cocky producer—a cigar chomping kind of guy, you know.When Paul did the head they said, “Oh, it’ll fit, don’t worry about it.” Corrigan, for some reason, didn’t want to come in for a fitting, so he just sent over a pair of long johns. Paul just stuffed them with newspaper and built the whole suit over that."
When the headpiece was placed on Corrigan’s massive head, the actor’s chin protruded through and distorted the mask’s mouth. Blaisdell arrived on the sound stage after the panicked phone call with a set of hastily assembled lower teeth for the creature’s mouth, which he glued into position on the mask. With the actor’s chin painted red to look like the monster’s enlarged tongue, and the lower teeth in position to complete the illusion, Corrigan was quickly outfitted and was ready to go back to work. Once again, Blaisdell’s resourcefulness and willingness to co-operate saved the day.
Bob Burns again describes the details of the creature suit’s construction, provides an example of Blaisdell’s less than cordial treatment on the set and comments on Edward L. Cahn, his highly efficient working style and his direction of It! The Terror from Beyond Space:
“'It' was the only monster suit that Paul ever built molds for. I have the one mold, for the head. He made probably thirty different texture patterns of scales. He and Jackie made them all up and glued then on one at a time, just like they did for the She-Creature, basically, and made the whole suit that way. The claw parts were made of white pine, covered with latex over heavy garden gloves. The feet were sculpted and molded. It’s the only monster that he actually sculpted from the ground up out of negative molds.
Paul built an extra arm so Corrigan wouldn’t have to put the suit on for those scenes of the monster coming up through the hatches. He took it over to the studio one day and I guess the assistant director was there and he looked at Paul and asked, “Who the hell are you?” Paul tried to explain that he’d made this extra arm and the guy said, “Just leave it over there and get out of here!” It was just like Paul to do more than he was asked and he took pity on Corrigan, knowing he was uncomfortable in the suit. Paul was very thoughtful that way."
Eddie Cahn, he knew how to shoot It! The Terror from Beyond Space. It looked very effective. It was a really very well done film for what it was. I think it was shot in about twelve days. It had a longer shooting schedule than most of the films Eddie worked on. He also knew the limitations of Crash [brought on by his drinking], and so he kept that in mind. Eddie Cahn, I’ve got to say, was probably one of the best directors I’ve ever seen work—and especially with those short shooting schedule things, where he didn’t have any time. He did his homework every night. He came in and he knew exactly what set-ups he wanted. And, if possible, he could do forty set-ups in a day. He’d just move on. He was even better at it than Roger Corman. Of course, he’d been around a lot longer. He used to do a whole lot of those “B” westerns.
The years 1957 and ’58 marked the most productive and prosperous period of Paul Blaisdell’s film career. In 1959, however, his motion picture commissions began to dwindle, and over the next few years they dropped precipitously. During his all-too-brief heyday, however, three significant events influenced the production of science fiction films and eventually impacted Blaisdell’s life.
The first of these came from a small production company in England called Hammer Studios. Although it was managed economically, unlike AIP, it maintained its own studio facilities. AIP usually rented sound stages when needed to minimize its overhead. In November 1956 Hammer began production on a sensational remake of the 1931 Universal horror classic, Frankenstein. Naming their version The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer teamed actors Peter Cushing (as Dr. Victor Frankenstein) and Christopher Lee (as his man-made monster) for the first time. Working both separately and together, the two actors subsequently appeared in seemingly countless horror movies over the next thirty years. For most of the 1960s and ’70s their popularity in the genre would rival that of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi’s. So, too, would the fame of American actor Vincent Price when Roger Corman and AIP, following Hammer’s lead, took the plunge into producing full color period horror pictures in Europe beginning in November 1963. The lesson that AIP and others learned from Hammer’s example was that the American dollar simply bought more in overseas production. And while SF movies were viewed in the late ’50s as a passing fad, supernatural horror—in glorious Technicolor and leaving precious little to the imagination—was quickly emerging to take its place.
Released internationally by Warner Brothers in vivid Eastman color in May 1957, The Curse of Frankenstein‘s propensity for showing the gruesome particulars of the monster’s assembly in minute and loving detail made the film a subject of intense interest and controversy. The Hammer version also set the story in the 19th century, as had Mary Shelley’s original novel, written in 1816.
But it was not the first of Hammer’s excursions into the fantastic. The Curse of Frankenstein had been preceded by the science fiction films The Four-Sided Triangle (Astor Pictures, 1952), Spaceways (Lippert, 1953) and The Quatermass Xperiment (United Artists, 1955). The first two were relatively tame, but the last of these, released in the United States as The Creeping Unknown, was based on a popular, well-written and rather grim BBC television mini-series scripted by the brilliantly talented Nigel Kneale (b. 1922). The film adaptation offered the first inkling of Hammer’s willingness to show what so many other studios had shied away from in the making of SF and horror films—explicit gore; restrained though it may seem by contemporary standards.
The unprecedented success of The Curse of Frankenstein spawned a Hammer-produced color remake of Dracula, released in the U.S. under the title Horror of Dracula (Universal-International, 1958). Hammer’s aggressive plan to capture the horror film market included remakes of many of the Universal classics and in the closing years of the 1950s, in addition to its new Dracula, Hammer produced The Revenge of Frankenstein (a direct sequel to The Curse of Frankenstein; Columbia, 1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (United Artists, 1959) and The Mummy (Universal-International, 1959)—films that had been previously made by Universal during the 1930s and ’40s. It also produced a version of the 1944 Paramount feature, The Man in Half Moon Street, a marginal SF story, releasing it through Paramount Pictures in 1959 as The Man Who Could Cheat Death.
While Hammer still continued to produce SF films, as its reputation for horror grew, its output of science fiction took a back seat. There was another adaptation of a Nigel Kneale BBC teleplay, The Creature, released in the U.S. as The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (20th Century-Fox, 1957); a sequel to The Quatermass Xperiment, entitled Quatermass II (a.k.a. Enemy from Space, United Artists, 1957); a gruesome but highly entertaining precursor to The Blob (Paramount, 1958) in X-The Unknown (Warner Bros., 1957); and an off-beat Cold War SF film directed by Joseph Losey in These Are the Damned (Columbia, 1965). Shot in 1961 and released two years later in the U.K. as The Damned, Losey’s film was considered so eccentric that it took another two years to reach American audiences. But these SF titles had relatively small budgets, were photographed in black and white and, although they were for the most part successful, they were unable to rival the box office performance of Hammer’s more elaborate color horror films.
The second thing to impact the genre was the leasing of the Universal horror film library to TV in the fall of 1957. In the initial Shock package offered by Screen Gems, a television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, there were fifty-two horror and mystery films—enough to show a first-run movie once a week for an entire year. Ratings from the airing of these films were so strong that a second package, Son of Shock, was promptly assembled with twenty-one additional titles; twelve of which were motion pictures produced by Columbia between 1932 and 1944 and originally intended to mimicked the look and mood of the original Universal classics (The Devil Commands, 1941,with Boris Karloff and The Return of the Vampire, 1943, with Bela Lugosi are excellent examples of how well Columbia could emulate the Universal horror film formula). Shown in syndication across the country as late night TV fare, the series went by many different regional names and these local shows were often hosted by costumed actors who lampooning the ghoulish proceedings of the evening’s offerings during the commercial breaks.
The horror host phenomenon was a popular and long-lived tradition with the televising of these films, and the films were rerun endlessly through the late 1950s and into the 1960s. In later years other shows, such as Nightmare!, Chiller Theater, Creature Features, and Haunted Hollywood emerged to show second-, third- and fourth-tier horror and SF films until the supply was virtually exhausted. If nothing more, the Shock package and its progeny cultivated a wider interest in the fantastic and, like the films of Hammer Studios and its many imitators, moved the focus away from science fiction and more toward the traditions of supernatural horror.
The last of the three major events to change the face of science fiction in the mass media during the late 1950s was the publication of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland in February of 1958. Edited by Forrest J. Ackerman and focused exclusively on horror and SF movies and the monsters that inhabit them, it was an unparalleled success. It was soon followed by a wave of like-minded publications that included World Famous Creatures, Shriek, The Castle of Frankenstein, Mad Monsters, Monster Madness, Monster Mania, Chilling Monster Tales, Monster Parade, Monster Land, For Monsters Only, Spacemen, Monster World (these last two were companion magazines to Famous Monsters)…and the list goes on. The first issue of Famous Monsters contained a six page, illustrated article profiling the film careers of Paul and Jackie Blaisdell. As previously noted, it also included a step-by-step guide to the making of the creature costumes for Invasion of the Saucer Men, much of which was staged after the fact specifically for FM‘s premiere edition.
After 1958 AIP entered a transitional period during which it heightened its domestic product with an even greater emphasis on teenagers and their interests and further pursued its collaborative efforts abroad with Anglo-Amalgamated Films, the company with which it had made Cat Girl. Three more films, shot in widescreen—two of them in color—followed from this union: Horrors of the Black Museum, The Headless Ghost (both 1959) and Circus of Horrors (1960). To further mimic Hammer’s recipe for success, the first and last of these collaborations used some of the same supporting players who’d appeared in previous Hammer productions. Roger Corman, at about this time, began work in Los Angeles on House of Usher (AIP, 1960), the first of his highly successful Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. By 1963 the later Corman/Poe films were being shot in Europe to save on production costs.
The forerunner of AIP’s quirky, teen-centered surfer comedies was The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, which the studio released in 1959. It marked Paul Blaisdell’s final screen appearance and was even more prophetic than the previous year’s How to Make a Monster, for in it, Blaisdell essentially played himself. Scripted by Lou Rusoff, the plot revolves around a gang of hot rod enthusiasts who call themselves the Zenith Club. When they’re unceremoniously booted out of their clubhouse, the kids try to exorcise a ghost from a purportedly haunted house intended as the club’s new digs. The resident spook is, in the end, a mere mortal in costume (Paul Blaisdell). He’s exposed during the film’s climactic costume party, during which Blaisdell wears yet another overhauled version of the She-Creature outfit. Bob Burns explains:
"I was in the army stationed in San Antonio, Texas then and I wasn’t really around when Paul did The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow. He was asked to revamp the She-Creature costume, again! They said it was a comedy and they said, “Well, Paul, you can play the role this time.” This was the last thing, I think, he did for AIP, as a matter of fact. [In How to Make a Monster] they messed up [many of Paul’s masks] pretty good. He lost the Cat Girl mask and a couple of other things got burned. That was about a deranged make up artist who gets kicked out of the studio because they’re not shooting horror films anymore.Oh, it’s all connected, if you really look at it. One thing about Paul [when it came to politics in the film business] he was very naive. He trusted people. He took them at their word and it was always a handshake deal with him. Right after they did Day the World Ended, and changed from American Releasing Corporation to AIP, they said, “Oh, you’re part of the family and you’ll grow as the family grows. We can’t pay you much now, but as it goes along you’ll get more, blah, blah, blah.” When they finally got rid of him, they got rid of him—that was all there was to it, you know. That came on Beast from Haunted Cave [produced by Gene Corman, Roger’s brother, for Allied Artists in1959], when they wanted to build this monster and didn’t want to pay him any more than they ever paid him. He said, “No, I want more money.” “Well,” they said, “okay, we’ll get some teenage guy to build it.” And that’s exactly what they did [teenager Chris Robinson created the monster entirely without pay, in exchange for screen credit], and Paul couldn’t fight that. He honestly didn’t see it. I don’t think he really saw it coming. Or maybe he did, subconsciously, I don’t know.At first he thought the role in The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow was fun. He told me later, “It was kind of fun being around as the monster and then revealing myself at the end.” And he did that little mousy voice—”I scared you in The She-Creature and I scared you in such-and-such.”He used the titles of his own films, but that was his epitaph and he didn’t even know it at the time. I remember him writing to me in the army—”Well, I spoofed myself. I spoofed it and got to use this crazy voice and all.” He was very ‘up’ about it. But later on, when things really started breaking down for him, it was painfully obvious to him that he sealed his own death warrant right there.The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow was sadly biographical. Years later when he got bitter he did regret doing the film. He said, “I killed myself in that film. I destroyed my career”—which wasn’t really true, but that’s the way he kind of looked at it later.At the end it was extremely sad that Corman and the others never called to ask him to do anything. I remember back in the late ’70s, [low budget filmmaker] Fred Olen Ray called Paul and tried to get him to build a monster for him. He was going to pay him well and everything else, and Paul just said, “Absolutely not. I’m not interested in ever doing that again—whatsoever.” Fred Olen Ray was an extremely big fan of Paul’s and he felt he finally got enough money to pay Paul what he was worth, but he just got the absolute cold shoulder and a ‘no’ from Paul. Paul wouldn’t even consider it. He was way past that at that point, and he was just doing handyman work out in Topanga [to make ends meet]; fixing leaky faucets and digging out sewers, or whatever. Very sad for a man who had all that talent."
After finishing The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, Blaisdell’s film work narrowed to a trickle. Expanding its foreign production schedule, Blaisdell was commissioned by AIP to create concept art for Goliath and the Dragon (a.k.a. The Vengeance of Hercules, 1960), an Italian-made sword and sandal epic starring muscle-bound American actor Mark Forrest. The following year, with the success of AIP’s color extravaganza, Master of the World—quite possibly the studio’s most elaborate science fiction picture—Blaisdell was commissioned to design props for a never produced, unofficial sequel entitled Strato-Fin. In 1962 he was asked to create concept art for Edward Small’s production of Jack the Giant Killer (United Artists), a blatant knock-off of Ray Harryhausen’s striking stop-motion/live action fantasy, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (Columbia, 1958), but his art was never used. Shortly afterward he was hired again by James Nicholson to work on two series for AIP’s fledgling TV subsidiary, American International Television (AIT). The shows, an anthology series entitled Out of This World, and a space opera similar to Star Trek called Beyond the Barriers of Space, never materialized.
In the early 1960s, when Bob Burns returned from his stint in the army, the two friends entered into a promising business venture that went all too quickly sour. Burns, in his own words, speaks poignantly of that time and of the circumstances that left an already disillusioned Paul Blaisdell in a state of utter despair.
"When I got out of the army we just immediately connected up again. Two years after that (I got out in ’60), is when we formed the magazine, Fantastic Monsters of the Films. That disaster was the last straw. That’s the one that actually broke Paul’s back. That was it. It was our magazine and we got totally cheated out of it, because we were both green. Here again, Paul was naïve. He never learned from these experiences, and I never learned anything either. I do everything on a handshake and Kathy gets mad at me once in a while, then she says, “Good lord, you should have seen that coming!” And I did, but that kind of person you can’t change, and Paul didn’t change. It’s always a very sad thing for me when I talk about the magazine, because he kind of blamed me for its demise, in a way. It was a collaborative thing that we both came up with together.We were sitting up there [in Paul and Jackie’s home in Topanga Canyon], having a little wine or something, I don’t know, and we were kind of mellowed out. I guess I’d brought along some of the other monster magazines that he hadn’t seen—like Monster Parade and Horror Monsters, or something, and he said, “You know, we could do a magazine as good as this, if not better. We have all the experience behind us of doing movies and we could really tell the fans how this stuff was built.” And we got that mindset going. The next day I called him and asked, “Are you serious about this?” He replied, “I was going to call you. Yeah, I’m serious about it.” Then we started actively trying to do something. He started by making up a dummy of the magazine, which I still have—a drawn dummy for which he did sketches and stuff.It was going to be called Fantastic Films, originally. It wouldn’t be just monsters; it would be all kinds of fantastic things. The investor Paul found, who was also the printer, said, “You have to have monsters in the title because all the other monster magazines have the word monsters.” At the time, the guy was probably right. Fantastic Films might have sounded like a trade magazine or something. So, we went along with that and it was fine and we started doing the magazine. Then I recommended a guy named Ron Haydock to be the editor, for which I was sorry later on. He used to write stuff for Forry [Ackerman] and he was down on his luck. Paul did not want to be the editor, I didn’t know how to be an editor—I was going to be the research guy and I knew that from the beginning and was very happy with that. I brought this guy Haydock in thinking, well, this might help everybody, and it did—to a point. I mean, he was an okay editor, but I didn’t realize that he started undermining me right away with Paul. I didn’t know this until much, much later. I still don’t know the reason why he did this and I don’t think I’ll ever know.So, we got the first issue out and it turned out pretty well. I came up with “The Devil’s Workshop” idea of actually showing how things were done—how these miniatures were done; how a mask was done—whatever—and really show how it worked, to give the fans something that none of the other magazines were doing. Paul said, “Yeah, I’ve done enough stuff; we could do that pretty easily.” And then I thought of “The Monster of the Month” foldout—like Playboy. I thought it was going to be a one-shot idea, just for kicks. Well, we got so much response from it that we kept it in. We started getting tons of letters pouring into Black Shield—that was Paul’s company—a lot of people saying, “It’s a great magazine,” and then it caught on.A young, thirteen year old Bill Malone did a thing about how to make a mask for us, and, of course, now he’s a director [Creature, Trans World Entertainment, 1985; House on Haunted Hill, Warner Bros., 1999; FearDotCom, Warner Bros., 2002]. [The well-known special effects artists] Bob and Denny Skotak said the magazine heavily influenced them. So, we didn’t realize what it was actually accomplishing out there. We just didn’t know that.We had to do our share of funny shtick, too. “The Graveyard Examiner,” and things like Forry was doing [in Famous Monsters]. You have to do a certain amount of that. We did articles, we did stories—we tried a lot of different techniques. We even did our own thing about 3-D.The only thing that we didn’t realize was that the printer was setting us up the whole time. He needed a national magazine for what he was evidently planning to do, and we kept noticing that the quality of the magazine got worse almost every issue. Paul would call the printer and the guy would say, “Oh, I’m having printing troubles. I’m getting it cleaned up. Don’t worry about it.” And then the next to last issue—the last issue was going to be a great Karloff issue, which never even happened—and I lost tons of my stills by sending them to this guy—then all of a sudden issue #7 comes out and the masthead’s different—there’s an oriental guy’s name on it. We said, “What’s this?” The design’s all different, everything’s changed. The printer said, “Well, you guys were kind of running out of steam, so I got this new guy in.” It wasn’t what Paul or I wanted at all. Paul said, “This isn’t right.” He really had a big argument with the guy. He said, “You can’t do this to us!” The printer said, “Yeah, well, I own 51% of the magazine. I can do anything I want.” It kind of turned out to be a nasty situation. Right after that was when the—quote—Big Fire hit. They found out a couple of years later that it was arson. The guy set his own business on fire. And the reason he wanted a national magazine was so that he could get [the business] insured for more. We were the patsies in this whole thing.In the meantime, Ron Haydock was trying to destroy my friendship with Paul. He got Paul and me going at each other. He’d tell me something about Paul; he’d tell Paul something about me that neither one of us said at all. When the magazine folded, Paul kind of blamed me for the whole thing, practically. And also I’d given Ron Haydock about a thousand of my best stills for future issues and he ended up selling them to every bookstore out here.We had a meeting about issue #5. Paul called a meeting with Haydock, Kathy and myself and Paul just laid into me. “Just what are you really doing? We’re trying to figure out just what your contribution is?” And I said, “What do you mean? They’re all my stills, Paul, for one thing. I did all the research on the stories.” “Yeah,” he said, “but Ron Haydock wants to really know, and I want to know, too, what you are doing for this magazine to deserve your name on the masthead?” “Paul,” I said, “I co-created the magazine with you!” Haydock completely turned Paul around. For years Paul and I didn’t talk at all. It wasn’t just about that, Paul was so bitter by that point. What happened with the magazine was just the final blow for him. And Ron had poisoned him against me so much.I asked Jackie after Paul passed away about that. She said, “You know, Bob, I don’t really know what happened there. I told Paul many times, ‘Paul, you’re wrong, you’re absolutely wrong about this.'” And Paul did realize it, I think. Just before he died, too, because he told Jackie, “I did a lot of dumb things. Just make sure when all is said and done that you tell Bob I loved him like a brother.” I just wish I could have heard it from him.He was a manly man of the old school, and he thought that was a weakness, I guess, to tell another guy how he felt about him. Jackie said, “You can feel secure that he loved you very much.” I got that knowledge, at least, to know that, but it’s just so sad. We talked a few times before he died and had some nice conversations. I think he was feeling pretty bad about the situation and so we had some nice little talks. I never saw him at all again, but we talked a few times and kind of reminisced about stuff and how much fun we used to have. I think he was really feeling it at that time. I’m glad we did the magazine. I think we got some neat stuff out there."
In its roughly twenty-five year lifespan, American International Pictures made in excess of five hundred feature films; sixty of which were produced by its co-founder and president, James H. Nicholson. Nicholson and Arkoff established the partnership that would eventually evolve into AIP in 1954 and, apparently, shared a good working relationship until Nicholson became ill in the early 1970s. The Midwesterner, who so loved the movies and came to Hollywood with stars in his eyes, attained a degree of success in the motion picture business, both monetarily and artistically. In 1965 he divorced his wife, Sylvia, and married twenty-four year old starlet Susan Hart, who had appeared in several AIP movies. Nicholson was forty-nine at the time. He resigned his presidency in the company in 1971 and died of cancer less than a year later, on December 10, 1972. His widow, since remarried and going by the name of Susan Nicholson-Hofheinz, has doggedly resisted making many of Nicholson’s better-known films available to the public in commercial home video formats.
From 1971 until 1979, when he sold his interest in AIP for four million dollars in a merger with Filmways, Samuel Zachary Arkoff managed the company alone. The shrewd lawyer from Fort Dodge, Iowa subsequently set up Arkoff International Pictures and managed the new company until his death on September 16, 2001. Among the company’s activities was the leasing of such AIP movies as I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Amazing Colossal Man, War of the Colossal Beast, Earth vs. the Spider and How to Make a Monster to Cinemax in the early 1990s, and their subsequent licensing to home video. His son, Lou Arkoff, intent on carrying on the family tradition of low budget filmmaking, produced a series of made-for-cable movies for Showtime in 2001 using the titles, but not necessarily the plotlines, of a number of AIP’s vintage SF movies of the 1950s. Filling the role of master monster maker for the cable series, that would once have been the domain of Paul Blaisdell, was Academy Award-winning special effects artist Stan Winston (b. 1946; Terminator 2: Judgment Day, TriStar, 1991; Jurassic Park, Universal, 1993; Pearl Harbor, Buena Vista, 2001).
The prolific Lou Rusoff (b. 1911), who wrote many of the scripts for AIP’s SF and teen movies of the ’50s and ’60s, expanded his activities later in his career to include film producing. His most recent writing credit was for the 1994 made-for-cable movie, Runaway Daughters directed by Joe Dante, a Corman protégé, for Showtime Networks, Inc.
Like Rusoff, Charles B. Griffith has remained close to his roots in the low budget film industry and has written scripts for nearly thirty motion pictures since the mid-1950s. The grandson of comedic actress Myrtle Vail (a.k.a. Myrtle Damerel; 1888-1978), Griffith has appeared a half-dozen times on screen in bit parts and has also directed and produced a small number of films. His best known genre scripts were written for Roger Corman during science fiction’s Golden Age for such films as It Conquered the World (uncredited), Attack of the Crab Monsters, Not of This Earth, A Bucket of Blood (Filmgroup, 1959), Beast from Haunted Cave, Little Shop of Horrors (Filmgroup, 1960) and Creature from the Haunted Sea (Filmgroup, 1961). In 1995 he adapted, with Mark Hanna, new, updated versions of Not of This Earth and A Bucket of Blood for cable television (Concorde/New Horizons).
Bert I. Gordon, born on September 24, 1922 in Kenosha Wisconsin, remains professionally connected to the film business. Although he moved somewhat beyond his preoccupation with physical size, he continued to produce and direct films on the theme well into the 1970s, such as The Food of the Gods (AIP, 1976) and Empire of the Ants (AIP, 1977); both of which are loosely based on works by H. G. Wells.
Detroit-born Roger Corman studied engineering at Stanford University and claims that his education in that discipline was essential to his success in motion pictures. He started in the movie business as a messenger at 20th Century-Fox after his graduation from college in 1947 and worked his way up to story analyst before branching out on his own in 1954. During his remarkably prolific career he has been involved in nearly three hundred and fifty films as a producer, director, writer and actor. He officially retired from directing in 1970 with the founding of his own film company, New World Pictures. Although he continues to produce, act and remain otherwise connected to the industry, he has thus far returned to directing only once; to helm the screen adaptation of Brian Aldiss’ brilliant 1973 science fiction novel, Frankenstein Unbound (20th Century-Fox, 1990). After selling New World Pictures in 1982 he set up Concorde/New Horizons, which still flourishes. He’s well known in the industry for both his frugality as a producer and for his generosity in developing new talent. He helped launch the careers of such screen legends as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, John Sayles and Peter Bogdonovich, to name but a few.
His brother Gene Corman (b. 1927), a year younger than he, produced some thirty-four feature films and made for TV movies, including the notorious SF cheapies, Night of the Blood Beast (AIP, 1958), Attack of the Giant Leeches (AIP, 1959) and Beast from Haunted Cave, proving beyond a doubt that cheap doesn’t necessarily mean bad.
Edward L. Cahn, second only to Roger Corman in the number of films he made with Paul Blaisdell, began his Hollywood career in 1931. His most well regarded film, Law and Order (Universal), a 1932 western starring Walter Huston and Harry Carey, came early in his career. By the end of the 1930s he was working for a number of poverty row studios churning out low budget westerns and an assortment of other “B” programmers. Some directors worked for the low-end markets, preferring the freedom of the independents and smaller studios to the tightly controlled environment of the majors. Cahn died in 1963. He was sixty-four.
As for Paul Blaisdell, no one, with the notable exception of his reclusive spouse, Jackie, knew him better, nor loved him more dearly than his friend, Bob Burns. Burns shares some insights into his friend’s personality and offers some information on Blaisdell’s soul mate and collaborator, Jackie:
"Paul was a very even-tempered guy. He was very quiet and he was actually, basically, pretty shy. A lot of people took that wrong—that he was kind of aloof, but he wasn’t at all. He was just kind of a shy guy. I think he had confidence in everything he was doing. He would always complain to people, say to people, “Well, I could have done better if I ‘d have had more time and more budget.” Had he the advantage of a lab, as the Westmores had, access to lab technicians that other people had, there’s no telling what he could have done. His imagination wasn’t stumped—the only thing he was staggered by were materials and how to use them, and what to do. Mostly it was budget; he just didn’t have the money to do this stuff. That’s why most of his suits, including Marty and the She-Creature, were built over a pair of long johns.’55 to ’58 was his time period. He did a lot of films in that small span of time and worked in a lot of films that he did just bits and hunks of. Like in The Undead…Paul even played a corpse in that film. In Voodoo Woman he was one of the drunks sitting at the table. In Hot Rod Girl he got run over by a car. He could have been a good actor, but that was not his bag at all. That wasn’t his thing—he just loved creating the monsters and stuff.He had the wackiest sense of humor of any guy I ever knew—that’s why we did so many gag pictures together. I always knew when he was coming up with something because he’d start to whistle—not a tune, just whistle—and I’d think, ‘oh-oh, he’s coming up with something!’ And he’d say, “Hey, let’s do you as the Frankenstein monster and me as Dracula and shoot a thing underneath our house here.” And he’d come up with this whole idea of how this gal would get [the monsters] in the mail in these big crates and it’s called, The Girl Who Owned Dracula’s Castle—I don’t know what it was—some crazy thing. But we’d do so many things like that that were just nuts! We had way too much fun! That’s why I’m especially saddened by what a recluse he became and how bitter he got.To think what he and Jackie did off a shoestring, literally, and the creativity this man had to come up with this stuff—like, “How do I build this? I don’t know how! There are no books—there’s nothing!” And to be able to come up with how to do it! That’s why I thought his monsters were absolutely spectacular. Sure they were crude. Of course they were crude! There was no time and no budget. But as far as uniqueness goes, and originality, I don’t think you can get any more original than Beulah. In Japan Beulah’s one of their favorite monsters because, I think, it kind of reminds them of the stuff they do. Over there Beulah’s known as “The Golden Crab.” In most all of their genre books there’s a picture of Beulah in there somewhere.But he just put it all away. Jackie told us after he passed away that he didn’t sketch anymore; he didn’t do anything. The last year and a half of his life he didn’t do anything. Even before he got sick he wanted nothing to do with me, or anybody whatever in show business. While I was away in the army he used to send what he called “care packages” to me all the time. They would be projects he was working on. He was working on Strato-Fin, a “Seaview“[futuristic flying submarine] type of thing, but that never got off the ground. He’d send me pictures of all the stuff he was doing and he’d do these funny little cartoons, a lot of which I’ve saved.We don’t know whatever happened to Jackie. We went to see her a couple of times after Paul died and it was very sad recounting the old days, because the four of us were like—we went up there every single weekend on a Saturday or a Sunday for year, after year, after year, and it was just kind of all over.She called me one day about a year after Paul had died and said, “Bob, this conversation’s going to sound very strange, but you’ll just have to understand. I can’t see you guys anymore. I love you guys dearly, but when I see you it bubbles up, all the great stuff that we used to do, and I just can’t handle it. It’s just too much of a hurt for me. So, please don’t call me or anything. Someday maybe I’ll call you back. My life is changed now. It’s totally different than it used to be and I can’t ever go back to those days.” I said, “Well, Jackie, I’d like to check on you, at least. Come down and see us, or we’ll pick you up, or whatever.” And she replied, “No, please understand I love you very much, but I just cannot do it. Someday maybe I’ll call you.” And I’ve never heard from her since. I took her at her word. I said, “Okay, Jackie, we ‘ll do what you ask.”I heard around Hallowe’en [2002], somebody told me that someone’s in contact with her. She’s still around, somewhere—I don’t know where. They said she’s in very bad health. They said she’s not what she used to be. I wouldn’t even have any idea of how to contact her.I wanted so much to send her [my] book [It Came from Bob’s Basement, Chronicle Books, 2000]. I so much wanted her to get the Randy Palmer book [Paul Blaisdell: Monster Maker]. Maybe she got that one, I don’t know. But it’s hurt Kathy and me ever since, not being able to keep in contact with her. I know how we feel when we think about it and, her being by herself, it must be really terrible. They were inseparable—I mean they were absolutely inseparable.I don’t think she knows any of the stuff that’s been going on about Paul now; how much he’s revered and how much people do love his work. I’ve pushed his name and his work to anybody I could. I’ve gotten on my soapbox about it and done it because I feel so strongly about the guy. I feel he was so short-changed. I want everybody to know that this guy was an extremely talented man and a great guy. Anything I can do to keep his name out there I’m trying to do. He literally was my best friend and I don’t feel I’m doing any great thing at all. I think I’m just doing something that anybody that had a friend like that would do. He was an extremely important part of my life. I mean, I wouldn’t even have been in the business at all, had it not been for Paul."
To bring some closure to this story, perhaps stranger and sadder still is the fact that the Blaisdell home was condemned by the County of Los Angeles and marked for demolition after a mudslide in Topanga Canyon all but leveled the house in 1989. Everyone, except the Blaisdells’ closest neighbor, Mark Nygard, had assumed that the reclusive Jackie had moved back east to live with family after Paul’s death, but the bizarre and startling fact is that she’d simply dropped out of sight and remained in the house alone, exposed to the elements, without heat or electricity for nearly two decades until her lonely demise. Nygard had been her friend and confidant in those desolate times, sometimes going to the market for her and seeing to her basic needs. And it was he who discovered her lifeless body in the remnants of her home on December 2, 2006. Jackie had met Paul in the early 1950s at the New England School of Art and Design in Boston and married him soon after graduation. The withdrawn and, ultimately, idiosyncratic Jackie had loved Paul deeply, and perhaps a bit irrationally, for that devotion had taken on a truly surreal dimension after his death. In what once survived of that ramshackle house, a family of raccoons had taken up residence in the remnants of the She-Creature costume stored in the attic prior to the collapse of the roof. I’m almost certain that Bob and Kathy Burns have not yet fully reconciled Jackie’s passing and, most especially, the disturbing circumstances of her later years, although they did reconnect with her not long before her death.
Ever since Paul Blaisdell’s passing in the early 1980s, Bob Burns has taken on the personal crusade of perpetuating Paul’s memory and bringing attention to his truly innovative creations. Despite the lack of access to high-end professional level amenities, there is a resourcefulness and a sense of inspired invention in Blaisdell’s creatures that make them unique, iconic and instantly recognizable. That life can be harsh and at times brutally unfair is a sobering fact, especially in the arts, but Paul, despite his brilliance, would almost certainly have been forgotten, or at best, considerably marginalized, if not for the earnest efforts of his devoted friend, Bob Burns.
So, there you have it, the somewhat strange and melancholy saga of Paul Blaisdell. Blaisdell may not have been the most accomplished illustrator to work in the science fiction magazines nor, perhaps, was he the most skillful of movie monster makers, given all the limitations placed upon him. But he was almost certainly among the upper echelon of those in that unique profession for his sheer inventiveness in the application of materials, and for his raw and irrepressible imagination. Today the popularity of his monsters—Beulah, Cuddles, Marty and the rest—rival the output of the majors—the Gill Man, the Metaluna Mutant, the Mole People. Not for the perfect realization of their appearance on the screen, but for the sheer ambition, ingenuity and originality of their design.
To have endured the slings of an industry driven by rampant egos and a lust for wealth and power, he demonstrated a unique devotion to the genre he so dearly loved, even if in the end it left him with profound feelings of bitterness and abandonment. Artists, though they often feel put upon, are really a privileged lot. Their works live on canvas and board, on the printed page and on the silver screen, and in the hearts and minds of those who see them and are moved by them. In a very real sense, when a life in the arts ends, these works survive to enchant and to entertain, to touch and to enlighten each new generation. The artist reaches across the years and beyond the barriers of culture, distance, time and even death to touch the living; to engage those gifted with a sense of wonder in dialogue; to put us all, regardless of our preferences and inclinations, in touch with our own humanity. And so it was, and is, with Paul Blaisdell. Although he was sadly undervalued in his lifetime, today Paul’s memory shines brightly in the realm of possible dreams. And in so being, he lives on.
For those readers who want to know still more about Paul Blaisdell, his book-length biography was written by the late Randy Palmer and is still in print. You can preview it here: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Paul_Blaisdell_Monster_Maker/MWcsAAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PP1&printsec=frontcover
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