Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker: A Biography of the B Movie Makeup and Special Effects Artist

by Randy Palmer

  Later the same day Duke wanders into the desert, where he becomes attracted to an immense, funnel-like crater that periodically emits flashing beacons of light. At the center of the pit is a strange metallic object, apparently several stories high, topped with an anomalous propeller whipping the air furiously. Duke emerges from the crater a maddened, salivating thing. Back at the ranch, he goes after Carol in a frenzy, his fangs dripping like a python’s. Carol grabs the closest available weapon—an axe—and destroys Duke before the dog can hurt her.

  Sandy accuses her mother of killing Duke unjustly, but her words are blunted barbs, born mostly out of the frustration that has arisen between her and her mother. Both feel trapped by a nihilistic existence in a brutal environment. Only Allan seems to believe wholeheartedly in the family unit, which he strives to keep together as events around him spiral out of control.

  Ironically, it takes the arrival of a hostile alien force to goose Carol into shifting gears and beginning to take the first positive steps she has taken in years. Carol describes in no uncertain terms her feeling that the desert has become a refuge for a malevolent, inhuman intelligence which has arrived on Earth and taken control of its wildlife. Her theory is strengthened when Allan discovers that a neighbor has been gored to death by one of his own cows. When the animal shows up at the Kelly ranch and attacks the women, Allan is forced to kill it with a shotgun.

  The weird attacks increase. Carol suffers a skirmish with the farm chickens, and there is a second scuffle with a mass of blackbirds. “Him” is drawn to the desert crater and becomes possessed by the alien mind occupying the spaceship. Allan discovers that “Him” is missing and senses that the alien presence is closing in on them all. He sends Carol and Sandy into town to fetch the sheriff and returns to the ranch in case “Him” should show up. The blackbirds attack again, but Allan eventually reaches the ranch only to discover that Carol and Sandy were forced to turn their truck around and return home when massive flocks of blackbirds drove them off the road.

  Newly invigorated with a sense of purpose, Carol realizes that the animal attacks are precipitated by human isolation. The strength of love and the family unity seem to operate as deterrents to the alien’s influence. While she and Allan strive to work out some kind of defense plan, Sandy, in a move of astonishing stupidity, climbs out her bedroom window to search for the missing Deputy Larry. Hiding nearby, “Him”—his mind now completely controlled by the alien brain—abducts Sandy and carries her toward the glowing crater.

  Larry, who was delayed en route by an encounter with “Him,” finally arrives at the ranch only to discover Sandy missing. Allan orders Carol to bolt the door while he and Larry make their way to the precipice of the crater, where they see “Him” carrying Sandy toward the ship. Allan calls out to “Him,” who somehow defies the alien’s controlling influence and returns Sandy to her father’s outstretched arms. Enraged, the alien kills “Him” by frying what is left of his brain.

  Out of range of the crater, Allan meets up with Carol, who fled the ranch when it was invaded by a mass of attacking blackbirds. Convinced that together they are stronger than the alien, they return to the rim of the crater. A telepathic voice tells them that life on the alien’s planet is dying out. Its race seeks a new world rich with “food”—brains—on which this race of formless energy can feed. Emissaries have been sent to many solar systems to locate a planet with suitable life-forms which could be easily assimilated. Earth would be next, if not for this unusual force the alien senses—the strength of human love and companionship.

  A porthole opens in the side of the craft, exposing the slave of the Beast with a Million Eyes. With chains and manacles dangling loosely from its wrists, the creature approaches the ship’s airlock and gazes down hypnotically at the diminuitive figures on the desert floor. The thing’s face wears a triumphant sneer as a ghostly cyclopean eyeball appears before it—a representation of the “real” Beast—and a (very brief) battle of wills commences. Overpowered by the collective passion of its human adversaries, the alien consciousness flees its corporeal host and escapes—to where? Allan thinks it may have entered the body of a mouse or eagle which seem to have appeared literally out of nowhere—but there is no real way of telling. Abruptly, the spaceship, apparently predetermined to lift off at a specific time, shudders to life and rushes up into the night sky, rocketing away from the Earth forever.

  With proper care and funding, Tom Filer’s uneven screenplay might have been developed into an entertaining little picture. But the severe constraints of the film’s miniscule budget, the sloppy staging of the story’s events, and the rather undistinguished direction by Lou Place (with possible input from Kramarsky or Corman) all combine to sabotage whatever sense of mood and mystery The Beast with a Million Eyes might have had to begin with. Except for Paul Birch, who tended to overact at the drop of a hat (he is even worse in Day the World Ended), the cast members meander through their roles in the most forgettable fashion. Richard Sargeant is especially bad in an extended desert fight sequence which was shot without synchronous sound with an undercranked camera. The unfortunate result is that the actor’s motions mimic the most exaggerated silent film antics.

  Until Roger Corman began making use of him in early pictures like Apache Woman and Five Guns West, Paul Birch’s film roles had been limited to smallish parts in Assignment—Paris! (his 1952 screen debut), Ride Clear of Diablo, and George Pal’s memorable The War of the Worlds (both 1953). Prior to 1952 his acting experience extended only to Broadway, which is probably where his tendency to overact originated. (Stage actors invariably overplay roles in order to project characterization into the cheap seats at the back of the theater.) In The Beast with a Million Eyes Birch tries hard as the henpecked rancher who never seems to run short of bad luck, but the film’s technical deficiencies are simply too overwhelming to allow him a chance to pull off any kind of acting coup. In actuality Birch never learned to corral his exaggerated methods, which is probably why he landed his meatiest roles in the undiscriminating ’50s, even though he continued acting through the sixties. He died in 1969.

  Throughout The Beast with a Million Eyes, numerous scenes were photographed without the benefit of synchronous sound, adding to the film’s bare-bones look and feel. The minimalist interior sets were starkly and unimaginatively lit, and much of the location photography turned out dark and murky. In fact, only during the picture’s severely abbreviated climax is any measure of imagination evidenced by the filmmakers, mainly in the juxtaposition of elements leading up to the cast’s descent into the crater and Paul Birch’s face-off with the alien monster. Everett Baker, who was a professor at UCLA’s cinema department, is cited during the credit crawl as director of photography, although the uncredited Floyd Crosby provided important footage at Roger Corman’s direction. (Crosby was employed on a number of Corman projects, from the director’s picayunish debut in 1955 well into the 1960s.) Nine days into production, Corman stepped in to direct some scenes when the film fell behind schedule.

  The frenetic musical score by John Bickford is unusual but anachronistic, sounding almost as if it were composed for a thriller from the 1940s instead of a sci-fi film of the 1950s. Much of the time it is too mechanically melodramatic to be anything other than just plain obtrusive. Bickford’s blend of swooning strings, staccato horns, and hammering drums mainly recalls elements from Hans J. Salter’s scores for Universal but anticipates the then-emerging style of Hammer Films’ James Bernard, whose scores for The Creeping Unknown (British title: The Quatermass Experiment) and Enemy from Space (Quatermass 2) helped define that studio’s orchestral calling card.

  Even though ARC’s advertising campaign claimed the picture was filmed “for wide-screen in terror-scope,” The Beast with a Million Eyes was projected in standard 1:1.66 ratio. This probably served as the first tip-off to exhibitors that they might not be getting exactly what Arkoff and Nicholson had promised. The clincher, of course, was that the film ended without showing any
physical manifestation of the Beast at all. Not surprisingly, this infuriated most of the exhibitors, who had been primed by ARC’s promotional artwork to expect something extraordinary. All they got, after suffering through 78 numbing minutes of monsterless, nearly plotless footage, was a dark, bullet-shaped object buried in the sand with an incongruous spinning propeller that looked about as unearthly as a miniature ceiling fan.

  A lame attempt to rationalize the title was made when ARC tacked on a precredits prologue picturing the Earth revolving in space with voice-over oratory by the invisible Beast, who crows about all the millions of terrestrial eyes it will use to spy on mankind—rather like a galactic peeping tom. This bit (which was later excised from television prints) may have explained away the title to the satisfaction of the producers, but there was still no monster, and after all, this was supposed to be a monster movie.

  According to some reports (including one from Sam Arkoff), when the exhibitors started raising a stink about the substandard quality of the picture, Jim Nicholson snuck the last reel of film into another room and carefully scratched lines into the film emulsion so that when it was projected it looked as if some kind of dangerous rays were being emitted by the bullet-shaped spacecraft. It’s extremely doubtful that Nicholson actually did this, but if he did the footage must have been deep-sixed because as the film stands there are no “rays” flashing from the spaceship in any scene in the film, except the final shot of the craft as it is propelled skyward, leaving a trailing “ray” of exhaust behind. Alex Gordon, producer of numerous early ARC and AIP films, claimed that the spaceship was nothing more than a customized teakettle. (Arkoff said it was a coffee percolator.) Other reports claimed that the exhibitors offered Nicholson and Arkoff $100,000 to burn the movie and start over from scratch. This is very hard to swallow because Nicholson and Arkoff probably would have taken the hundred G’s, offered Corman enough money to remake the film, and used the remainder to make another picture.

  Whatever the actual circumstances, it is true that Roger Corman eventually recognized the need for a climactic on-camera confrontation between Man and Beast, whether the Beast had a million eyes or not. He got in touch with Forrest J Ackerman, who had numerous contacts in the film industry, to see who might be able to save his picture. Ackerman recommended his good friend Ray Harryhausen, the stop-motion “Dynamation” expert who had breathed life into Mighty Joe Young, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, It Came from Beneath the Sea, and many other monster films. But Harryhausen didn’t work cheaply—especially not as cheaply as Corman had in mind. Ackerman subsequently recommended Jacques Fresco, who had designed the special effects for a 1953 film called Project Moonbase, which boasted a script cowritten by Jack Seaman and Robert A. Heinlein. But Fresco wanted a thousand dollars for the job, and Corman thought that was too expensive. Ackerman cut to the chase by asking how much Corman actually intended to spend on his film’s special effects. Corman said he was willing to go as high as $200 for a reasonably well-made million-eyed monster.

  Ackerman knew the offer was patently ridiculous, but he went along with the gag. For $200 Corman couldn’t expect much; obviously no established Hollywood effects specialist was going to nibble at such miserable bait.

  Eventually it occurred to Ackerman that Paul Blaisdell might be interested in the gig. Blaisdell had recently signed up with Ackerman’s literary agency and was selling cover paintings to some of the science-fiction periodicals of the day on a semiregular basis. Ackerman knew very well that Blaisdell had no experience as a monster-maker, but recalled that Blaisdell had mentioned building his own model airplanes from scratch and working with soap carvings and homemade puppets when he was growing up in the ‘30s. He gave Paul a call and explained what Corman wanted.

  Blaisdell said he might be willing to give it a try, but he wanted to see a copy of the film script before he committed himself. Corman sent him one. After Paul and Jackie looked it over, they got in touch with Corman to discuss the details. The producer assured them that the only thing the picture required at this point was a miniature monster to come on screen for a few seconds, point a ray gun at its (offscreen) human adversaries, and topple over gracefully when it died. That was all there was to it.

  Paul asked for another $200. (He was figuring $200 for materials, $200 for labor.)

  Corman agreed. (He had to agree. At this point there was no one else around who could help out.)

  And so a beast was born.

  Blaisdell later described the relationship between the Beast he created and the Beast of the movie’s title:

  For the 3,451st time, I must explain that the Beast that appeared in the film was the slave of the Beast with a Million eyes. The “real’’ Beast had no material concept in reality. The title comes from the supposed fact that this was a creature that was a malevolent entity, possibly made up of a molecular cohesion, that can look through the eyes of all the creatures of whatever planet it lands on, whether they’re human, dogs, cats, rats, or you-name-it. But it had no physical being, so it used a creature from another star system to pilot its ship, and that creature was its slave. If you can get a glimpse of all of the creature that opens the airlock door, you might notice he has on manacles and chains that have been released so he can do the Beast’s bidding.

  Why they superimposed that awful eyeball over Little Herky is something I’ll never understand, because it just made the whole scene look ludicrous. The Beast is supposed to be controlling the slave from the inside, like a kind of parasite, not floating above him like a disembodied orb. Of course, how the real Beast was able to pilot the ship away after Paul Birch shot it with a .30-30 Winchester rifle is something even I can’t explain. That’s one reason why I’d like to get hold of the scriptwriter someday!

  The miniature monster Paul and Jackie built for the film was a lifesaver as far as Roger Corman was concerned. The exhibitors who had raised such a fuss about the sand-covered bullet, or teakettle, or coffee percolator, or whatever it was, could finally stop bitching. The film might be a cheapie, but at least the producers were going to have an honest to God monster in their monster picture.

  There was one other little hitch: according to the script that Blaisdell read, the monster didn’t have a million eyes. In fact, it didn’t have any eyes. It was a mind with no substance, a being composed of pure energy. Since there was no way Blaisdell could create a dimensional mockup of a cumulous molecular force, he decided the monster would actually be the slave of the Beast with a Million Eyes. It made sense. After all, how could an invisible force pilot a rocket ship from one solar system to another? It couldn’t, unless it was controlling some other life-form that already possessed the lineaments necessary to twist dials and push buttons and grab hold of an interplanetary steering wheel.

  Once Blaisdell accepted the assignment the pressure was on to get things moving as quickly as possible. Working under the gun was something that Blaisdell would become very much accustomed to as the 1950s progressed and Roger Corman and other budget film producers began turning to him not only for their movie monsters, but for props, scenery, and special stunt effects as well. For The Beast with a Million Eyes, Corman promised that the monster only had to perform three actions: open the spaceship’s airlock, point a ray gun at its offscreen adversary, and drop dead. How tough could the job be?

  From the outset of his involvement with the project, Blaisdell realized he would be working with miniature effects. No life-size props were required because this movie monster would not be conducting any direct action with the cast. The only time it would be seen was at the climax of the picture, when it appeared in the doorway of its spaceship some 20 feet above the desert floor. The creature itself was supposed to be between seven and eight feet tall, so Paul decided to build it one-quarter life-size. That meant it would measure about 18 inches in height, on the same scale as the most famous stop-motion movie monster ever created, Willis O’Brien’s King Kong.

  The “slave” of the Beast with a Million Eyes was an
18-inch hand puppet nicknamed Little Hercules. The batlike wings, clearly visible here, were obscured in the film by a hypnotic spiral and floating eyeball superimposed over the action.

  Corman allowed Blaisdell free reign when it came to dreaming up the look of the creature. Since Tom Filer’s script never specified where the alien came from, there was no need to worry about whether its appearance would reasonably match its geographical background, and Blaisdell let his imagination run free. (Not that anyone else involved with the film might care. Blaisdell typically thought through the most meticulous exegeses to extrapolate visual plans for his creations, most of the time merely for his own amusement. Undoubtedly, if Filer had specified that the Beast came from the planet Neptune, Blaisdell would have designed something that could withstand extreme cold, perhaps a being with a thick hide or bushy hair.) Since the thing inside the spaceship was going to be the slave of the real Beast, Blaisdell decided to add some elements to the design which would help convey the idea that it was a life form that had been captured and imprisoned against its will. Although most of these design details were obscured in the finished film, they did show up in some of the promotional photos released by ARC.

  Blaisdell began work on the project by first developing pen-and-ink sketches to schematize the overall shape of the monster. The basic design incorporated humanoid as well as reptilian and mammalian features—an interesting combination that would recur frequently in some of the artist’s later work. The finished sketches served as a blueprint for the three-dimensional model. Since there would be no stop-motion animation used in the film, there was no need to make an expensive and problematic ball-and-socket armature. Water-based modeling clay served Paul’s purposes very well. It was comfortable to work with, mistakes could be corrected with relative ease, and its plasticity offered the widest possible margin for sculptile trial and error.