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

by Randy Palmer

  Blaisdell later recalled how he had developed his conception of the monster:

  The writer wanted some kind of a creature that was pretty invulnerable and came from the planet Venus. At that time the belief about the physiognomy of Venus was that it was hot, humid, conducive to plant life but not too well suited to animal life. If anybody would care to think it out, there is a kind of vegetation we have right here on Earth that you wouldn’t particularly feel like fooling around with. Not a carrot or an ear of corn, but something that grows in the darkness and the dampness, something that might grow on the planet Venus. Something that might, in lieu of animal life, develop an intelligence of its own. Wouldn’t you be inclined to pick a toadstool or a mushroom or fungus of that particular species? It would move like a perambulating plant, but it would not move very far. When it wanted to conduct direct action, it would send out small creatures which it would give birth to, and they would do its dirty work.

  The design of “It” was so radically different from the standard bipedal movie monsters of the 1950s that Blaisdell was forced to completely rethink his working methods. There was no way the design concept could be realized using the standard man-in-a-suit approach. After discussing the problem with Jackie, Paul decided to construct the monster mushroom out of wood and foam rubber. It would be bulky and maybe a bit clunky, but since its only moving parts would be the arms, that didn’t really matter. Or so he thought.

  Blaisdell made a wood “skeleton” to establish the creature’s overall shape. Using quarter- and eighth-inch plywood, he assembled a kind of lattice-work that resembled an airplane fuselage, or teepee, fitted to a circular swivel-base which was capable of swinging right or left through a 90-degree arc. Over this skeleton were fitted large panels of foam rubber, each measuring about two inches thick. The panels were glued to each other and attached to the frame with generous amounts of contact bond cement. Holes were cut into the material to allow for the insertion of the arms, antennae, and facial features. A smaller hole drilled between the eye sockets provided a viewport for Beulah’s human operator.

  Midway through the construction process Paul suddenly realized that the dimensions of the framework would prevent the finished costume from fitting through his workshop door. (The frame stood 6 feet tall and measured nearly 12½ feet in circumference at the base.) Try as they might, there was no way he and Jackie could get it outside. So out came the screws and bolts; down came the plywood frame. Paul took his materials to a makeshift workshop near the film studio and began the process all over again.

  Although Beulah had no lower extremities, she did sport an enormous arm on either side of her conical body. Measuring almost six feet in length, the arms were built in the same fashion as the body, using a wood interior and thick foam rubber exterior. Blaisdell sculpted huge crablike pincers out of white pine, which served as a positive mold for the liquid latex used to finish the claws. To enable the pincers to open and close, Blaisdell outfitted each arm with a flexible interior cable which operated much like a bicycle’s hand brake. By squeezing an attached grip control, the cable line tugged on a pin embedded in one of the pincers, pulling it toward the other. When combined with a variety of arm movements which Blaisdell controlled from within, the effect was uncannily lifelike. The arms, though cumbersome, were capable of 180-degree arcs of movement.

  Creating the hornlike antennae which “It” used to de-energize the town of Beechwood involved the use of large-size candles which were heated until they were flexible and were then bent into the desired shape. These were covered with multiple layers of liquid latex and allowed to dry, then peeled away and stuffed with cotton and wire to maintain their shape. They were painted with an airbrush and attached to the apex of the creature costume with contact bond cement.

  The creature’s perpetual scowling visage was capable of a little bit of movement. By using layers of block foam, Blaisdell formed a jutting brow and mouth and added pock-marked detailing around the nose and eyes. White pine, carved to shape, was used to make the famous stalactite teeth. The tongue was latex. Blaisdell attached a single wire, about the thickness of a coat hanger, to the back of the lower lip inside the costume, which he could use to give the mouth some up and down movement. For eyes Paul once again turned to the Frye Plastic Company, painting irises onto plastic orbs about 3.5 inches in diameter. He drilled holes into the back of the finished eyeballs and secured each one to an ordinary pocket flashlight. Inside the costume Blaisdell used the flashlights as “handles” to twist and turn the eyeballs in whatever direction he wished. In addition, the flashlights’ beams made the plastic eyes glow eerily during low-light location filming inside the Bronson Quarry cave.

  When all the various parts of the costume were locked in place, Beulah was coated with bright red lacquer paint and highlighted with streaks of black. On film the bright red color would register as a kind of medium-gray, allowing the highlights to stand out. As a final touch, Blaisdell used a ball-peen hammer to pound texture into the monster’s foam rubber skin. This also gave the costume better flexibility and erased any reflective tendencies of the paint, making “It” appear more realistic.

  Paul invited Jim Nicholson in to take a look at the life-size version of the model he had presented to AIP’s president weeks earlier. While Nicholson stood silently by, Blaisdell crawled inside the costume and began working the controls that operated the claws. To Nicholson’s surprise, one of Beulah’s arms snaked upward, opened a crablike pincer, and swiped the handkerchief right out of his breast pocket. It was a stunt Paul had been practicing for a couple of days with Jackie, and it came off without a hitch. Nicholson was suitably impressed. “Paul, you’ve done it again,” he exclaimed. “I never thought you’d come up with something this far-out!”

  For the film, Blaisdell also built four attack bats nicknamed Manny, Moe, Mack, and Sleepy. Blaisdell called these the Flying Fingers and originally their design was quite different; they looked nothing like bats, but were globular creatures that had the ability to float through the air. About the size of a ten-pin bowling ball, they sported two stubby horns above a singular cyclopean eye with a slitted, catlike iris. A gibbous, slanting brow helped give the eye a bit of menacing character. Blaisdell created a three-dimensional model of this early design from clay, but that was as far as he got. Ultimately, he decided that the look “just wasn’t right,” so the model was scrapped and the Flying Fingers were redesigned from the ground up.

  The new version proved to be more aerodynamic. Whereas a spherical organism would have to float from place to place, the redesigned model with its angular wingspan could actually fly (with the help of an invisible wire). It also looked a lot more like a bat. A weird bat, but a bat nonetheless.

  Blaisdell’s clay model became the positive mold for the creation of an army of Flying Fingers. Liquid latex, built to about a quarter-inch thickness, became the flesh of the bat creatures, which were later customized with strips of foam rubber and additional layers of latex. The eyes, once again, were tiny plastic balls obtained from the Frye Company. Blaisdell added an eerie effect to the flock of Fingers by coating the backs of the eyes with a highly reflective copper paint, giving them a weird kind of glint. Lastly, fingernails were added to each model. For these Paul used the commercially available “Glo-Fangs,” a Halloween party staple, which he painted a bright red and glued down with contact bond cement.

  All except one of the bats were rigged to fly on monofilament wires attached to the rubber latex body. Blaisdell used two different flying techniques: overhead and zooming. For the overhead method, he manipulated a gadget called a fishpole, so named because the long arm that depended from its tripodlike base looked almost exactly like one. By gently shaking the fishpole, he could make the attached rubber wings jiggle up and down, creating the illusion that they were flapping. Blaisdell likened the operation to working with a string marionette. He practiced with the Flying Fingers at home for several days prior to filming and got so good at working the fishpol
e rig he could make the bats loop, dive, arc, and just generally “go crazy.”

  Paul Blaisdell’s original design for the Flying Fingers from It Conquered the World consisted of a globular, cyclopean shell that possessed the power of levitation and controlled its human victims by clamping onto the back of their necks with its viselike mouth. The design was radically altered after Paul decided that the creatures would look more realistic if they were batlike in appearance and used a standard wing-flapping kind of locomotion. The globular design is slightly obscured by two of the final models, resting above and below the original (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  When an actor shared the stage with one of the Flying Fingers, timing was difficult and critical. The actor in the scene had to avoid hitting the wires while swatting at the creature in as forcefully realistic a fashion as possible. Blaisdell often remarked on Peter Graves’s ability to smash just about every prop in sight without getting tangled up in the wires during the filming of the scene in which his character kills his “control device.”

  Less frequently employed was a hands-off zooming technique. For this effect, a length piece of piano wire was stretched across the set, which created the trajectory of the bat’s flight path. Loosely fitting one of the latex models to the wire would allow it to glide down or through the film frame. For proper balance the trajectory line was threaded through two tiny metal loops attached to the front and rear of the bat. The obvious drawback to the zooming technique was that the wings could not be made to flap. For that reason this effect was used as little as possible, only in those scenes requiring a bat to hit a specific target such as an actor’s neck.

  One of the models was a stationary prop used for a single scene in the film where it appears to be resting in a bush. (This was the one Paul nicknamed Sleepy.) It was the only prop from It Conquered the World that managed to survive in Blaisdell’s personal collection; the others were given to Bob Burns, Jim Nicholson, and Forrest Ackerman after the picture finished filming. Big Beulah herself was destroyed in the major 1969 flood that ravaged much of Southern California.

  To make it appear as if Sleepy was a living, breathing entity, Paul devised an early bladder effect by hooking a CO2 tank and O2 valve (similar to that used in an artist’s airbrush) to a liplike opening on the back of the latex body. By alternately inflating and deflating the latex rubber, Blaisdell could make it appear as if the creature were actually breathing. The effect was startlingly realistic. (Many years later a similar effect was used for David Cronenberg’s science-fiction-horror film Scanners, which popularized the so-called bladder effect.)

  To play the role of the Venusian mushroom, Blaisdell had to enter the oversized costume from the bottom. (It was built very much like a teepee, with an opening in the bottom.) By tipping the costume up at an angle, Paul could crawl in underneath. Once situated inside, he was able to manipulate the swivel base as well as the individual controls for the antennae, eyes, mouth, arms, and claws. Although it was a tight fit, there was room enough to accommodate a battery-powered light and a copy of the script. In fact, Jackie once got inside the costume with Paul so that they could operate all the controls simultaneously.

  Unfortunately, disaster struck the very first time the costume was wheeled to the set. With members of the crew scurrying about to set up the camera and lights, Paul left Beulah by herself in a stationary position, with the arms resting on the ground. Before he knew it, one of Corman’s crew dragged a grip cart over the outstretched arms. The weight of the cart, piled high with film equipment, snapped the inner cables inside that worked the claw-pincers. When he checked, Blaisdell found he could still raise and lower the arms, but the pincers would never again be able to pluck a handkerchief out of a breast pocket unless they were rebuilt and rewired, and there clearly wasn’t time for that. Too late, Paul realized he should have tied the arms above Beulah’s pointy head.

  When it was time to film some of the monster footage, Paul wheeled his monstrous mushroom into place inside the cave and took his place inside. Corman wanted to film some shots of the monster’s glowing eyes using a 45-degree angle with the camera aimed down at the creature from above. Paul operated the controls that moved the oversized mouth, which allowed for some pretty neat fang-gnashing, and switched on the flashlights to make the eyes glow. With suitably eerie lighting these quick-cut scenes turned out to be Beulah’s finest moments.

  This was then followed by one of her worst screen moments. When Pvt. Ortiz (Jonathan Haze) rushes the monster and tries to kill it with a bayonet, “It” crushes him to death with its enormous piledriver arms. Because the cables controlling the claws had been severed, Blaisdell was unable to operate the pincers, which flapped uselessly on camera as Paul worked the arms around his attacker. Despite the ludicrousness of the scene, Corman kept it in the final cut.

  But there were more problems behind the cameras. While the cast and crew were gearing up to film this scene, Blaisdell was fiddling with the damaged pincer controls to see if he could get them to work. Jonathan Haze was practicing with his prop bayonet while Roger Corman was blocking out the shot. Jackie Blaisdell started to get a “funny feeling” about the activity. It was almost like a precognition; there was too much adrenaline in the air. At the last minute, she asked Paul to wear one of the prop army helmets for protection. Paul borrowed a helmet from Danny Knight, an actor who was playing one of the other soldiers who didn’t appear in the scene.

  Sure enough, when Corman called for “Action!” Jonathan Haze bounded headlong toward Beulah, ramming the bayonet into the costume as Corman had instructed. Inside the costume Paul heard a loud clink as the bayonet bounced off his helmet. After he heard the director call “Cut!” Blaisdell climbed out from the costume and thanked Jackie for saving his life. Then he called Haze aside. “Next time, aim a bit higher,” he growled.

  More problems cropped up when it came time to film Beverly Garland’s death scene. According to the script, Garland’s character uses a Winchester rifle to fill the monster full of lead in between lines of dialogue, but ends up perishing in its lethal grasp. To help Blaisdell play the scene, Corman stationed two prop men below the camera lens who would help maneuver the costume’s monstrous arms into the frame. The first take was ruined when one of them misjudged the target and smacked Garland square in the chest with those oversized pincers. Scrap take one.

  Everything went according to plan in take two—to a point, as Blaisdell later recalled:

  There was enough light in the cave during the fading of the afternoon for Beverly Garland to try and kill me with a Winchester rifle. Beverly has a wonderful sense of barracks language when she gets mad. She’s my kind of gal. There was a lot of cussing on both our parts when the rifle jammed on the first shot and I only got one bullet through my head. I ended up grabbing everything in the cave except her neck, as scheduled.

  A puzzled Corman refrained from yelling “Cut” until Garland finally ditched the rifle and slid to the floor with Beulah’s rubber claws wrapped around her neck. Precise editing allowed the scene to be pieced together in postproduction.

  After the squabble over the climax of the film, when Roger Corman decided the hitherto immobile mushroom monster would suddenly acquire the power of locomotion, the crew began setting up for Beulah’s big death scene. Although the setting had changed (from a niche inside the cave to outside the mouth of the cave), the details of the script had not. The monster would be riddled with bullets and bazooka fire and cooked by a blowtorch to boot. Blaisdell had incorporated into the costume all the appropriate responses his creation would need.

  For the scene in which the monster is riddled with bullets, Beulah was outfitted with explosive squibbs to simulate gunshots. For reasons of safety Blaisdell remained outside the costume, watching from the sidelines as the soldiers let loose with a barrage of rifle fire. On cue the squibbs detonated, leaving trails of smoke drifting in the air. When he thought he had enough footage, Corman yelled “Cut!” He failed to notice that Beulah’s interi
or had become saturated with smoke, which started leaking out of every orifice on the creature’s conical body.

  Dick Miller, who had badly twisted his ankle in an earlier scene but remained on the set because Corman had drafted him into the crew, countermanded the director’s order: “Don’t cut!”

  “I said cut!” Corman screamed.

  “Keep filming!” Fingers were pointing at something behind Corman.

  Corman turned around and saw his movie monster smoking like a cherry bomb. He ran over to his cameraman, Fred West. “Did you get that?” Corman asked.

  “No, you said to cut,” West replied.

  “Shit.”

  Corman may have missed out on the fireworks display, but he managed to get a dynamite closing shot for the monster’s demise, thanks to Paul and Jackie Blaisdell. After the costume was fumigated and returned to Topanga Canyon, Blaisdell set the stage for a neat bleeding effect. (This insert shot was filmed on Blaisdell’s own property with a second-unit crew. Corman was not there.) Paul decided to use Hershey-brand chocolate syrup to simulate blood because its rich brown color registered well on film. With the camera running, Blaisdell opened up prefabricated wounds in the monster’s hide, letting a small quantity of “blood” gush out.

  Many of the cast found it difficult to keep a straight face playing against such an odd-looking monster, and it was no different for Lee Van Cleef, who was required to destroy the invader by blowtorching it to death. As he was trying to psych himself up for the picture’s finale, members of the crew were shouting, “Do it, Lee! Kill that fucking overgrown ice cream cone!” Instead of laughing, Van Cleef got angry. “Get off my back!” he yelled. When Corman called for “Action,” Van Cleef delivered his lines faithfully. Then he leaned down to burn out the creature’s eye, at which point the editor inserted another shot that had actually been filmed at Topanga Canyon.