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

by Randy Palmer

  Several of the small scale props Paul and Jackie created for Bert I. Gordon’s 1958 film, Attack of the Puppet People. The Dr. Jekyll marionette appears in top hat and cloak, while the companion Mr. Hyde mask rests on top of the tape measure. The partially obscured, globelike object on the far left is Paul’s original concept of the Flying Fingers that soared through Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  Paul himself gave special credit to Jackie for her work on this film:

  Besides the trouble we had trying to figure out how to bend a giant paper clip or fold a gigantic sheet of paper into a giant glider, there was the difficulty of reproducing these props six times smaller as well as six times larger than life size, so that when John Hoyt took them back from the puppet people they approximated the correct measurements. But how do you make these things six times normal size and six times miniature size? Well, you could get a slide rule and go crazy. Actually, much of the credit has to go to Jackie, who helped me keep my head on straight while we were working on this film.

  Bert Gordon wasted little time in developing his next sci-fi extravaganza for AIP. In fact, less than two months separated Attack of the Puppet People and The Spider (aka Earth vs. the Spider), which opened nationally in September and November 1958, respectively.

  As he had done with his last picture, Gordon developed a story outline rather than a full screenplay for The Spider, turning the actual scripting chores over to George Worthing Yates and Laszlo Gorog, a new name in the AIP camp. Together they fleshed out Gordon’s story idea about a mammoth tarantula that invades a small California town (it’s always a small town that comes under attack in these pictures) and chows down on a diet of obnoxious high-schoolers. Despite the rather ordinary premise, The Spider became one of American International’s most entertaining drive-in classics, making up in spunk what it lacked in finesse.

  Compared to Universal’s similarly themed Tarantula of 1955, The Spider could not pretend to be other than what it really was: a low-budget takeoff of a low-budget Universal movie. But Tarantula, despite its bigger budget, generally superior effects, and its legion of Hollywood stalwarts, was too stuffy, at times even boring. In contrast, The Spider offered a few real chills and even some pretty decent photographic tricks.

  Surprisingly, no explanation was given for the existence of the title monster. Perhaps Gordon felt the genre was becoming inundated with behemoths spawned from atomic mushroom clouds. He may have been right about that, but any explanation is usually better than no explanation at all.

  The Spider opens with one of the creepiest sequences of any AIP film from the 1950s. Cruising down a lonely stretch of road at night, truck driver Jack Flynn runs headlong into a weird ropey substance stretched across the roadway. Glass shatters; the truck overturns, and the driver’s face turns black with spraying blood.

  At school the following day, Carol Flynn (June Kenny) complains to her boyfriend Mike Simpson (Gene Persson) that Daddy never made it home last night—pretty strange considering that today is her birthday. Mike shrugs it off with the telling remark, “This isn’t the first time,” but the Gorog/Yates screenplay shies away from exploring the subject of parents in absentia further, letting the adults in the audience draw their own conclusions. This is, after all, a monster movie and not a melodrama about family strife. Or perhaps this is the writers’ justification for allowing the teenage leads to conduct their own investigation into Flynn’s disappearance. (Why bother alerting the cops that Daddy has disappeared when the guy routinely pulls these kinds of shenanigans?)

  Mike borrows a car from his buddy Joe (Troy Patterson, who looks less like a teenager and more like a flunky who has had to repeat his senior year at least ten times) so he and Carol can retrace Flynn’s trail. Sure enough, Daddy’s overturned pickup is found abandoned in a ditch, along with the birthday present he had bought for Carol, but of Flynn himself there is no sign.

  The pair decide to investigate a nearby cave on the theory that Flynn might have sought shelter sometime during the night. There is some knuckleheaded dialogue here from Mike which tends to short-circuit the believability of the scene, but the action kicks in before the viewer has much time to complain. The kids stumble blindly into an enormous web inside the cave, almost becoming the giant tarantula’s next meal before they manage to swing free and locate an escape route through the labyrinthine caverns.

  Sympathetic Prof. Kingman (Ed Kemmer), local high school science teacher and all-around good Joe, convinces Sheriff Cagle (Gene Roth) to take the kids’ story seriously. He doesn’t, but just to humor the tendentious Kingman, Cagle outfits a search party with enough DDT to kill a spider 50 times larger than life-size and sets off to locate the missing Flynn. With Mike and Carol as its guides, the search party manages to locate the giant web and the spider, as well as Flynn’s hideously shriveled corpse, which has been sucked dry of fluids by the eight-legged horror. At Cagle’s signal, Deputy Sanders (Bill Giorgio) unloads every ounce of chemical DDT available, bringing the hairy behemoth to a dead halt at last.

  Kingman hires a house mover to transport the spider’s carcass from the cave to River Falls High School, where it is temporarily stored in the gymnasium. Like everyone else, Kingman believes the spider to be dead, but in fact it has only been stunned. During the school band’s rehearsal, the spider regains its senses and immediately makes a meal out of Hugo the janitor (Hank Patterson). It stalks its way through town, snacking on the occasional resident now and again before snuggling up to Kingman’s house and menacing the professor’s wife (AIP regular Sally Fraser). Kingman manages to divert the monster’s attention by ramming his car into its rear end and leads it on a chase out of town.

  When the deputy’s body turns up in the same pruny condition as the monster’s first victim, Cagle and Kingman begin brainstorming ways to kill the spider. Elder reactionary Jake (Howard Wright) reports seeing the creature heading back to its cavernous home, so Kingman asks road foreman Sam Haskell (Skip Young) to dynamite the cave’s entrance, sealing the spider inside for good.

  No one knows that Carol and Mike have returned to the cave to try and find Carol’s birthday necklace, dropped during their first encounter with the beast. Mike locates the necklace, but they take a wrong turn somewhere in the cavern’s arterial channels and are soon hopelessly lost. Hours later, when Haskell dynamites the cave entrance, a chain reaction drops a mountain of debris on the young couple, knocking them—and the spider, which was a lot closer than either of them realized—out cold.

  When Cagle finds out that the kids are trapped inside the cave, he orders Haskell to initiate excavation procedures, digging from the top of the mountain down through the center. Shortly after regaining consciousness, the couple hear the excited voices of the rescue team, but the spider is alive, alert, and after them again. Recalling his classroom demonstration of positive and negative electrical current, Kingman diverts power from a nearby cable line into a set of hand-held dipoles and descends into the cave to electrocute the creature.

  Like many of the photographic effects that dominated Gordon’s other films, The Spider was loaded with process shots. Although there were occasional problems with mismatched matte lines that resulted in scenes, for example, in which the tarantula’s eight legs disappeared one by one into the ground, on the whole the effects were remarkably well done. (There was nothing as blatantly obvious as the spider’s legs that vanished into the sky as the monster crept over a hill in Universal’s Tarantula.) In fact, much of Gordon’s matte work in The Spider was surprisingly convincing. The scenes which married footage of the tarantula with live actors benefitted from Gordon’s growing expertise in trick photographic effects. Gone were the telltale matte lines that had plagued The Cyclops and Beginning of the End. The Spider was a mammoth step forward for Gordon and AIP.

  Since the film was so reliant on process shots to create the illusion of a giant tarantula stalking the city streets, cameraman Jack Marta employed macro-photography to shoot foo
tage of the tarantula scurrying up, over, and around enlarged photographs of the cityscape, a technique Gordon had used on Beginning of the End to show giant locusts overrunning Chicago. Three-dimensional scale miniatures would have looked better, but they would have been too expensive and time-consuming to use. For Gordon’s purposes the photo method worked fine, and as far as audiences were concerned, everything looked reasonably authentic. Gordon also used photographic enlargements of New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns to create the illusion that his cast was wandering through a real cave full of dripping stalactites and stalagmites.

  Paul Blaisdell’s contributions to The Spider included a giant spider leg, rigged for use in close-up shots, and a dried-up husk of a corpse that was used in two different scenes. (It was supposed to be a different corpse each time.) Blaisdell also devised a tiny rubber appliance for the real tarantula that could be used to give it a monsterishly unique appearance. He later recalled how well this appliance worked:

  AIP wanted to make a kind of spinoff of Tarantula, and that’s how The Spider came into being. Unbelievable as it may sound, I did create a makeup for the tarantula, as well as some of his buddies, all of which were supplied by Jim Daniels. It was designed to go on the carapace, the bony plate that the tarantula has in back of his eight compound eyes, and it made the tarantula look as if he had just two slitted, catlike, ghostly eyes. When he started crawling toward you … yipe! You wanted to go right up the chimney. The appliance didn’t weigh as much as a postage stamp, and it in no way interfered with the tarantula’s ability to see or maneuver; he accepted the mini-minuscule load with no problem at all. Jim Nicholson and I got down on the floor and watched while the spider trotted back and forth between the two of us, and whenever we could get to its eye-level and see it coming straight toward us, we agreed that it would scare the hell out of the audience. That’s not my own conceited opinion, by the way; that was the general opinion all around.

  Unfortunately, Paul’s tarantula makeup, which took two days to design, never got past the testing stage. It was the same old story. “The producer took one look and said, ‘Nope, we can’t use it, it’s too horrible,’” Blaisdell recalled. “Of course, this particular producer had always been scared of bugs anyway, so it didn’t much surprise me.”

  Several scenes in the film required the use of a “life-size” tarantula leg. The expense that would have been involved in creating a complex traveling photographic matte to show a tarantula swiping at a live actor was outside Gordon’s budget (it was also outside his expertise), so the director opted to go with a mechanical mockup of the real thing.

  Blaisdell figured that a mechanical leg that could interact with members of the cast in the manner which Gordon envisioned would be prohibitively expensive as well as too time-consuming to build. He convinced Gordon to use a much simpler hinged mockup, which could be wired to work off-camera. Using the wire to lift the leg up or down or left or right would allow the force of gravity to bend it in all the anatomically correct spots. It was the kind of solution Blaisdell had become famous for working out: simple, expedient, and cost-effective.

  Paul and Jackie built the spider leg out of separate lengths of balsa wood that were hinged so that it would fold realistically. The balsa skeleton was covered with broom straws which were painted to simulate the hair on a spider’s leg. A single wire was fitted around the lower portion of the leg, which measured nearly 9 feet in length.

  Bringing the giant spider leg to life turned out to be one of the easiest jobs Paul ever had. The scenes requiring the actors’ interaction with the leg were short and sweet. There were no complicated camera angles or long-running shots that took time to plan and choreograph as there had been with the Flying Fingers in It Conquered the World. In fact, only three scenes in the film used the prop, and one of those was a static shot of the leg jutting up from beneath a pile of rubble (when the giant spider had been buried by an avalanche). In the other scenes, Blaisdell’s hirsute horror was manipulated with the wire, and everything worked without a hitch.

  Two of the cast die at the fangs of The Spider—Carol Flynn’s father and Deputy Sanders. (Presumably there were others, but these are the only two victims the story specifies.) Gordon asked Blaisdell to provide the requisite corpses. Because a tarantula attacks its food by first paralyzing it and then sucking out the fluids, the bodies needed to appear properly exsanguinated. Luckily for Paul, the script specified that each corpse would appear in a separate scene, so only a single desiccated carcass needed to be produced. Wardrobe changes would indicate the victim’s identity.

  Blaisdell had a free hand in deciding the wizened appearance of the spider’s victims. After some experimentation with pen and paper, he settled on a design that combined elements of extreme old age with the look of the ancient Egyptian mummies seen in many museums. “Everyone knows what an old person looks like,” Blaisdell pointed out, “so by extending that look, accentuating it, I was able to give the victim a solid base in reality. By adding elements of the Egyptian mummies, that look was further amplified, but whereas the skin of an old person simply sags, the skin of a mummy is tight and withdrawn.”

  Creating the skeletonesque body started with the use of a rubber latex blank generated by applying liquid latex to Jackie’s sculpture of Paul. Once the latex was dry, the features were built up using the same methods Paul had employed on his Cat Girl mask. Of course, creating a human head—even one that had been squeezed like a pimple—was a bit different from creating a monster mask, but according to Bob Burns, Blaisdell had no need for anatomical reference texts or visual aids. “Paul knew anatomy so well, it was natural for him to know which features needed to be aged to make the face of this thing look like a corpse,” Burns said. “He didn’t rely on technical illustrations or anything like that; everything just flowed naturally from his own imagination.”

  Liquid latex and foam rubber—the main ingredients of any Blaisdell mask—gave definition to the corpse’s face. By adding multiple layers of foam rubber to areas such as the cheekbones, temples, eye sockets, and portions of the throat, Blaisdell was able to magnify certain facial features to create the illusion that the flesh was severely sunken. A gray-streaked wig was attached to the finished mask, plastic eyes were inserted, and the head was attached to a “corpse”—a mannequin outfitted with the proper character wardrobe.

  Paul was pleased with his handiwork. He thought the effect was just what Gordon was looking for—something gruesomely realistic and visually unnerving. He liked it so much he decided to call it “Uncle Elmo.” Before delivering Elmo to the film set, he and Bob Burns decided to have a little fun with it, propping it up inside closets or on the other side of office doorways that some poor AIP secretary was bound to open sooner or later. They were like a couple of kids, hiding close by to watch the fun and laughing at their victims’ gasps of fright. “We hadn’t had so much fun since Paul scared the bejeezus out of that guy in the car with his She-Creature costume,” Burns recalled.

  Taking the credit of “Special Designs,” Paul and Jackie (it was her second screen credit) provided props not only for The Spider, but for some of the theaters that booked the picture as well. Three-dimensional lobby displays depicting a giant tarantula straddling its web were made out of fiberglass and painted with acrylics using a red-and-black color scheme. The finished placards measured about five feet square. Paul added slitted eyes to the spiders on the displays, but they were a poor substitute for the real thing. In later years he often cited the never-used tarantula makeup as his least favorite creation.

  Compared to some of the other American International releases that had failed to win accolades from the industry press, The Spider was more warmly received. Those who cited it as a low-budget turn on Universal’s Tarantula weren’t really off the mark, but even they had to admit that The Spider offered a lot of bite for the buck. Even Variety declared, “It is characterized by well done special effects, a reasonably credible plot, and will be a good feature for the exploit
ation market.” Reviewer “Powe” marveled at Bert Gordon’s photographic contributions. “Gordon uses Carlsbad Caverns background by means of split screen and traveling matte photography, and gets some eerie sequences. These technical aspects are particularly interesting and well done.”

  Arachnid mealtime. This early victim in The Spider (aka Earth vs. the Spider) turned up later in the film outfitted in a policeman’s uniform, posing as a different victim. Blaisdell dubbed the dummy “Uncle Elmo” (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  The critics returned to standard AIP-bashing with the release of Herman Cohen’s follow-up to I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Teenage Frankenstein. The teenage monster movies had been so successful it was a natural to combine them in a single feature. How to Make a Monster took a fictitious behind-the-scenes look at monster movie-making and threw in a pinch of the old Mystery of the Wax Museum/House of Wax shtick as well. Cohen and Aben Kandel (writing as Kenneth Langtry) wrote the story, which offered multitudinous opportunities for self-aggrandizement by image-conscious AIP. Not only were there constant verbal and pictorial references to American International as a legitimate motion picture outfit, the behind-the-scenes locale pretended to let the audience in on movie-making “secrets.” Many of the visual asides referenced purely fictitious films, but Cohen took the opportunity to publicize one of his own upcoming productions. “Our first stop will be Stage Number Three, where they’re making Horrors of the Black Museum,” a studio guide advises a busload of AIP tourists. “And folks, I think you’re in luck. The big scene of the picture shoots today.” Never mind that Horrors of the Black Museum was a British pickup made by Anglo-Amalgamated for AIP; in truth the company would have had a rather hard time entertaining the masses who wanted to see the making of any American International film, because the company had no sound stages. AIP films were shot in rented studios and on location.