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

by Randy Palmer

  While he was reading over the script, Paul noticed that there were one or two scenes with the monster reaching up through a floor hatch to grab at one of the astronauts. Knowing what a hassle it would be for Ray Corrigan to don the entire lizard-man outfit just to shoot a couple of scenes of the monster’s arm poking through an opening, Blaisdell decided to build an extra appendage that Corrigan could slip on just for those scenes. It was constructed like the full-length suit, with rubber latex scales stretching from wrist to shoulder. It took an extra two days to put together the armpiece, without a claw. When it was finished, Paul sent it over to the studio and kicked back, figuring now was the time for a little rest and relaxation.

  Wrong. The day the costume was delivered to Vogel Pictures, Bob Kent got on the horn to Blaisdell and asked him to drive down to the production office.

  “Why? Is something the matter?” Paul wanted to know.

  “You’ll see when you get here.” Click.

  Forty-five minutes later Paul and Jackie arrived at the Vogel office. Ray Corrigan was standing in the center of the room wearing the It costume, holding the headpiece under one arm while the film’s makeup artist, Lane “Shotgun” Britton (who later became head of the Hollywood makeup union), dusted his eyes with a mixture of powder and greasepaint. “What’s going on?” Paul asked.

  By way of explanation, Corrigan pulled the mask down over his head. It was a tight squeeze—the headpiece was much too small for Corrigan’s considerable countenance—but with a little stretching and tugging he was able to wrestle it on. The only problem was that Ray’s bulbous chin stuck out of the mouth like a half-swallowed softball. “It doesn’t fit,” Corrigan offered lamely.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Blaisdell scolded, trying hard to hold his tongue. He wanted to say a lot more—why let Kent think that the ill-fitting mask was his own fault?—but it just wasn’t in Paul’s nature to take a contemporary to task, especially in front of his own boss. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if Kent had found out that Corrigan had never bothered to show up for a life-mask fitting because Ed Small had been so insistent on hiring the actor to begin with. If word had got back to the front office, however, it might have cost Ray his job. Paul let the matter drop.

  “You know, I’ve got an idea what you could do,” Bob Kent interjected.

  Oh God, here it comes, thought Blaisdell. He’s going to ask me to redo the whole damned thing. ‘Could you make this mask a little bit bigger?’ Yeah right, buddy.

  “You could paint his chin, or something,” Kent suggested. “Maybe that would make it blend in better.”

  Paul’s eyes lit up—not because he thought the idea was any good but because he was so happy that Kent hadn’t just dumped the problem in his lap.

  One of the most popular portraits of It! the Terror from Beyond Space clearly shows Ray “Crash” Corrigan’s bulbous chin jutting out from the alien mouthpiece. Before Corrigan was pressed into service for the role of the Martian vampire, the alien visage possessed large eyes and only one row of upper fangs. The bottom dentures were added by Blaisdell to help conceal Corrigan’s chin.

  Lane Britton had a better idea. “What about this—we’ll put some makeup on his chin and make it look like a tongue.” Before anyone had a chance to respond, Britton pulled out his greasepaints and went to work on Corrigan’s jutting jowl. A few minutes later he stopped to inspect his handiwork. “What do you think, Paul?” asked Lane.

  Britton had pulled off the subterfuge remarkably well. Corrigan’s chin really did look like a tongue; a big tongue, but then who was to say how overgrown a Martian’s tongue would be anyway? “Not bad,” Paul admitted. “But there’s one small problem.” He urged Lane to take a few steps back to get a better look at the overall effect. “You see what I see?”

  With its “tongue” constantly protruding from its mouth, the monster seemed terribly unintelligent. “Yeah, I think I see what you mean,” said Britton. “Kinda looks like he’s saying ‘D-uh.’” Everyone who saw the costume thought the same thing.

  Luckily, Blaisdell was able to come up with a quick fix. He made up a second set of choppers and glued them into the mask, giving It a bottom row of fangs in addition to the top row. The effect was instantaneous. This second set of teeth not only helped to conceal Corrigan’s masquerading chin, it screened out the shadows between his chin and neck. Now the monster looked even meaner than before. And instead of saying “D-uh,” it looked like it was saying “Hisss-s-s!”

  There was one other small problem left to resolve. Since the original plastic eyes had been removed from the mask at Ed Small’s request, the holes left in the rubber latex tended to reveal too much of Corrigan’s actual face. Paul decided to whip up a couple of specially colored latex pieces that could be applied to the skin around Corrigan’s eyes with spirit gum. These doughnut-shaped appliances blended with the texture of the mask and obscured the eyeholes well enough so that only those standing close to Corrigan could tell the difference.

  At last, It was ready to rock, or so Blaisdell believed: “I really thought I was finished with It when I turned everything over to the production department, but after just a few days of shooting I got a desperate call from the studio. They needed me to come down and patch things up, because ‘Crash’ Corrigan had crashed right through the scales on his lizard hide, and nobody at the studio knew how to fix it.”

  When Paul turned up at the film set with his “rescue kit” in response to Bob Kent’s phone call, he walked into a situation he had never before encountered. With Eddie Cahn at the helm of It!, he expected that the shooting would be progressing relatively smoothly. But in fact the atmosphere on the set was unfriendly and disjunctive. Tempers flared constantly. Ray Corrigan, Paul learned, had shown up on the set three sheets to the wind on more than one occasion and was becoming decidedly uncooperative. Cahn had set up a shot using shadows that would appear early in the picture to introduce the monster to the audience, but Corrigan refused to play the scene in the It headpiece. “I’m not gonna wear that blasted mask when I don’t have to,” Corrigan complained. If Cahn was going to photograph only his shadow, why should he be bothered? The audience wasn’t going to see the monster’s face, anyway.

  “You don’t understand, Ray,” Cahn argued. “The shape of the monster’s head is completely different from your own. The audience isn’t stupid. They’re going to be able to see your profile, even if it is only a shadow.”

  “I don’t care, I ain’t wearin’ that mask,” Corrigan insisted.

  Time was wasting while they argued back and forth, so eventually Cahn gave up and they photographed the scene with Corrigan in Blaisdell’s monster suit, minus the head. Sure enough, in the finished film Corrigan’s obviously human profile stood out in sharp contrast to the bulky monster suit he was wearing as the creature’s silhouette was thrown on the spaceship’s interior wall. It was easy to spot not only Corrigan’s nose and chin, but even his hairline.

  Cahn related to Paul the difficulty they were having with Corrigan. “He’s been drinking, and he’s creating some real problems for us. I don’t know whether it’s that, or if he’s just being overzealous with his role, but he has torn the hell out of that costume of yours. ‘Shotgun’ [Britton] has been following him around all day with a bucket of glue, picking up the pieces that’ve been knocked loose and putting them back on.” Sure enough, when Paul checked, he found dozens of scales missing from the costume. The zipper was stuck, too, and nobody seemed able to get Ray resealed inside the suit. “I never understood why the guy in charge of the costume department couldn’t get Ray sealed into that suit,” Blaisdell said, “but I figured once I got him patched up, I’d better stick around in case anything else happened.”

  Paul and Jackie always kept supplies of latex, glue, paint, and similar materials at the ready in their portable repair kit. It took less than an hour to replace the scales that had gotten knocked loose from the It! costume, so the production didn’t suffer much downtime. Once
Corrigan was good to go, Blaisdell stepped back to the sidelines and kept to himself. He was really hanging out more for Corrigan’s benefit than anyone else’s. “Frankly, I think Ray appreciated the company,” said Blaisdell. “Everybody had their nose in the script, and it was really just a tight fit. It wasn’t the kind of ‘loose’ situation we’d had at American International, where we’d all learned to work together. I never heard anybody kidding anybody, or anybody laughing. It was really a stuffy, sad sort of set.”

  Marshall Thompson seemed to be the only one enjoying himself on the picture. His costar, Shawn Smith, who played the love interest, turned out to be almost as much of a problem as Corrigan. No one seemed to be able to figure out whether she was angry at Ray for his inebriated misbehavior, angry at Eddie Cahn for putting up with Corrigan’s shenanigans, or angry with her agent for signing her to the picture. “All we knew was that she was a real snit,” said a source close to the production. “Everybody stayed as far away from her as possible.”

  Although Blaisdell never said much about it, Ray Corrigan continued to be a source of headaches for the producers of It! Often he failed to pay attention to Cahn’s direction or misconstrued a set of instructions. In one particular scene that was never excised from the final print, the monster was supposed to search for its prey in a cramped, tubelike corridor that snaked through the spaceship. While Corrigan was playing the scene, the mask worked itself loose from the latex around his eyes, obscuring his vision. Cahn yelled from his director’s chair, “Lift your head! Lift your head! We can’t see your damn face!” Corrigan, not quite understanding that Cahn wanted him to look up at the camera, reached out with one of his huge three-fingered monster gauntlets and literally pushed the mask back on his forehead, realigning the eyeholes. It was definitely not one of It’s better moments.

  Cahn had never intended for his Martian lizard-man to ape the antics of a gorilla, but as Bob Burns often pointed out, Corrigan essentially played the role of the monster as if he were playing a simian in one of the old movies he had made years earlier. But the critics apparently never noticed. It! the Terror from Beyond Space received better notices than most other grade-B sci-fi films of the day, and paying audiences seemed to love it. Buoyed by a better-than-average budget, the film looked good and played better. Jerry Bixby’s timeless tale generated a fair amount of suspense as well. Topped off by Blaisdell’s nightmarish vision of a Martian vampire, the United Artists release became one of the most popular of the late 1950s monster movies.

  The costume Paul built ended up being used in another low-budget movie called Invisible Invaders, released about a year after It! the Terror from Beyond Space. This disjointed quickie, which has almost been forgotten, has the single distinction of picturing armies of the walking dead menacing remote pockets of human beings almost ten years before George A. Romero popularized the concept in his nightmarish Night of the Living Dead (itself inspired by Richard Matheson’s classic sci-fi novel, I Am Legend). But there the similarities end. The basic concept of Invisible Invaders, that the aliens are invisible and ride around in invisible spaceships, allowed the film to be made as cheaply and effortlessly as possible. It was produced by Bob Kent and directed by Eddie Cahn, the same team that had given us It! the Terror from Beyond Space, so it is not all that surprising that Paul’s monster outfit turned up at the conclusion of Invisible Invaders.

  The story begins with the death of Dr. Karol Noyman (John Carradine), who accidentally blows himself to smithereens in his own laboratory. An invisible presence shuffles toward his graveside at the funeral, and later that night Noyman’s reanimated corpse (Carradine again, now sporting hollow-eyed greasepaint makeup) visits level-headed Dr. Penner (Philip Tonge), an outspoken opponent of nuclear testing. The corpse begins a dialogue with Penner, revealing its alien origin and demanding that Penner deliver a message to his people (presumably associates at the Atomic Energy Commission). The message, not surprisingly, is that since human beings are now capable of space travel, we must stop fooling around with nuclear toys or risk the threat of extinction. If the leaders of Earth fail to capitulate to the invaders’ demands, this extraterrestrial race will take over the bodies of our dear departed loved ones and wage an all-out war against humanity.

  Twenty-four hours later the aliens make good their threat, and lots of dead guys get up and stagger around. (There are no dead girls, interestingly enough.) Lots of stock footage of natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and the like is inserted here just to show us the aliens mean business.

  Meanwhile, a crack team of scientists headed up by a no-nonsense military type, Major Bruce Jay (John Agar), works feverishly to devise a means to combat the invaders. They manage to trap one of the creatures by luring an ambulatory corpse into a pool of liquid acrylic. This has the effect of sealing the body’s pores, thus trapping the alien inside. (Previously it was learned that the aliens enter the flesh through the pores.) Jay and the others transport the body back to their lab for testing. Later a fistfight breaks out between Major Jay and Dr. LaMont (Robert Hutton), and a bottle of acid strikes an air conditioner during the scuffle. The air conditioner emits a loud screeching sound, which sends the imprisoned invisible invader into paroxysms of pain, eventually killing it. A chance accident has inadvertently led to the discovery of the key to the mystery (this happens all the time in these 1950s films): amplified sound waves will destroy the menaces from outer space. Incidentally, the sound waves also turn the invaders visible for a short time just before they die.

  With time running out, the scientists in the bunker devise high-powered “sound rifles” to be used against the invaders. It’s just a matter of time before hundreds of the units are manufactured and shipped all over the world to combat the menace, returning ownership of terra firma to the living once more.

  Paul’s It! costume was worn briefly by those actors in the film who portrayed the dying invaders, who for some odd reason become visible just as their vital signs shut down. To help camouflage the costume, optical effects were added to lighten the image and give it a distinct blur, so that it’s very difficult to tell that the invaders’ true form matches that of Paul’s Martian lizard-man. (If this had been an American International release, the dying invaders would probably have been seen very clearly, most likely as a bunch of She-Creatures.)

  Invisible Invaders garnered absolutely terrible reviews, and deservedly so. Even children, who by 1959 made up the bulk of the sci-fi movie audience, seemed to hate it. (I know I did.)

  No filmmaker ever looked to Invisible Invaders for inspiration, but the same is just not true of It! the Terror from Beyond Space, despite its B-budget origin. Jerome Bixby’s story of a stowaway monster knocking off the crew of an earthbound spaceship one by one was so popular it was repeated twenty years later in 20th Century Fox’s blockbuster hit of 1979, Alien. That film, written by Dan O’Bannon, suffered critical barbs fired by fans who remembered It! the Terror from Beyond Space and believed it to be the uncredited inspiration for Fox’s multimillion-dollar extravaganza. Genre magazine Cinéfantastique ran an article comparing the plotlines of the two films, and examined another motion picture called Planet of the Vampires (retitled The Demon Planet for American television) that seemed to have suggested a major subplot of Alien. Blaisdell acknowledged the connections between all three films but didn’t think there was any intentional plagiarism on the part of any of the writers. “Lots of movies tell the same stories,” he pointed out. “I’ve seen Alien, and I’m not surprised it has become the success it has with the kind of budget and manpower involved. Remind me never to be a one-man band again.”

  Typically, Paul had nothing but kind words for the creative team behind the picture. “Personally, I thought the creature itself was great. It kind of suggested the head of a moray eel attached to the body of a sea horse, with a lizard’s tail and human legs,” he said. “My hat’s off to the guy that played the monster. What a great job he did.”

  After the release of It! the
Terror from Beyond Space Blaisdell set aside his latex and foam rubber for a while and concentrated on painting while waiting for another film assignment to turn up. A very minor project presented itself when James Warren and Forrest Ackerman were working out the contents of the premiere issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Warren wanted to have a “behind-the-scenes” story about the creation of a movie monster, so Forry asked Paul to contribute some photographs of himself working on one of his AIP monsters. Paul sent Ackerman some material on Invasion of the Saucer Men, but none of the photos demonstrated the step-by-step process of monster-making that Warren and Ackerman had in mind. Paul turned for help to Bob Burns, who agreed to photograph Blaisdell at work creating a “giant brain.” For the photo session, Paul whipped up an enormous plaster brain—nearly three times the size of a Saucer Man cranium—and highlighted it with airbrushed folds of “tissue.” The magazine ended up using several of these photographs in a pictorial entitled “How Hollywood Creates a Monster,” the implication being that the plaster brain seen in the pictures was built for an actual Hollywood production. (It wasn’t, of course. It was created specifically for the article and was never used in a movie. It did provide raw material for the Blaisdell/Burns gag-photo sessions, however.)

  As 1958 segued into 1959, those days of fun-filled photo sessions, 16mm home horror movies, and radio spoofs were drawing to a close. For the last few years, Bob and Kathy Burns had visited with the Blaisdells nearly every single weekend, and Paul and Bob had become the best of friends. Traditionally the Blaisdells shied away from big Hollywood brouhahas, preferring each other’s company over that of Hollywood bigshots, stars, and showpeople. Now that Paul had gotten to know someone on his own wavelength he truly enjoyed Bob’s and Kathy’s company.