by Randy Palmer
It was now time for the TV-appearance of The She-Creature.
On Quinn’s Corner, Louis and I gagged it up for a good (I hope) ten minutes, playing it strictly for laughs. Since it was three in the afternoon, the station didn’t want any irate mothers saying we scared their kids so bad they weren’t able to enjoy the murders on “Martin Kane, Private Eye.’’
We had opened with Quinn sitting at his desk, giving everybody a big smile of welcome, when I came in through the window behind him, and reached over to tap the cheerful Louis on the shoulder with a scaly claw.
Undaunted, Quinn had gone on to talk casually with me on the fine points of monster film-making, and even sympathized with me about how the poor monster never wins in horror movies.
The bit with Gene Norman was going to be different.
For one thing, on “Campus Club,” Norman had a live audience of school kids, and he was going to surprise them with The She-Creature.
They were surprised, all right. The next moment turned into a time of terror.
I was scared stiff that I might get trampled in the mad rush they made up onto the stage, practically driving me through the backdrop, scales and all.
Finally, Norman restored order, and it was time for fun and games.
After we talked about the picture for a while, Norman asked “Cuddles” to join in the marshmallow-eating contest. Admittedly, marshmallow eating is fairly simple—but it does get a little harder when the marshmallow is on a one foot string, and you have to drag it up to your mouth by eating the string. Pure string, I found, tastes nothing like string beans.
Finally, I made it and got my prize—two tickets to see The She-Creature at my local theater.
Growling, I gave them to the runner-up.
Then, at the end of a perfect day, Lionel and I headed for the vault—for films—that I had used as a dressing room. As the elevator opened on the 2nd floor, one of the same secretaries we had met in the basement was standing there, her mouth open.
I decided to say something to quiet her. “Don’t worry, honey,” I said, “I’m not a She-Creature. I’m a man.”
But, alas, she just ran off screaming again.
Lionel Comport helped me out of the horror suit, after I had been in there for some four hours. And by that time I was drenched in sweat, just as if I had been in a steam cabinet. I lost three pounds doing the TV spots, but the movie studio figured that it was better I lose pounds than they lose dollars.
Burns enjoyed his TV time with the She-Creature so much that he asked Blaisdell if he could borrow the costume for a few days.
“Sure, no problem,” Paul told him, knowing his friend would take good care of it.
Burns had a neighbor who wanted to see the costume up close, so Bob agreed to bring it over that evening. But Burns didn’t just bring it, he wore the costume over. It was about 9:30 P.M. on a warm summer night as he made his way through the neighborhood. A little girl no more than seven years old was running and playing by herself. She was so caught up in what she was doing, she never bothered to watch where she was going. Naturally, she ran straight into Burns. Before he could say anything, the girl let out a bansheelike howl and took off running in the direction she’d just come from. The girl was so terrified she accidentally tripped over the curb and chipped her two front teeth on a concrete sidewalk. Burns’s first thought was Oh, my God, lawsuit city.
He jerked the She-Creature mask off and helped the girl home. When her parents opened the door and saw Burns in the monster costume, they didn’t bat an eye. (“They knew I had some pretty weird friends in the movie business,” said Burns.) He apologized and explained what had happened as the father walked his daughter upstairs.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” the mother said. “Linda has been sneaking out of her room every night for a while now, just to defy us. We told her if she kept it up, one day she was going to run into the Devil.”
No lawsuits were forthcoming, but Burns has never forgotten that night. He thinks Linda probably never forgot either. “She was scared so bad, she’s probably still in that house,” Burns laughed.
The She-Creature came and went during the summer of 1956, and Blaisdell hung the costume out to dry. Little did he dream that he would end up inside that unforgettable “72-pound suit of armor” not once but twice more for two different films and would loan the headpiece to AIP for yet a third production. Not only that, but clips of the lumbering monster (lifted from the sequence where it was stalking Ron Randell) were incorporated into Roger Corman’s 1958 production of Teenage Caveman, so the costume was seen in a total of five different AIP movies.
The She-Creature barely had time for a summer vacation, and her retirement was a long way off.
6
Voodoo and Venom
The producers wanted to do a quickie at the old Charlie Chaplin studios, so they dreamed up this story literally on a couple of weekend afternoons. Russ Bender wrote the script, and he had never written a script in his life—he was an actor—and he had no idea what to do with a creature called a “zombie.” In fact, I don’t think anyone connected with Voodoo Woman had ever read a pulp magazine when they were kids to find out what a zombie was.
—Paul Blaisdell
Alex Gordon liked The She-Creature so much he decided to make a second picture about a female fiend for AIP. He didn’t much care what the story was about, so long as its protagonist was a woman. Since screenwriters Lou Rusoff and Chuck Griffith were busy working on other pictures, Gordon turned over the scriptwriting chores to Russ Bender, the actor who had played General Pattick in It Conquered the World.
Bender hadn’t written a screenplay before, but as an actor he’d read numerous scripts and was well aware of the mechanics of putting them together. With advice from Sam Arkoff and Lou Rusoff, and the help of a cowriter named V. I. Voss, Bender figured he could pull off a decent script. As it turned out, Bender knew how to put together a script; he just didn’t know how to tell a good story.
Bender turned in his finished screenplay, entitled Black Voodoo, to Alex Gordon and thereby ended his scriptwriting career. (He continued acting in films for Roger Corman and AIP throughout the 1960s. One of the last pictures he did for Nicholson and Arkoff was Devil’s Angels. He died in 1969.) Gordon now owned a fairly uninventive and uneventful script about a she-monster conjured into being by a cross-breeding of voodoo and modern medicine. It wasn’t very impressive, and it definitely was not as memorable as Rusoff’s script for The She-Creature, but it would have to do. Alex began lining up a cast and crew and asked Paul Blaisdell to take a look at the script and begin working out some ideas for the film’s title monster.
Meanwhile, Roger Corman was also working on a movie that had a female protagonist. Known during preproduction as The Trance of Diana Love, the title of the script by Chuck Griffith, it was eventually released as The Undead. It was mainly a fantasy with horrific overtones. Griffith had originally written his script entirely in iambic pentameter, which Corman thought was a neat idea. Later on, of course, Roger had second thoughts and asked Griffith to rewrite the script without any poetic touches.
Like The She-Creature, The Undead tried to exploit interest in the Bridey Murphy story. A streetwalker is regressed through hypnosis to an earlier life (seen in extended flashback sequences) as a fairytale princess accused of witchcraft. The real witch (Allison Hayes) and her familiar are shape-shifters who can change into cats or bats.
Corman wanted Blaisdell to do some work for The Undead. Since his new picture would rely mainly on opticals (and poor ones at that) for its effects, there would be no need for a full-figured monster, so Paul agreed to design and build the flying bats. But later, when it became apparent that The Undead would interfere with his commitment to Alex Gordon’s film, Blaisdell got Corman’s approval to repaint and reoutfit two of the Flying Fingers he had originally designed for It Conquered the World. In the end, the bats were flown through the mythic sets of The Undead using the same fishpole device Paul h
ad used on the earlier film. Although they didn’t really look all that much like the fairy-tale bats Corman had in mind, they sufficed, and no one ever complained.
Blaisdell also had a cameo in The Undead as a staring-eyed corpse. (The makeup was handled by the film’s regular makeup artist, not by Blaisdell himself.) During his brief bit, Paul came face to face with Pamela Duncan, who played the double role of Princess Helene and Diana Love. While Helene is trying to escape the notice of a band of witch-hunters, she climbs into a coffin occupied by a corpse (Blaisdell). Paul had fond memories of his stint on The Undead: “Frankly, I thought I made a pretty good corpse,” he opined. “I mean, how many times do you get a chance to be a corpse and have a very attractive girl using you for a mattress?” There was a downside to the role, however. “It was a bit difficult, though, because I was supposed to be a staring-eyed corpse, and insulation from the ceiling was constantly floating down and getting into my eyes.”
As Black Voodoo—now retitled Voodoo Woman—neared its start-up date, producer Alex Gordon began rounding up his cast. Some familiar faces from The She-Creature showed up in the new film, including Marla English, Tom Conway, Lance Fuller, and Paul Dubov, who were under contract to AIP. With Blaisdell playing the part of the monster, that made a total of five cast members from the earlier film returning to engage unearthly forces in the new production.
The She-Creature had cost American International over $100,000 to make, and it wasn’t interested in sinking that much money into Voodoo Woman. As quickly and cheaply made as most of AIP’s movies were to begin with, Voodoo Woman was even cheaper and quicker. The film was budgeted in the neighborhood of $60,000. When Gordon figured out the logistics, he realized there wasn’t enough money in the budget to make the picture he had in mind. Corners had to be cut somewhere.
Most of the cuts ended up coming out of the makeup and effects budget. That meant Paul Blaisdell had even less money to work with than usual. No matter how the numbers were juggled, there was simply no way AIP could finance an entirely new movie monster this time around.
Blaisdell had been doing a series of pencil sketches of the title monster when Alex Gordon broke the bad news. Blaisdell’s pivotal idea for the “zombie woman” survived up to the final sketch—the one he would use to sell the idea for the design to AIP and the one which he would use as a starting point for his full-size costume. But that was as far as he got in designing an entirely new creature. Bob Burns, one of the few persons outside of Paul and Jackie, Alex Gordon, and Jim Nicholson to ever see the sketch (which unfortunately has not survived over the years), said it had the appearance of “a sickly, shrunken head,” although it was normal-sized on a normal-sized woman’s body. Blaisdell himself said the monster “would give you the dry heaves if she served you a cup of tea.” But AIP wasn’t having any of it—potential for dry heaves at drive-ins across the country or not. Arkoff told Blaisdell what they had decided. “We’ll just dust off your She-Creature costume, Paul. You can make a couple of changes here and there, give her something new, make her look a little different. By the way, you don’t have much time. We’ve got to have this thing ready in about a week because the studio has already been booked.”
At that point Blaisdell lost whatever enthusiasm he may have had for the picture. He agreed to redesign the She-Creature’s body only if AIP would find someone else to design a new headpiece. “We can’t use the same face,” Paul argued. Reluctantly, AIP agreed. They’d find somebody else to create the new headpiece.
At their home workshop, Paul and Jackie began the task of revamping the She-Creature costume to make way for “Voodoo,” which is what Blaisdell called the new monster. Off came the rudimentary wings, the dorsal fins, the tail and three pairs of horns from the elbows, knees, and feet. The lunch hooks were removed and newly cut pieces of block foam were cemented into all the gaps and colored with an airbrush to match the greenish-blue hue of the rest of the costume. A large piece of burlap was wrapped around the body to further disguise it.
Meanwhile, AIP had awarded the job of designing the monster mask to Harry Thomas, a makeup artist whose credits included Frankenstein’s Daughter and The Neanderthal Man. Thomas was “between assignments,” as they say. He promised to have the headpiece ready by the time Blaisdell finished revamping the She-Creature costume.
When Thomas eventually turned in his finished mask, everyone at AIP was horrified all right—but for all the wrong reasons. The head looked cheap. It looked phony. It looked like he had purchased it from a novelty shop.
In fact, that’s exactly what Thomas had done. According to a source at AIP, Thomas had gotten hold of an ordinary “over the top” latex skull-mask—the kind anyone could buy at Halloween for $5 or so—and glued a cheap blonde wig to the top of it. “My God, we can’t use this,” Alex Gordon told Sam Arkoff the first time he saw it. Sam got on the phone to Blaisdell and told him what had happened. “Can you do anything to save this thing?” he asked.
Paul was not happy. He hadn’t wanted to reuse the She-Creature costume in the first place. It didn’t look anything like a zombie, but no one seemed much concerned about that. Now they wanted him to fix this travesty of a headpiece, which is what he had hoped to avoid all along.
“Oh, all right,” Blaisdell grumbled. “Drop it off at my workshop.”
AIP sent the mask to Topanga Canyon. When Paul opened the shipping carton he couldn’t believe his eyes. He was looking at a dime-store Halloween mask. Did AIP actually pay Thomas for such a monstrous miscarriage?
For years Blaisdell never told the media the complete truth about poor old Voodoo. Never one to speak badly of a colleague, he merely said that Harry Thomas’s headpiece “required a little bit of cutting and trimming” to make the mask fit his own measurements. “It didn’t turn out too badly,” he lied.
But Bob Burns told the truth. “That mask looked just awful,” Burns revealed. “Thomas had poked two holes in the latex eye sockets so Paul could see out of it—or maybe it was that way when he bought it—but there were no eyeballs, no teeth, nothing. Paul had to rebuild that mask almost from scratch, and he only had three days to do it. That’s all the time AIP gave him.”
Rescuing the headpiece involved a laborious building up process. Blaisdell covered the mask with sections of foam rubber and latex in order to bring out the monster’s cheekbones and chin. The eye sockets were accentuated as well and colored black. A skeletal nose cavity—one of the mask’s few attributes that Blaisdell retained—was rendered three-dimensionally by building it up with nose putty and latex, then “pinching out” the nostrils, with the result that the face took on a semblance of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera.
Blaisdell added fangs and eyeballs with huge pupils, which gave the mask a uniquely eerie appearance. He glued a tongue depressor to the inside of the mouth so he could give the face a bit of life on camera by wiggling it between his teeth. After painting it to match the hue of the She-Creature bodysuit, he lacquered it to give the foam-rubber “flesh” a reflective sheen.
When photographed, Voodoo looked right at home in a steaming jungle set, her monstrous visage seemingly drenched in sweat.
The zombified Voodoo Woman was a composite of the She-Creature bodysuit and a brand new headpiece provided by makeup man Harry (Frankenstein’s Daughter) Thomas. Unfortunately, Thomas’s work was so inferior that AIP had to ask Paul Blaisdell to rescue the film’s title monster. Blaisdell ended up having to rebuild the mask almost from scratch (courtesy of Bob Burns).
Blaisdell also changed the costume’s hands and feet, removing the oversized monster gauntlets and swim-fin feet originally designed for the She-Creature. Out of time and money, he purchased fresh pairs of commercial monster claws and monster feet and outfitted them with pine-carved toenails and fingernails, which were customized with foam rubber and painted with an airbrush to simulate the jigsaw pattern of the body suit.
Although the headpiece had started out as a disaster, it ended up looking a lot more frighteni
ng than anyone ever expected it could. Although she was never shown very clearly in the finished film, Voodoo nevertheless made a memorable addition to Blaisdell’s creature canon.
The film opens in the savage jungles beyond French Bantalaya. Dr. Roland Gerard (Tom Conway) has infiltrated a voodoo tribe whose high priest, Chaka (Martin Wilkins), stands in awe of “white man’s magic.” Through a combination of modern medical science and ancient sorcery, Gerard is able to alter the physical constitution of the human body. He has been experimenting on a young beauty from a neighboring village named Sirandah (Jean Davis), but so far the results have been mixed. Gerard’s Hitleresque dream is to create an entire new race of beings—half-man, half-beast—that can carry out telepathic commands. With an army of such hybrids at his disposal, a man would be a king.
In a Bantalayan pub, Marilyn Blanchard (Marla English), a conniving beauty from the slums of Pittsburgh, and her boyfriend Rick (Lance Fuller) are keeping a watchful eye on Harry West (Norman Willis), an opportunist who possesses a jungle map that shows the route to a native village rich in gold artifacts. Money-hungry Marilyn asks her barkeeping friend Marcel (Paul Dubov) to create a diversion so that she and Rick can sneak into West’s room and purloin the map. Marcel sends the resident barroom singer (Giselle D’Arc) to West’s table to keep him occupied while Marilyn and Rick take a powder. (Sharp-eyed viewers will spot Paul Blaisdell, in one of his few nonmonster roles, sitting at a table in the pub.)
West surprises the couple during their search but is killed by a bullet from Marilyn’s pistol. Marcel agrees to arrange a burial that won’t raise any questions—for a fee. Marilyn promises to pay him when she returns from the jungle with her gold.
The next day Ted Bronson (Mike “Touch” Connors), a part-time guide West had hired by mail, arrives at the pub. Since Bronson never met the real West, Rick poses as the fortune hunter and outlines Marilyn’s plan. Bronson warns them that stealing from a voodoo cult can only result in death by retribution, but Marilyn thinks she can outsmart any native tribes that dare interfere with her plans and make it back to civilization alive.