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

by Randy Palmer

  The explosion was the result of the army’s attempt to penetrate the metal of the Martian spaceship. When the soldiers accidentally ignite a hidden fuse with their blowtorches, they activate a self-destruct mechanism, blowing the ship to pieces. All that remains are shards of the strange, silvery metal. The army congratulates itself on a job well done.

  When the police discover that Johnny and Joan have fled, Hayden takes charge, promising to get everything straightened out. Meanwhile, the kids begin snooping around for evidence of the Martians’ existence. After an exhaustive search, they return to the stolen police cruiser empty-handed. As they head up a lonely stretch of back road, neither of them notices the disembodied Martian claw that has crawled into the car through an open back window until Joan senses it next to her shoulder. She lets out a terrified shriek; Johnny swerves and the claw tumbles to the floorboards. Before it can scramble back up the seat, the kids jump out of the car and lock the doors. “At last we’ve got some evidence!” Johnny cries.

  With no immediate way to transport the evidence to the police station, Johnny and Joan are forced to hike back to the soda shop to retrieve Joan’s car. From there they drive to the boardinghouse to tell Joe Gruen’s roommate, Art Burns, their story. “Joe kept trying to tell me something about it,” Art remembers, realizing there may be something to this story about invaders from another world after all. He grabs a pistol and a camera, and the three of them head back to Pelham Woods. The police cruiser is still there, now surrounded by Saucer Men who are desperately trying to get what’s left of their buddy out of the locked vehicle. When they hear Joan’s car approaching, the creatures scatter into the woods. Johnny aims the car’s spotlight at the cruiser, allowing Art to catch a glimpse of the disembodied claw. He tries to take a snapshot of it, but when the flashgun ignites, the claw vanishes in a blast of smoke and flame. The only evidence that could have proven Johnny’s innocence is now gone for good.

  Art promises to back up Johnny’s story of the little green men from space. But as they get ready to leave, the car’s battery gives out, stranding them. Art swivels the spotlight around, illuminating a bevy of advancing Martians who unexpectedly let out an unearthly shriek. “It’s the light that hurts them!” Joan cries, suddenly understanding why the claw was destroyed by Art’s flash camera. Unfortunately, with a dead battery the spotlight soon gives out, and the three of them are forced to make a run for it. Art uses his pistol on a couple of the saucer men, but bullets don’t seem to hurt them. He is attacked by three of the creatures, who stab him repeatedly with their hypo-nails. While the saucer men are occupied with Art, Johnny and Joan manage to get away.

  One of the aliens is killed by Larkin’s bull, who gores the creature’s eyeball out. That still leaves three of them alive, and they carry Art’s body to a clearing in the woods. Johnny and Joan make it on foot to Larkin’s farmhouse and use his phone to call the police. Johnny offers to give himself up for Gruen’s murder, hoping to lure the cops to the woods so they can see the alien menace for themselves. To his surprise, they blow him off. The detective (Jason Johnson) tells Johnny that an autopsy revealed that Gruen died from alcohol poisoning. Technically, that lets Johnny off the hook. When Joan complains that they should still be on the wanted list for car theft, the detective tells them not to worry. “Your father took care of everything.”

  On their own once more, Joan suggests that they go to Lovers’ Point and try to convince their friends what’s happening. In no time Johnny and Joan have half a dozen couples on their side. The kids form a car caravan and drive up to the clearing where the aliens are guarding Art’s body. When Johnny gives the signal, everyone switches on their hi-beam headlights. The blinding lights sizzle the Saucer Men’s flesh and within moments the invaders vanish in a gigantic ball of smoke.

  A bevy of big-headed, bug-eyed monsters prepare to set up the Cosmic Frame in Invasion of the Saucer Men (courtesy of Bob Burns). This promotional photo shows the original martian heads, before undergoing “lobotomies” at the Blaisdell workshop.

  When Johnny and Joan rush to Art’s side, they find him disheveled and disorderly. In fact, he’s downright drunk. But at least he’s alive. That’s when they realize that the aliens subdued their victims by injecting them with pure alcohol. Now it becomes clear why Joe Gruen died from a Martian attack while Art Burns did not.

  Art’s voice-over narration reminds us we’ve been watching a flashback: “So that’s my story. Johnny and Joan helped me remember a little of it, but I wrote it, y’understand. A true story? That’s the nice thing about this book-writin’ business: you pay before you read.” Ditto for motion pictures: you pay before you see.

  The story line of Invasion of the Saucer Men takes place in “real time”; everything happens in a single night. There are no time contractions. In spite of (or perhaps because of) this element, the picture turned out to be one of the best in American-International’s long line of sci-fi thrillers. Ramping up the comic overtones during post production helped give the film a fresh edge. Instead of being just another space-monster picture, Invasion of the Saucer Men became a glib, even hip, encounter with the unknown that managed to thumb its nose at adult conventions without once losing sight of its primary responsibility to entertain.

  The late Lyn Osborne gets attacked by a bug-eyed monster in this specially posed promotional photo for Edward L. Cahn’s Invasion of the Saucer Men.

  As often happens in low-budget movie-making, some changes were made to the Gurney-Martin script to restrict the shooting schedule and reduce production expenditures. Several noncritical scenes, such as military vehicles driving down a highway, were omitted in the interests of time and budget. For the most part, character dialogue remained the same, although in one curious instance a Saucer Man is described as “all black, except his head.” In the film this line was changed to “He was all green, except his head,” which was more in line with Jim Nicholson’s original vision of the monsters as “little green men from Mars.” (Since there is another reference to “green men” later on in the script, the original description may have been merely a mistake.)

  Several lines of dialogue between Johnny and Joan (Steve Terrell and Gloria Castillo) were switched as the film approached its conclusion. Lines intended for Gloria Castillo were spoken by costar Steve Terrell, and vice versa. This was probably done to maintain proper character perspective. Throughout the picture Johnny takes the initiative in almost every instance. He is the one who decides when they should return to the stranded car; he notices the open window in the police station; he leads Joan through the woods. Except for Joan’s single critical revelation—“It’s the light that hurts them!”—she is a follower who trusts in Johnny’s judgment and sense of righteousness.

  The most interesting departures from the script are those involving Paul Blaisdell’s effects work. Although Gurney and Martin described the aliens in only the vaguest terms, there is a script notation that each claw should possess a total of “ten snakelike fingers” with inbuilt “stingers.” According to Blaisdell, he never seriously considered giving the Saucer Men more than five fingers per claw because the effect would have been too difficult to pull off. Of course, the “stingers,” or hypodermic-fingernails, were central to the story and were retained. The idea of the monsters’ eyes closing (cited twice in the script in two different scenes) was eliminated also, as it would have involved adding cumbersome mechanics to one of the Saucer Men heads.

  In the single major effects sequence that was excised from the script, Johnny and Joan make a detour to his apartment after their first encounter with the seeing-eye claw. The scene as written is mostly dialogue, but there was to have been a brief interlude with a single crawling alien finger which Joan discovers clinging to Johnny’s shirt. In the original script, the finger evaporates in a flash of smoke when it crawls too close to a floor heater. As Bob Burns has pointed out, animating a single alien digit would have involved building a mechanized finger, a project Blaisdell was not all t
hat keen to tackle. Thus the apartment scene, which really didn’t do anything to further the narrative, was eliminated from the script entirely.

  Measured by today’s critical yardsticks, Invasion of the Saucer Men seems a rather remarkable 1950s feature. The story line may have been routine, but the execution was not, at least when compared to most other independent productions of the time. Invasion of the Saucer Men could have been just a lucky shot in the dark—merely a truistic AIP title that had little going for it besides Paul Blaisdell’s brain-busting monsters—but it seems more probable that, as Blaisdell has himself suggested, spirits soared once the pressure was off to produce just one more routine monster movie.

  Freshening up a standard story line by peppering it with humorous touches and bits of spoof and sarcasm went a long way toward making the new film a winner. But Saucer Men also boasted some of the best photographic work ever to come out of the AIP school of filmmaking. Fred West’s camera captured the best studio-generated night-time photography ever seen in an American International production, bar none. Movies that relied on day-for-night location photography, like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The She-Creature, invariably suffered from inadequate filtering techniques. Lowering the camera’s f-stop had the effect of darkening a shot, but day-for-night invariably appeared murky on-screen, with telltale giveaways every time the camera tilted upward to reveal a sky that was too bright to look like anything except mid-afternoon. Night-for-night photography was too expensive. Saucer Men benefitted tremendously from its dark, studio-bound sets and proved that not every low-budget monster movie needed to rely on location shooting just to achieve a respectable degree of realism.

  The acting wasn’t too bad either. Steve Terrell was a realistic enough teen who responded to events in the Gurney-Martin screenplay in convincing fashion. Gloria Castillo, too, did well with her material; she turned out to be one of AIP’s best screamers. Frank Gorshin displayed an early feel for comedy, and Lyn Osborne, who had appeared in a small role in The Amazing Colossal Man but achieved his greatest fame as Cadet Happy on TV’s Space Patrol (1950-55), had one of the those rubbery, expressionistic faces that could register interest, disdain, fear, or whichever emotion the story might require at the drop of a hat. It’s too bad he died before getting a better chance to show Hollywood what he was capable of. (Osborne also appeared in The Cosmic Man, released about a year after his death.)

  The film’s secondary characters were pretty spunky, too. Jason Johnson (the detective), Sam Buffington (the Colonel), and Douglas Henderson (Lt. Wilkins) were the kinds of stock characters who turned up in numerous ’50s genre films, but here the actors’ portrayals were spot-on. Ray Hatton, one of Alex Gordon’s old-time favorites, didn’t fare quite as well as Old Man Larkin, but the character was too one-dimensional to begin with to offer any actor much beyond what Hatton managed to do with it.

  Probably the weakest link in the Saucer Man formula was the direction by Eddie Cahn. Many of the film’s comedic touches were added only in the later stages of filming and during postproduction, including Ronald Stein’s silly-symphonic musical score, which had as much to do with establishing the light-hearted mood as anything else. It’s doubtful Cahn interjected much of his own brand of humor into the mix (assuming he had any), preferring to let the actors work out their own interpretations of the script. His pedestrian direction, combined with a tendency to rush through as many camera setups in a single day as possible, only managed to obscure much of the action, with the result that some scenes became downright confusing. The geometry of Pelham Woods, for example, with its broken-down cars, idling police cruisers, cow pasture, Lovers’ Point, and alien landing sight, is especially muddled. And once again some of Paul Blaisdell’s handiwork got pushed aside during the scurry of budgetary corner-cutting.

  Cahn had already proven his ability to get a story told reasonably well and with as few frills as possible on pictures like Voodoo Woman. With financing set at about $70,000 and only a seven-day shooting schedule, Cahn couldn’t have done much more even if he had wanted to. Obviously, with that kind of budget nobody at AIP was expecting anything more than standard drive-in fodder. (The picture was being made to fill the bottom half of a double bill with I Was a Teenage Werewolf.) In spite of this, Invasion of the Saucer Men remains one of the best examples of cost-conscious filmmaking at AIP during the 1950s.

  According to Bob Burns, who worked uncredited as Blaisdell’s assistant on this film, 98 percent of Saucer Men was shot on a studio soundstage. AIP constructed a marvelous set that outclassed anything built previously for It Conquered the World, The Undead, The She-Creature, or any of a dozen other films which relied heavily on studio photography. “It was a very large stage, with the police station and the cafe situated in one corner and the farmer’s house in the middle,” Burns described. “The wooded area was also part of the same stage, and it was designed so realistically, with shrubs and broken fences and muddy tracks and all, you had to look up at the roof to remind yourself that you weren’t really outside in the woods.”

  Although Saucer Men began life as a serious take on a light-hearted short story, once the focus of the film shifted from gasps to giggles, “Everything just sort of fell into place,” remarked Blaisdell. “In the end, Invasion of the Saucer Men turned out to be a much more enjoyable film than anyone had envisioned. It certainly became more than the sum of its original parts.” Bob Burns added, “It played better as a comedy than it ever would have as a straight science-fiction story because it still retained a share of horrific elements, like the creeping hand. The mix of comedy and horror is what helped endear this picture to a generation of film fans, and they’ve made it into a cult favorite.” There is another reason why the film became so popular with fantasy fans, however: it has adorable little monsters who are as lovable as they are lethal.

  For Paul, taking on the Saucer Men assignment meant taking on one heck of a lot of work. He would have to build not just one monster costume, but four. After all, a single alien being would hardly constitute an invasion. (For that matter, even four amounted to no more than a little overcrowding.) In addition to those costumes, one of which would be worn by Blaisdell himself and one by Bob Burns, the others worn by dwarf actors Angelo Rossito (whose Hollywood connection dated back to 1932 when he worked for director Tod Browning in the controversial MGM film Freaks), Eddie Gibbons, Dean Neville, and Lloyd Dixon, it would be necessary to construct a separate, partially mechanized Martian head as well as a disembodied claw. There was also the spaceship as well as a couple of otherworldly props. All things considered, Invasion of the Saucer Men turned out to be one of Blaisdell’s toughest but most rewarding projects.

  To relieve some of the burden, it was decided early on that the Martian monster costumes would not be full-figured monster suits. Blaisdell would make only the heads and hands. The bodies would be covered by fabric provided by the wardrobe department. Since the Martians were supposed to be spacemen, it made sense that they would be wearing some type of clothing or an astronomical suit. AIP’s wardrobe specialist came up with black body costumes, each outfitted with a scalloped pattern of sequined material around the neck and wrists. Ballet shoes covered the actors’ feet. In the film’s low-level lighting, these appeared at least a little unusual, although any ballet fans in the audience probably had to laugh at such cheesy shenanigans.

  Even with the aid of these time-savers the amount of work involved with the project had Paul and Jackie toiling six days a week for six weeks to get things ready for the first day of filming. Since Paul needed to produce a total of five headpieces (four for the actors and a separate “hero head”), he created a compound plaster-and-rubber mold which was used to generate fiberglass copies. (The old method of building a latex mask over a blank would have been too cumbersome and time-consuming because the process would have had to be repeated for each separate mask.) He started out much as he had several years earlier when he was designing his very first movie monster, the Beast with a Million E
yes. A large egg-shaped plaster mold was constructed, which served as a three-dimensional base. This was divided into two sections, the right and left brain hemispheres. Using his favorite water-based clay, Blaisdell sculpted the design of the brain tissue directly over the plaster casts. (The plaster was employed merely to define the dimensions of each headpiece.) When the clay hardened, Blaisdell moved on to the next step in the process: making fiberglass copies of the finished sculpture. The two separate hemispheres could be used to produce as many three-dimensional fiberglass “brains” as necessary.

  Working with fiberglass proved to be not much more difficult than working with ordinary liquid latex. In fact, in some respects it was easier because the material seeped deep into the crevices of the sculpture, which helped make the final product more detailed.

  After the fiberglass was heated, cured, and carefully separated from the mold, the two hemispheres were joined together to produce one gigantic brain. To create a network of topical “blood vessels,” Blaisdell experimented with a special mixture of liquid latex and talcum powder, which when added together gave the latex a thicker consistency. The mix was then loaded into, of all things, a cake decorator. With the decorator it was easy to produce ribbons of latex of any length or thickness by firing the mixture onto a plane of glass. This insured that the ribbons remained flat on the bottom so they could be bonded to the fiberglass and latex heads and hands. A little appropriate coloring made these latex ribbons look just like a network of pulsing blood vessels.