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

by Randy Palmer

  Dr. Royce warns the crew that Van’s infection will eventually kill him. “I’ll need more plasma if we’re going to try to keep him alive,” she says, pointing to the empty containers of blood that have already been used. Carruthers, Royce, and Finelli (Richard Benedict) team up to collect emergency plasma from the lower deck. With Calder directing them via the intercom system (he can see the creature’s movements from his position between the induction pumps), they should be able to make the trip down and back safely.

  Just as they are about to start out, the intercom sputters to life and Calder announces that the monster has just wandered into the atomic reactor room. The quick-thinking Carruthers closes the door behind it via remote control and hollers to Royce and Finelli, “Now’s our chance!” The three of them descend through the central hatch to the ship’s storage compartment to gather the vials of plasma.

  Meanwhile, the alien infection in Van’s bloodstream reaches his brain, causing him to become hostile and unpredictable. He throws the switch that unshields the nuclear reactor core. The intense heat and light of the atomic pile drive the monster wild. It batters its way through the locked door and spots the crewmen trying to rescue Calder. The creature lashes out at Finelli, killing him instantly, then turns toward Carruthers and Royce. “There’s nothing we can do!” Royce shouts. “Get that blood upstairs, fast!” They make a dash for the ladder leading to the next level, while Calder limps back to the safety of the induction pumps.

  After Dr. Royce stabilizes Van Heusen’s condition with the plasma, the crew moves up another level to put more distance between themselves and It. Carruthers explains, “There’s nothing to do now but wait; wait and see if the beast will reach us through the center hatch. We can go no higher. We are in the top level of the ship. This is where either we die, or It dies.”

  A sudden communication from Calder warns them that the creature is on the move. It makes its way up the ladder and tears through the hatch leading to the upper levels. With nowhere left to run, the crew prepare for certain death. But Carruthers happens to notice a gauge that indicates the ship’s oxygen consumption is abnormally high. Surmising that the alien creature is rapidly using up the oxygen because of its enormous lung capacity, Carruthers gets the idea to suffocate the monster by creating an internal vacuum in the ship. “Get your spacesuits on quick!” Carruthers directs the others.

  As It crashes through the last hatch, Van Heusen throws the switch that opens the airlock door. Every loose object in the ship is kicked into a frenzied whirlwind dance as the air is sucked into space. As the oxygen level is reduced to zero, It begins gasping for breath, then slowly lowers its head and dies.

  Back on Earth, a tele-radio message is received from Royce: “Of the 19 men and woman who have set foot on the planet Mars, 6 will return. There’s no longer a question of murder, but of an alien and elemental life force—a planet so cruel, so hostile, that Man may find it necessary to bypass it in his endeavor to explore and understand the Universe. Another name for Mars is ‘Death.’”

  Fade to black.

  Paul Blaisdell particularly enjoyed working with the script writer: “Jerry Bixby wrote a helluva script in my opinion, and we had no problems figuring out what a Martian lizard-man should look like. Jerry likes my planetary astronomy, and I always liked his writing, so we worked pretty well together. He’s great to have around because when he gets bored on a soundstage he gets so damned funny he cracks us all up. I think he must have taught Rich Little.”

  Blaisdell wanted to give the lizard-man an expanded, barrel-like chest to suggest the enormous lung capacity a living being would need to survive in the thin atmosphere on Mars, along with a large, upturned nose with flaring nostrils. He decided that since It was supposed to be a carnivore, it would need to have a row of needlelike fangs like those of history’s most infamous killer, the tyrannosaur. And because it was more reptilian than mammalian, it should have scales and prodigious strength. It would be a massive creature, much larger than the Atomic Mutant, more bulky than the She-Creature. Everything about It was going to be big—big eyes, big teeth, big neck, big claws, big feet.

  In early sketches It had facial features that were scaly but sleek, less boxlike than the final product. The changes that were made to the costume were the result of the producers opting to give the role of the monster to someone other than Blaisdell. When he was first approached to work on the picture, Paul naturally assumed he would play the part of the monster just as he had in the movies he had worked on up to this point. But the film’s executive producer, Ed Small, figured to add some extra umph to the marquee value by hiring a down-and-out actor by the name of Ray “Crash” Corrigan to play the part of the monster.

  Corrigan had been a popular Saturday matinee hero at the height of his career in the 1930s and 1940s. He appeared in cliff-hangers like Undersea Kingdom but most often played the hulking apes that stalked through films such as Dr. Renault’s Secret, Captive Wild Woman, White Gorilla, and a slew of other adventure and horror films. By the 1950s, Corrigan was having difficulty keeping his alcoholic intake in check—that was part of the reason his Hollywood career was on the skids—and he often was disagreeable and uncooperative. He interfered with the production of It! by refusing to make a trip to Blaisdell’s workshop in Topanga to get measured for the costume. Therefore, when Paul began work on the first part of the costume to be made—the headpiece—he was forced to build it over his own bust, just as he normally did when designing masks for other pictures. It wasn’t too surprising to discover later on that the completed headpiece failed to fit Corrigan very well, as Blaisdell later noted:

  The only real headache I had on It! The Terror was with the headpiece, which had to be altered before it would fit Ray Corrigan. Fortunately, Ray was able to give me a pair of his long underwear so I could make the rest of the costume to fit him. And it’s a good thing he did, because if I’d had to guess at his measurements I doubt we could’ve ever gotten him into that suit, even if the whole crew was squeezing him from every side.

  For years Blaisdell had been making movie monsters in his own unique way, employing positive molds to create the haunting images that nightmare-seekers paid to see over and over again. Now he tried experimenting with more sophisticated mask-making techniques, for the first time using a negative mold to create the three-dimensional visage of It! the Terror from Beyond Space.

  The positive molds Blaisdell had been using ever since he got into the monster business were possible only because in effect a negative mold had been created years earlier. When Jackie sculpted a life-size bust of her husband, it took the place of a life-mask that Blaisdell should have made when he designed his very first full-body monster suit in 1955. To make certain that a rubber latex appliance will fit the person who is supposed to wear it, it needs to be developed from a mold of the wearer’s real-life dimensions. The process usually begins with the making of a plaster cast of the actor’s face. When the plaster hardens and is removed, the inside of the cast is a negative replica of the model’s likeness. Obviously a mask cannot be made from a negative mold, so the plaster mold is filled with latex which is allowed to harden and then removed. The dried latex now forms a perfect positive mold of the person’s face. Designing makeup appliances over this latex mold guarantees that the finished product will precisely fit the actor who is supposed to wear it.

  Blaisdell was able to skip most of these preliminaries by creating masks over a latex blank. Jackie’s life-size sculpture took the place of the standard plaster mold that is generally the first step of any mask-making process. If she had made the sculpture too large or too small, Blaisdell would never have been able to take the short-cuts he did over the years.

  Obviously, with Ray Corrigan playing the part of the monster, Paul should not have used one of his blanks to build the headpiece because Corrigan’s measurements were quite different from his own, but in fact that is what he ended up doing. Producer Bob Kent and director Eddie Cahn had already looked at Pa
ul’s preliminary sketches of It! and given their blessings, so Paul was free to proceed with the actual headpiece. With a deadline staring him in the face, it was impossible to delay work on the mask for long, hoping that Corrigan would eventually get off his high horse and make the drive up to Topanga Canyon for a fitting. A few days later, when Corrigan’s long johns arrived on the doorstep without Ray inside them, Paul figured he was going to have to use one of his blanks or the mask would never be finished in time.

  Hoping that the latex rubber would stretch enough to accommodate Corrigan’s hat size, Blaisdell began the monster-making process by modeling a three-dimensional version of the creature’s face using water-based clay over a latex blank. He kept the design relatively straightforward, without all the hooks, horns, antennae, and other protuberances that had graced many of his other creations. The mouth was made extremely wide and fishlike, complimenting the creature’s bulbous ears and enormous, upturned nostrils. Above the brow were added several bony ridges that curved downward from the temples to the eyelids, creating a perpetually scowling countenance that also gave the face a certain degree of varicosity. A larger vertical ridge ran between the eyes and up the forehead to the top of the head, where it gradually receded into the scalp. A row of aluminum plates were pushed into the clay on either side of the head to create metallic scales. These plates were about the size of playing cards and ran from the neck over the top of the head and down the other side, effectively dividing the headpiece into two parts.

  Leaving the eyes, ears, and fangs for last, Blaisdell mixed up a quantity of casting plaster which would be used to create a negative mold of the finished sculpture. Water was stirred into the plaster until the mixture reached the consistency of heavy whipped cream, and it was then brushed onto the front half of the clay figure. Wet burlap strips were added to the plaster before it hardened to give the mold extra strength. Additional alternating layers of plaster and burlap were continually applied until Blaisdell had built up the mixture to a little more than an inch thick. This was allowed to dry thoroughly, and the process was then repeated for the back of the head. When this had also dried, Blaisdell pried apart the two halves of the mold with a screwdriver.

  Left: Paul Blaisdell’s original clay sculpture of the alien known as It! the Terror from Beyond Space. The dimensions of the completed latex headpiece were stretched out of all proportion by Ray Corrigan’s own massive, angular head. On film the monster looked like a deformed cousin to Blaisdell’s original concept. Right: This side view of the It! the Terror from Beyond Space sculpture plainly shows the original design’s enormous, elongated brow and egg-shaped head, which became much more boxlike on film. The very human ear was destined to be replaced by something a little more unusual, of course.

  The plaster, which had been absorbed into the many nooks and crannies of the original clay sculpture, now provided detailed front and back negative molds of the It! headpiece. After the molds were cleaned (some of the clay invariably stuck to the plaster), Blaisdell painted each with liquid latex. He added a bit of brown poster paint to the latex mix so that the finished product would have an appropriate desert-beige hue. This would eliminate the need to paint every inch of the costume, allowing Paul to spend more time on just the highlights.

  When the latex had dried, it was carefully peeled away from the plaster, and the front and back were sealed together with additional applications of latex. At this point positive molds for the ears and teeth were fashioned out of clay and pine, respectively, and used to generate rubber latex pieces that were glued to the headpiece with contact bond cement. Canine teeth were fashioned from a pine wood mold. To avoid having to glue each fang into the headpiece separately, a sawtooth pattern was made from a single length of pine. Liquid latex was applied to the pine mold, then dried, removed, and stuffed with cotton. What Paul ended up with was a single horizontal strip of pointed fangs which he glued to the inside of the mask’s upper lip.

  The Martian monster suit built for It! the Terror from Beyond Space prior to painting and detailing. The lethal-looking gauntlets were built over a heavy-duty pair of workmen’s gloves. The talons are white pine (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  The body of the Martian monstrosity was put together in a manner similar to that used for the She-Creature. Since Corrigan had provided Paul with a pair of long johns, the guesswork involved in correctly sizing the costume was eliminated. Because It was supposed to be a lizardlike being, Blaisdell elected to create separate reptilian “scales” that could be attached to the outfit in various configurations. Different size scales were sculpted with modeling clay and were then used to produce latex appliances. Altogether Paul made up a half-dozen different models, and used these to cast over two hundred separate latex scales. The scales were bonded to the long johns in overlapping patterns, which gave the costume a great deal of flexibility, allowing the actor inside to bend, stretch, and move quickly without having to worry whether the latex material was going to tear or be crushed. (Compare the She-Creature’s lumbering motions to the much freer movements Ray Corrigan was able to use in It! the Terror from Beyond Space.) The back of the costume supported a slightly protruding, humplike spinal column that served to conceal a heavy-duty zipper sewn into the lining of the material, which allowed Corrigan easy access to the suit.

  No monster would be complete without hands and feet, of course, and in this instance Blaisdell returned to the tried and true formula of past glories, utilizing pine and latex over workgloves and sneakers to form the basis of It’s triple-taloned appendages. It had the distinction of sporting the largest claws of any Blaisdell creation outside of Paul’s other “It” (the one that almost conquered the world), and Ray Corrigan put them to good use doing bad things to the supporting cast.

  Blaisdell’s completed latex rubber headpiece for It! the Terror from Beyond Space, outfitted with a pair of shifty eyes and newly designed, obviously inhuman ears. This close-up shows the startling amount of detail that went into one of Blaisdell’s projects. Unfortunately, most of the detail was lost amid the low lighting, black-and-white photography, and rushed nature of low-budget filmmaking. Compare this photo to the monster as it appeared in the finished film to note the alterations made to the facial features and the shape of the head. Years later Blaisdell published a color photograph of the original headpiece on the cover of Fantastic Monsters #3.

  Blaisdell worked hard to give the costume an incredible amount of detailing. The creature’s face is covered with literally hundreds of minute “age lines,” painstakingly etched into the latex rubber around the eyes and lips with a variety of brushes (as well as a nail file and playing card). Only a close inspection of the original mask can reveal the care Blaisdell took in the construction of his Martian lizard-man, as the detailing is difficult to notice in the finished film. Obviously, Paul’s handiwork was at its peak during the making of It! the Terror from Beyond Space. It’s really too bad this was his last 100 percent original creation for Hollywood.

  From start to finish, the lizard-man costume took nearly six weeks to develop. Before it was delivered to the set, Paul got a telephone call from Bob Kent at the production office. “Is this monster of yours going to have eyes?” Kent asked.

  What kind of question was that? “Of course it’s going to have eyes.” Blaisdell said. “How is it supposed to see unless it has eyes?”

  “No, what I mean is, are you going to make eyes for it? Because we don’t want to use Ray Corrigan’s eyes. This thing should have really big eyes.”

  “Well, I can give it big eyes, but they’re not going to move,” Blaisdell warned.

  “Oh, I don’t care about that. Just so long as it has big eyes.”

  “Okay.”

  Blaisdell hung up the phone and made the trip to Frye Plastics Company, where he scored a new set of plastic orbs. Back at his workshop, he painted emerald green irises on the plastic and popped them into the mask. He decided to add an extra layer of rubber latex beneath each eye socket and glue the t
op edge of the latex directly to the plastic. When the latex was painted, it looked for all the world as if It had genuine, wrinkly eyelids. With the way the latex lids hugged the plastic, these turned out to be the most realistic eyes Paul had ever designed. So naturally, they were never used in the finished film.

  When Blaisdell delivered the finished costume to the production office, Bob Kent was nowhere to be found; executive producer Ed Small was there instead. He took one look at the Martian headpiece and barked, “Who told you to put eyes in this thing? Those are the worst goddamn eyes I’ve ever seen!”

  Blaisdell started to protest. “But Bob said—”

  “I don’t care what anybody said. Get those eyes outta there!” Paul was so steamed that Jackie could have fried an egg on his head for breakfast. He took the mask back home, yanked out the plastic orbs and latex eyelids, and put them safely away. (And it’s a good thing he did. Those eyeballs came in handy a few years later when he decided to feature the original It face on the cover of an early issue of Fantastic Monsters.)

  When the headpiece was returned to the production office, Ed Small was gone, and Bob Kent was back. Kent wanted to know why It still didn’t have any eyeballs. An exasperated Blaisdell said, “Ask your boss.” Bob Burns remembers how frustrated his friend was. “That was such a prime example of studio indecision. ‘It’s gotta have eyes!’ ‘We don’t want those eyes!’ ‘Where are the eyes?’ Paul had to add some more latex to the mask after the eyes came out, and then of course Ray Corrigan couldn’t see anything half of the time. There’s actually a scene in the film where Corrigan readjusts the eyeholes in the mask so he can see. They never bothered to cut it out.”