by Randy Palmer
Blaisdell’s contributions to the first issue of the magazine were inspired. He wrote an article called “Dawn Age Beasts,” which was an overview of prehistoric monster movies, and he captioned the photos and wrote text for “Horrors of Hollywood,” which focused on Glenn Strange’s portrayal of the Frankenstein Monster in Universal’s Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. But Blaisdell’s best feature was “The Devil’s Workshop.” Here he outlined the process by which he had created The Beast with a Million Eyes, writing earnestly and straightforwardly and illustrating his text with never-before-seen photos of Little Hercules in various stages of completion. Blaisdell even took the opportunity to explain why his monster seemed to be missing 999,998 orbs. It was the first time the mystery of the “slave monster” had been explained in print.
Blaisdell also had some good moments in both the “Tombstone Times” and “Monster of the Month” featurettes. The latter, with its luscious, rainbow-color rendition of the She-Creature, was like nothing that had ever appeared before in a monster magazine. Included with the foldout poster was a bit of behind-the-scenes information about the making of the film—the kind of article, however brief, that would endear this publication to a generation of fantasy fans.
Count Downe (Paul in high-collared cape and stenciled-in widow’s peak), the “epitaph editor,” was a character cooked up by Blaisdell and Bob Burns for the magazine’s newspaper spoof. It was in this section that readers’ questions were answered (in the initial installment, questions were selected from personal correspondence or filtered through the fan grapevine). Other departments included “Slaymate of the Month” and “Haunt Ads,” no-cost classified ads for fans who were looking for posters, comics, books, and film-related items. (Famous Monsters also ran a “Haunt Ads” section which fulfilled the same function.) Above the legend “Slaymate of the Month” was a photograph of none other than “monster makeup fan” Lionel Comport of Burbank, California. Lionel, of course, was the poor devil who had lost his eyelashes to the evil Count Downe some years earlier. Blaisdell also included a “Ghoulden Opportunity” announcement in the “Tombstone Times,” inviting readers to become a “noose reporter” by sending in articles, artwork, and photographs concerning their own monster fan activities.
Like Famous Monsters, outside advertising in FanMo was virtually nil. Items advertised for sale in the magazine were sold through a company called “Castle Dracula” in Topanga, California. Of course, Paul and Jackie were the proprietors of this particular castle. Paul and Bob Burns rounded up a number of items they thought would appeal to the readership of the magazine, including the Mad Lab Radio. (“It appears to be one of those little imported transistor radios, but just turn it ‘on.’ Wow! The dummy speaker flips to one side and a ‘killer shrew’ jumps out with a wild squeal!”). Other items offered were the Mad Lab Hypo (“Life size! 8 inches fully extended!”) and Mr. Bones, the Pocket Skeleton (“Even feels creepy!”). In each of these cases, Blaisdell set the ‘scene’ and Jackie took the photograph. Typically, Blaisdell opted to create elaborate backgrounds for photos of some of the mail-order items, which usually sold for a dollar or two. The Mad Lab Camera rested on a table with a background of test tubes and coiled wires, and Mr. Bones sat on a miniature coffin next to a realistically detailed tree with a gothic castle in the background. Such novelty-store staples as the Devil Spider and Unlucky 13 Rattlesnake were rigged with wires to menace a familiar female figure; the damsel in distress was actually a miniature Paul had made for Attack of the Puppet People.
One particularly noteworthy ad was labeled “Monster Feet’’: “Horribly distorted monster feet, with twisted toes and gnarled claws! Slip over your shoes, and go shuffling after friends! Feet cover entire foot and ankle! Heavy duty latex, in realistic flesh color, with black toenails and claws! Great fun for parties, or to complete your monster outfit! Wear them down the street at night, if you like screaming neighbors! Only $3.00, postpaid.” A photograph depicted two different monster feet. One had big, gnarled, goofy-looking toes. The other had three toes with enormous, hooked, black nails. In fact, this triple-toed foot was the very same commercially produced monster foot that Blaisdell used in Day the World Ended for his Atomic Mutant. Although he customized the monster feet extensively, the origin of Marty the Mutant’s footwear is at long last revealed. (But wouldn’t FanMo have racked up better sales if they had advertised the monster foot as “the very same foot that tramped through the radioactive valley in Day the World Ended”?)
To break up the monotony of the ads, FanMo occasionally ran advertising spoofs. Underneath a picture of a menacing-looking Karloff holding a syringe (the photo was from Black Friday) ran the copy: “9 out of 10 doctors agree … SLAYER brings faster pain! Contented Normalcy is often caused by complete freedom from strain, minor aches, tenseness and other comforts. When you take SLAYER aspirin at bedtime, you increase your sensitivity to these sensations. Thus, SLAYER doesn’t make you ache, it lets pain come naturally. And when you wake up you feel wonderfully miserable, with a heavy trace of the ‘sedative hangover’ always following a good drugged sleep. So when no discomforts are bothering you, feel pain better with SLAYER.” This from the same minds that concocted “How to Become a Vampire Victim in One Easy Lesson” It’s no wonder some parents didn’t want their kids reading that “monster trash.”
The masthead in the first issue of Fantastic Monsters listed Ron Haydock as editor; Paul Blaisdell as editorial director; Bob Burns as research editor; and Jim Harmon as associate editor. In time those credits would change significantly. Although a publishing credit was not given, Blaisdell was more or less the ‘head honcho,’ given that he had sunk more money into the venture than anyone. Jackie eventually gained a credit as the magazine’s circulation manager, and Paul kicked himself upstairs from editorial director to managing editor to—finally—publisher. Burns retained his title of research editor throughout the life of the publication.
Most of the stills seen in FanMo came from Bob Burns’s collection, but Blaisdell contributed some materials of his own. For the cover of the second issue, they used a superb color shot of Paul’s Aunt Esmerelda mask (which burned in a flash in How to Make a Monster). Inside, a special article on 3-D movies included shots of Blaisdell holding the giant syringe from The Amazing Colossal Man along with a chess-playing Saucer Man. Both photos were double-printed in “stereo” so that readers could see the images in real 3-D using a pocket mirror. It was a complicated process, but for those who were able to follow the magazine’s instructions closely, the trick worked.
Blaisdell didn’t write “The Devil’s Workshop” column in FanMo #2, but he did contribute the 3-D article and a piece on movie robots called “Diary of a Tin Can Terror.” There was also the conclusion of his Glenn Strange feature from the first issue and a new Count Downe picture in the “Tombstone Times.’’
Reader response to the first issue’s Monster of the Month foldout poster was so overwhelmingly positive that the staff decided to make it a regular feature. This month the magazine offered a color portrait of the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth. Not that Burns and Blaisdell didn’t have plenty of color material on Paul’s monsters, but Blaisdell was reluctant to load the magazine down with his own work for fear that readers might accuse him of using the magazine as a kind of pictorial soapbox. To their everlasting credit, neither Blaisdell nor anyone else connected with Fantastic Monsters trumpeted the professional credentials of its editorial director.
Paul and Bob couldn’t believe the number of letters that were pouring in from all over the country. Just about everyone loved the foldout posters and interior color tints. As they had suspected, “The Devil’s Workshop” became one of the magazine’s most popular features, and the staff decided to accent the technical aspects of Hollywood movie-making in as many future articles as possible. Although Paul and Bob didn’t learn about it until many years later, two youngsters particularly influenced by the “Workshop” series were Bob and Dennis Skotak, who gre
w up to become highly paid industry professionals. Their marvelous miniatures and effects have been seen by millions of moviegoers in such pictures as Aliens, The Abyss, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The Skotaks were very young at the time they began reading Fantastic Monsters, and they studiously applied the principles outlined in “The Devil’s Workshop” to a variety of home horror projects. Perseverance paid off handsomely in the long run, and today the Skotaks point to Blaisdell’s series of behind-the-scenes articles as their major source of inspiration when, as young monster lovers, they first began dreaming about carving a niche in Hollywood as special effects artists.
Blaisdell created an oversized membership card for readers who sent in $3.00 to join the Fantastic Monsters Club. For their money, members got the card, an 8"×10" glossy photo from Invasion of the Saucer Men, a periodic club bulletin, and a year’s subscription to the magazine. The membership card featured drawings of several Blaisdell horrors, including Marty the Mutant from Day the World Ended, the Dragstrip Hollow version of Cuddles, Beulah and a Flying Finger from It Conquered the World, several Saucer Men and their flying saucer, and a curious, never-before-seen humanoid creature with a ridged scalp and stark white eyes. Just what was this wicked-looking thing? Readers would have a chance to find out when Fantastic Monsters announced its “Name the Nameless Monster Contest” in the next issue.
Unfortunately, problems were developing with the printer, as Bob Burns recalls:
I hate to say it, but I really think we were being set up to take a fall from the beginning. If you look at the entire run of Fantastic Monsters, you’ll notice that the printing gets worse and worse as time goes on. Paul and I couldn’t understand it. What the heck was this guy doing out in Iowa? Paul would call him up and chew him out, but there was always some excuse. “Oh, well, my printer is messed up, but don’t worry, I’m going to have it fixed. The next issue will look a lot better.” But it never did.
The cover of FanMo #3 featured a gorgeous color photo of Blaisdell’s Martian menace from It! the Terror from Beyond Space. Here at last was the original It!, the sleeker It!, the scarier It! … It! as It! was supposed to be seen—without Ray Corrigan’s massive mug stretching the latex rubber completely out of shape. Readers could now see the monster as Paul had originally designed it, without the extra set of lower fangs and with the large emerald eyes. The remarkable detailing of the mask was evident, with minute pores and age-lines running from the lidded eyes to the protruding cheekbones, all the way down to the wide, batrachian mouth. The overall effect was so different from the movie version that some readers thought it was a different monster.
Blaisdell’s contributions to the third issue of FanMo included another installment of “The Devil’s Workshop” and a short fiction piece entitled “Specimen,” which he also illustrated. For this issue’s “Workshop,” Paul described methods for creating a homemade giant monster movie using a live reptile and miniature sets. (Undoubtedly, this was Bert I. Gordon’s favorite article in the magazine.) At the time he wrote the feature, Blaisdell was keeping a female “Alligator Lizard” in a dry-dock fish tank. He named her Lizzie (what else?) and described how he got her to pose for the pictures that accompanied the article by holding food (meal worms) and water (in an eye-dropper) just out of reach of the camera lens. With miniature foliage, jeeps, and other structures strategically placed around the set, Blaisdell could encourage Lizzie to crawl across the models to claim her reward. The photographic effects were surprisingly good, and the layout undoubtedly inspired many readers to try their own hand at creating giant monster movies.
The big news in FanMo #3 was the Nameless Monster Contest. When readers turned to page 33, they saw a brand new Blaisdell monster, although nowhere in the magazine was Blaisdell credited with its creation. The contest was simple: make up a name for this beast and win a prize.
In fact, Blaisdell had already named the so-called Nameless Monster when he featured it in his own 16mm movie, The Cliff Monster. While Bob Burns was still in the army, Paul had been playing around with the idea of creating a true automaton—something that could be programmed to move and act, hands off. He knew what he wanted to do; he just wasn’t sure how to go about it. After some experimentation, he sculpted a miniature monster over the framework of a toy robot. Like Paul’s other fabulous creations, “Cliff” was customized with soft pine, block foam, and rubber latex and approximated the scale and dimensions of Little Hercules from The Beast with a Million Eyes. The body was humanoid but squat, with long, apelike arms ending in three-fingered extensions, much like It! The feet also suggested It. The face was rounded, and a downward-slanting triple-ridge running from the top of the head to the bridge of the nose—again somewhat resembling feature of It—gave the creature the famous Blaisdell “scowl.” The nose was full and slightly resembled the She-Creature. There were no fangs, but the creature did have bared teeth. There were several raised, veinlike lines running between the jowls and the eyes that somewhat resembled the blood-engorged brain vessels of Paul’s Saucer Men. The eyes (plastic globes from the Frye company) were white and pupilless, which gave the creature a startlingly malevolent appearance.
Inside the 18-inch miniature was an assemblage of push-rods, gears, and wires. “Cliff” needed to be wound up just like an old alarm clock, but he could be programmed to perform certain movements. His acting range was limited but effective. Bob Burns has described the interior mechanics of the model as something akin to a “clockwork mechanism,” but only Blaisdell knew how it actually worked.
Burns first saw the Cliff Monster upon his return from the army. While he and Paul were playing around with the model, a thought struck both of them simultaneously. Why not use Cliff in a homemade featurette? The more he thought about it, the more excited Paul got about making a new homemade horror flick. He sought out an inexpensive source of 16mm film stock and began working out the details of a simple plotline with Bob. What he ended up with was a story that incorporated elements of Jack the Giant Killer and, coincidentally, a Japanese production from Daiei Pictures called Majin, the Monster of Terror (which Paul had never seen).
Paul called his new film The Cliff Monster. It featured Lionel Comport (Paul’s standby guinea pig) and a friend of Jackie’s who lived down the street from the Blaisdells. The story opens with the young couple strolling through a park. Legend has it that eons ago a strange and terrifying monster was imprisoned in this very spot. Lionel notices a cliffside rock formation with a skull emblazoned high up on the granite. Testing the validity of the legend, he picks up a rock and throws it at the skull. Sure enough, the rocky cliffside cracks open and the monster emerges. It traps the girl and is about to do the “King Kong Meets Fay Wray” bit when Lionel produces a pocket knife and throws it at the creature, stabbing it below the shoulder. While the monster works the knife out of its flesh, Lionel rushes back to his truck and grabs a few sticks of dynamite. (What self-respecting movie hero would neglect to keep a supply of dynamite on hand?) He ignites the dynamite and throws it at the creature’s ponderous feet. The explosion sends the monster to its doom, sparing the young lovers from a crushing fate.
The Cliff Monster, Blaidell’s unique “clockwork creature,” turned up in this photograph which Paul and Jackie used as the cover of a Christmas card greeting sent to friends and relatives in the early 1960s. The girl in the photo is actually one of the miniatures designed for Attack of the Puppet People, outfitted with a new wardrobe. Cliff stood about 18 inches high.
Bob Burns was especially impressed by this monster:
“Cliff” was about a foot and a half tall, maybe a little taller. Paul had built some cams or some kind of clockwork-type mechanism into the interior—that’s the only way I can think of to describe it. He was able to program moves for the creature, such as walking, lifting its arms, bending, and so forth. It could point, the mouth worked, and the head moved from side to side. Paul was able to get a couple of really neat movements out of this thing, like when the knife went into its
chest. The monster reached down, plucked out the knife, and kind of cocked its head to one side while it studied the blade. It was a typical “Paulism!” This automaton, or whatever you want to call it, had to be wound up, and of course that meant it would eventually wind down and stop, but it ran long enough to get some good shots on film. It was definitely a unique invention, especially for its time.
The Cliff Monster was filmed with Burns’s 16mm Bolex camera, an excellent piece of equipment that had inbuilt backwinding capabilities. This meant it was possible to perform in-camera double-exposures on the same strip of film. Blaisdell tried doing some split-screen effects to combine the miniature Cliff Monster with the live actors. Unfortunately, the film stock he had bought turned out to be outdated, and it started shrinking inside the camera. This caused most of the mattes to be misaligned, so the split-screen effects suffered tremendously. Other than that, The Cliff Monster turned out to be a very decent amateur production. Blaisdell thought enough of it to offer copies of the film to fans through Fantastic Monsters. The price was $2 for an 8mm edition, $6 for 16mm. Of all the copies sold, only two were returned by customers who were disappointed with their purchase.
A few weeks later Paul tried putting together a second automaton. Modeled after a real monster—the prehistoric tyrannosaurus-rex—this eighteen-inch model could also be programmed to perform a few independent moves, but it wasn’t as versatile as Cliff. Blaisdell took some still photographs of the tyrannosaur terrorizing other miniature models amid scenery purchased from the local hobby shop, but he never shot any movie footage of the beast.