The idea of the “movie star” is usually reserved for the uber-famous; Margot Robbie, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. The occasional director like Jordan Peele or Christopher Nolan, filmmakers so well established they have their own font. But in the genre world, it’s different. As much as you might see a crowd turn out in force for the game-changing work of a John Carpenter, or a Michelle Yeoh, you’re just as likely to see lines around the block for Dick Smith, Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Greg Nicotero, Phil Tippett or Tom Savini – Hollywood’s most lauded special effects and make-up artists. The physical creators of some of the most iconic characters in cinema history: our movie monsters.
Which explains Forbidden Worlds Film Festival’s entire strand devoted to ‘Creature Creators’; a series of films shining a spotlight on these visual effects ‘stars’. Charting a course from Willis O’Brien’s world-shaking work on 1933’s King Kong, to Ray Harryhausen’s legendary stop-motion fantasy beasts, to four time Oscar-winning maestro of Pumpkinhead, Predator and several Terminators, Stan Winston.
But it all starts with the ape. Even now, 90 years on and several-hundred copycat versions later, the image of the gigantic, practically-puppeted, prehistoric Kong scaling the New York City skyline is a breathtaking sight on the big screen. And it’s not just the size of him, it’s the character that lives beyond all the smashing and crashing; both an apex predator, and a desperate loner. It’s one thing to make a fantastical creation like this move, it’s another to make it feel, too.
The personality of his movements, the very lifelike empathy that O’Brien pours into him as the “chief technician” and puppeteer behind the scenes. It’s the sort of relatable artistry that can only come from another human being (hear that, AI?). O’Brien’s own wife even noted how much of her husband she could see in the beast’s gait; he was Kong, in the same way any actor is their character. The creature’s creator is the star.
A protégé of O’Brien’s, Ray Harryhausen very much expanded this idea in the post-war period, as technicolour took hold and fantasy movies were all the rage. The image of his hairy-hoofed, man-eating Cyclops, thundering across a beach, shaking off spear after spear in 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, has become so emblematic of the depth Harryhausen’s personal touch brings to his own monsters. The Cyclops himself is just one of a number of spectacles in the film, but that shouldn’t make him any less significant. After all, for Harryhausen, so much of his talents lie in the finer details, defining every creature on screen beyond just their appearance. It’s in how quickly we learn the Cyclops’s story, just by watching the way he blinks, or turns his head; every tiny twitch builds a surprisingly complex reaction to the human interlopers. Sadness, fear, and rage, all delivered in a matter of seconds, through sheer mastery of the model – the very epitome of that frankly biblical Hollywood phrase “show don’t tell”.
To borrow from creature expert Guillermo del Toro, “it’s either tragedy or superiority that makes a good monster,” and Harryhausen’s somehow manage both. At once the fear and tension of being chased by a 20ft people-eater, blocked out against the pain of the beast itself, forced to hide away in caves, hoarding its treasure from dragons and adventurers. It’s no wonder that the face that so often adorns the artwork of not just the film, but the era, all these decades later, is that of Harryhausen’s creations, and not Kerwin Mathews’ Sinbad, or any of the leading men or women that followed. The monster, and by extension, its creator and animator, rises above all else.
So it’s no wonder that by the 1980s – following the runaway success of mask-toting game changer Halloween, the mass commercialisation of horror, and the dawn of the monster-fronted slasher movie as we know it today – an entire movement of Harryhausens and O’Briens would rise up and become the stars of their own decade. Stan Winston’s name so often drifts to the top of that pack for any number of reasons; namely that his work with Cameron, Spielberg, Burton and Carpenter is still so firmly referenced in modern pop culture. It’s hard to find a person alive who hasn’t seen seen one of his creations, whether that be in Jurassic Park, Batman Returns, or just completely out of context in a YouTube compilation somewhere.
While Rick Baker’s work on An American Werewolf in London and yes, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, is still ranked among the ickiest and stickiest, Winston was, arguably, the quintessential “star” of the 80s visual effects movement; very much the Tom Cruise of building badass monsters. Evolving from his Emmy award-winning work on TV, to assisting Rob Bottin on the legendary, paradigm-shifting effects of 1982’s The Thing, Winston eventually went on to crack the mainstream like few others. And it all started with a demented little fever dream, about a bloodthirsty robot.
The surprise success of James Cameron’s 1984 breakout The Terminator is hard to credit to any one person. Cameron’s unrelenting attitude and vision; Schwarzenegger’s iconic beefcake of a bad-guy; Linda Hamilton as the heroine that defined a generation. But none of it works without that finale – Stan Winston’s realisation of Cameron’s original pitch, the T-800 at its most vicious. Having been shot, stabbed, smooshed and blown to smithereens, the titular cyborg just can’t be stopped, finishing the final act sans-skin, as an uncanny-looking metal skeleton, not a million miles from one of Harryhausen’s own, with all of the same personality. Schwarzenegger was scary, but this was something else. The very definition of nightmare-fuel, and not just the star of the film, but its title too.
From there, Winston’s role in visual effects only became more influential, following Cameron onto 1986’s Aliens and winning an Oscar for his work, before going on to build everything from the Predator, to Danny DeVito’s iteration of The Penguin. His reunion with the Terminator for T2, and his groundbreaking dinosaurs for Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park also saw him go digital, changing cinema forever and cementing his status as a pioneer of the craft. But just looking at the monsters, it’s hard to find a name from this period that understood them on a deeper level, as much as Winston did. Many could design a fantastic sequence, few could build a titular character powerful and nuanced enough to drive an entire film, just like O’Brien had done back in 1933.
Case in point, 1988’s Pumpkinhead; an undervalued cult favourite of a creature-feature, and Winston’s directorial debut. Fellow effects artists Tom Savini (Night of the Living Dead), Greg Nicotero (The Walking Dead), and many others would eventually follow suit and take the leap to helming major projects themselves. But for Winston in the late 80s, it was a big deal to step out from behind the mask and prove his storytelling skills across an entire feature. And the result is something incredibly singular – an intensely dark and gothic revenge fable of a monster movie – that uses Winston’s depth of thinking around beasts to its advantage. Whilst Winston himself wasn’t the man in the suit literally puppeteering Pumpkinhead (that privilege fell to Winston’s own protégé Tom Woodruff, Jr., who would go on to work on everything from Starship Troopers, to last year’s Smile), his devotion to respecting the full character of a monster – beyond the basic onslaught of death and destruction – has made the film a lasting hit with horror fans all over the world.
Of all Winston’s work, Pumpkinhead feels the closest to capturing a “monster” in the truest sense of the word; a wide-smiled, sincerely sinister extension of human rage and suffering. It all begins with the blood of a vengeful, broken father having lost his son, and the towering boney behemoth that emerges feels like it’s been torn straight out of hell itself. Technically impressive, deeply terrifying, and also kind of cheeky and darkly funny, in a way that’s just very, very Stan Winston.
Winston passed away in 2008, and while he had certainly changed pace – building his own company and fully leaning into the digital revolution – by the time of his death, the idea of the special effects and make-up “star” had been slowly replaced.
These days, while practical effects are still often used, it’s on a very different scale, and ownership of the process is a lot more fragmented. Mostly gone are the tiny teams of overworked artists, juggling latex moulds and giant rubber suits; they still exist in the indie world (just ask modern-day MUFX designer Dan Martin), but on a Hollywood scale, and particularly with monsters, the job is usually footed to any number of VFX companies. In the computer age, it’s rare that one artist will see an entire creature performance through from beginning to end too, usually only covering a few shots each. The idea of one person, working night and day to graft a living, breathing creature performance – designing every last twitch and turn with their own personality and humanity – is all but gone, and the idea of the special effects artist as ‘star’ went with it.
All of this is of course, just another reason why it’s important to hold on to, and regularly celebrate, these classic cinematic beasts and their place in the grand pantheon of the genre. Not only are they the pioneers of science-fiction, horror and fantasy (basically, where this all came from), they remain the purest emblems of the genre and the creativity its spawned. Creature and creator, as one.
King Kong, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Terminator, Pumpkinhead and many other monster movie classics, were screened as part of Forbidden World’s Film Festival 2023. For more info on the festival and future events, head to forbiddenworldsfilmfestival.co.uk.
