How to Make a Monster

How to Make a Monster (1958)

See the Ghastly Ghouls in Flaming Color!

When master monster make-up man Pete Dumond is fired by the new bosses of American International studios, he uses his creations to exact revenge.

Date of release
1958-07-01
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (32)
Runtime
1h 13m
Genres
Horror, Science Fiction
Director
Herbert L. Strock

Casting

Interesting facts

How to Make a Monster is a 1958 American horror film drama. It was produced and written by Herman Cohen, directed by Herbert L. Strock, and starring Gary Conway, Robert H. Harris, Paul Brinegar, Morris Ankrum, Robert Shayne, and John Ashley. The film was released by American International Pictures on July 30, 1958. It played on September 3, 1958 on a double feature with Teenage Caveman. The film is notable for its inclusion of props and studios that were actually used in actual sci-fi horror movies.

Production

Many of Pete Dumond's "children" destroyed in the fire were props originally created by Paul Blaisdell for earlier AIP films, and he actually allowed the props to be destroyed. They include The Cat Girl (1957), "Beulah" from It Conquered the World (1956), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) and the Dr. Jekyll mask from Attack of the Puppet People (1958).

Blaisdell had specifically asked AIP not to burn his Cat Girl mask, but it was carelessly destroyed in the fire anyway. (To compound the tragedy, the cameraman failed to film the Cat Girl mask as it was burning.) The whole incident left a bad taste in Blaisdell's mouth.

Herman Cohen says he cast John Ashley as a singer at the request of James H. Nicholson, who had just put Ashley under a long-term contract with the studio. Ashley was having some minor success as a recording artist at the time.

AIP did not have a physical studio, so the film was shot at Ziv Studios. During production there, a sign was put up that called the studio lot "American International Studios", which was totally misleading.

Ed Wood's widow Kathy claimed in a 1992 interview that her husband always felt that the idea for How To Make a Monster was stolen from him by AIP producer Sam Arkoff. She said "Eddie condemned Arkoff, he really hated him. Eddie gave them a script for approval, and they changed the characters a little bit around. Eddie had written it for Lugosi.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended