Teenagers from Outer Space (1959)

Interesting facts

Teenagers from Outer Space is a 1959 American independent black-and-white science fiction cult film released by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film was produced, written and directed by Tom Graeff and stars David Love, Dawn Bender, Bryan Grant, Harvey B. Dunn and Tom Lockyear. The film's working titles were The Boy from Outer Space and The Ray Gun Terror. The tagline was "Hoodlums from Another World in a Ray-Gun Rampage!"

Production

Teenagers from Outer Space was filmed on location in and around Hollywood, California, in the fall of 1956 and winter of 1957. With a number of tell-tale landmarks like Bronson Canyon in Griffith Park and Hollywood High School, which gives away the film's otherwise generic location.

According to Bryan Pearson, the crew employed many guerrilla tactics in order to cut costs: Director Tom Graeff secured, for free, the location used for Betty Morgan's house by posing as a UCLA student (which he had attended and graduated from 5 years earlier). The older woman who owned the house even let the crew use her electricity to power their equipment.

Graeff shot in many nearby locations, mostly in the vicinity of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue, that doubled as more important city landmarks. Graeff's steady hand and framing kept most of the real locations subdued, creating a convincing low-budget illusion of a small town.

Other cost-cutting measures did not work as well; the aliens' costumes were simple flight suits clearly decorated with masking tape, dress shoes covered in socks and surplus Air Force flight helmets. The use of stock footage in lieu of real special effects, and pre-Spielbergian "looking" shots that replaced actual visuals of the invading alien spaceships, seriously undercut the film's ending.

Graeff hired special effects technician Paul Blaisdell to slightly modify the ray guns with small slivers of mirror to make the guns look as if they were really firing a ray. Blaisdell said Graeff also paid him to design the film's one-sheet poster, but Graeff could not afford Blaisdell's fee to design the Gargon monsters that appear in the film (Graeff did those effects himself by superimposing silhouetted images of various animals in Bert I.

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