The B-Movie Monster Re-Imagination Project
Doesn't that just sound important and significant and hollywood dumb? Once this site gets going I'll be occasionally taking breaks between stories to post different illustration series. For the BRMP I'm creating new designs for critters from the b-movies of yesteryear. Most of the costumes for the monsters in b-movies were designed and put together by people whose main concern was budget and speed rather than scientific plausibility. I've been playing around in my sketchbook, trying to make these beasts look more plausible (or in some cases, just a little less absurd) while still retaining the basic ideas behind their original designs.The majority of the monsters that I will be "reimagining"; are from films that I saw on local television back when I was a kid. Most of these movies were only watched once and, except for a few key scenes, are just fuzzy memories. Memories that are fuzzy enough that I've had to hunt down visual reference to remember exactly what the monsters looked like.
For now you can find some illustrations I did that were accepted to my gallery at Epilogue.net.
The Thing From Another World
My reworking here was fairly easy. The original monster looks a lot like the Universal Frankenstein monster and it's supposed to be a kind of ambulatory plant. The biggest thing I had to think about was why a plant would wear clothes. And what would they be made of?
Alien spider silk. With the spiders still in residence. They even repair the outfit when it tears - take a look at the group working on The Thing's right arm.
And it wears the silk to retain moisture during its travels.
The Monster of Piedras Blancas
Hmmm. Part of the reason I have such affection for this creature is his habit of decapitating his victims and wandering around with the heads in his claws. I saw the movie as a kid and that freaked me out. We'd definitely left Scooby Doo land behind. I don't believe the movie explains why it does this. All the victims are drained of blood so maybe he pulls off their heads, sucks the blood out of their necks and then saves the heads like a bottle cap collection? Or perhaps he stores the heads until the brains ferment and then gets all tipsy on grey matter glog?
Anyway -
The monster gets a radical redo here. Early versions in my sketchbook look pretty much like the original creature in the movie. Different aspects of it would get accentuated or adjusted but they were pretty conservative renditions. None of them satisfied me.
Unlike The Thing, the Monster of Piedras Blancas isn't a simple design. It's a sea creature but it's not a fish man. It's not the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Certainly there are similarities but once you get past the amphibious humanoid aspects of the two they start to seem pretty different. For one thing, the Creature (from the Black Lagoon, henceforth simply referred to as the Creature) is designed for swimming. He's got fins and webbed feet and hands. He's got gills. The Monster (of Piedras Blancas, henceforth referred to simply as the Monster), while apparently aquatic by nature, isn't designed to swim. It can't. And if it can't swim it also can't walk around too well underwater. Part of the reason that there are no bipedal sea creatures is that bipedalism isn't that effective underwater. If you've got to walk it helps if you've got multiple legs.
But all this was the result of the Monster's costume being a patchwork affair - its hands were originally wielded by the Mole Men (late of the movie The Mole People) and its feet were formally on the gravity ends of the Metalunan Mutant's legs (in the film This Island Earth). The head is original but resembles no sea creature that I can think of.
I really didn't want to make the Monster more like the Creature. I don't expect to do a version of the Creature in this series. I don't know that there's much I could do with the basic design that hasn't already been done by many others. And the original design is still pretty spiffy today.
The idea for this design came to me when two concepts collided in my mind while I was having my morning coffee. The first concept was that the light house keeper in the movie thought of the Monster as a sort of family pet, a wild dog he was feeding. The second concept was a phrase describing the Monster that I'd read somewhere - a reviewer referred to it as a "sort of a lobster man". And the basic visual popped into my head. If the Monster was a crustacean rather than a fish then suddenly there were a lot of alterations I could make that would make the Monster more unique rather than less. Now the Monster becomes a wolfmancrab.
A wolfmancrab that collects heads as souvenirs.
It! The Terror From Beyond Space!
I must confess, I haven't actually seen the movie that this beastie hails from. I've seen enough photos of the creature that the temptation to redo him was too much to resist. In the lobby cards and posters the Terror is green. Most monsters in the '50's and '60's seemed to have been green. Given that the Terror hails from Mars and is a predator (and would therefore find camoflage useful in its hunts) I gave him a re-coloring to go with the re-imagination.
One of these days I'll have to watch It and see if doing so inspires a different interpretation of the creature.
Sentient 39 is copyright 2003 by David Lee Ingersoll
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