31 Days of Halloween - Day 29 - Movie 2

A rocketship returning to Earth from Venus crash-lands in the Mediterranean. It's precious cargo, an alien life form, is set free and grows to tremendous proportions. Terrified, it is hounded and hunted until it is finally cornered atop the Coliseum.

20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) is a giant monster on the loose movie from Charles Scanner, Nathan Juran and Ray Harryhausen, the same team that would bring us The 7th Voyage of Sinbad a year later. Unlike most other giant monster movies of the 50s, 20 Million Miles to Earth hearkens back to movies such as King Kong and Mighty Joe Young, by giving us a sympathetic creature who only acts out because it is frightened or under attack itself. Harryhausen's stop-motion animated Ymir gives a wonderfully nuanced performance, and the plaintive sounds it is given only add to the creature's distress.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 15

The Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957). Cut paper.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 7 - Movie 2

The Navy searches desperately for a giant octopus that's attacking ships, and finally San Francisco in It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955). I've seen this movie a number of times in my life and there's nothing really wrong with it. It's well made. It has a good cast. Ray Harryhausen's special effects are as awe inspiring as always. For some reason though, I found it really hard to get through this movie on this viewing. It suffers from the same trappings that plague a number of genre movies from this period; unnecessary narration and a really long process before the story gets underway, and once it does, it's just about over. It's military organization vs monster procedural on display here. In order to spread the special effects out through the whole movie we're given brief octopus attacks followed by a long sequence of scenes of investigation, hypothesis, and arms akimbo discussion followed by another octopus attack and more of the same intercut with stock footage of navy planes searching, and ships dropping depth charges on the ocean, followed by more waiting discussion, etc. It does give the movie a documentary like feel, as if this is really the Navy at work trying to take care of this giant octopus threat, but boy is it dull. The scenes featuring the stop motion animated giant octopus are still great though.

Ray Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 - May 7, 2013)

He was a special effects giant, and and inspiration to so many, myself included. His movies, and the creatures that starred in them, enriched my childhood, and continue to enrich my adult life.

A few years back I wrote a post about Ray Harryhausen and his work for my (now much neglected) companion blog for kids. In that post I discussed the two lessons that Ray's movies taught me.

"The first thing I learned is that if you are going to tell stories using non-existent creatures in them, it's incredibly important to make them seem real. You need to convince the reader that these are living, breathing creatures with their own personalities and behaviors, that live in their own habitats and behave in a manner that suggests that they are interacting with their world in a believable way. Ray learned this from another stop-motion animator named Willis O'Brien who was responsible for the special effects in the original (and best) "King Kong" (1933). In "King Kong" there is a famous scene in which Kong fights an allosaurus. O'Brien could have just had the two creatures grapple with each other and still impressed people, but he went an extra step. Not only does Kong use wrestling and boxing moves to fight the dinosaur, but my favorite detail is the way the allosaurus swishes its tail back and forth when it's getting ready to pounce. O'Brien made his stop-motion puppets characters and actors, something Ray Harryhausen did as well. My favorite detail of Ray Harryhausen's is in "20 Million Miles to Earth" (1957).  It's a scene where someone turns on a light and disturbs the baby alien Ymir, who blinks and starts rubbing his eyes at the brightness of the light. This detail makes the Ymir seem even more like a living creature reacting with its environment.

The second thing I learned from Ray Harryhausen is that your work and your play don't have to be two different things. As a writer, or any kind of artist, your workday never really ends. Even if you are not actively writing, or drawing, or playing music, you are thinking about it, generating ideas, and reading, watching and encountering things that might inspire your next big idea. I write about the things that I enjoy when I'm not working, and enjoy the sorts of things I write about when I am."

You can read the entire post here.