Written By: Ken HulseyThroughout the history of monster movies literally hundreds of beautiful young women have been carried off in the arms of an uncountable number of various creatures. What you may not know is that one such beauty actually was responsible for designing a few of these Hollywood Horrors.
Actress and artist Milicent Patrick (sometimes credited as Millicent Patrick) actually created several of the most notable and iconic monsters in history including the "Creature From The Black Lagoon", the alien xenomorph from "It Came From Outer Space" and the alien mutant from "This Island Earth." Patrick also penned an unknown amount of illustrations for Disney that included Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the gang.
In 1954 Patrick was called in by Universal make-up artist Bud Westmore to design a half-man-half-amphibian monster for a little movie called "Creature From The Black Lagoon." Though Westmore was credited for the creation of the "Gill-Man" for decades it was actually Patrick who created the monster from scratch.
During the production of "Creature" Patrick was photographed extensively both behind the scenes and on the set for publicity purposes. Actually there seems to be as many pictures of the artist with the monster as there are of Julia Adams ... and she was actually the heroine.
Pairing Patrick with the Gill-Man made a lot of sense from a publicity stand point, after all the young woman was rather stunning and had all the curves in the right places.
Surprisingly she actually never appeared on screen in any of the three Creature films though she did land roles in several lesser known productions spanning from the late 1940s to the late 1960s.
Note: Observe the mask in the upper left portion of the photo ... is it me or does that look an awful lot like the Gorn mask from the "Star Trek" episode "Arena"?
Did Patrick design that monster too?
0 comments:
Post a Comment