We Don't Call Them Monsters, We Call Them Creatures: An Interview With Ray Harryhausen

Miguel Ramos and Allen Frost

King Kong didn't die in 1933. Every showing left him alive, resurrected by a thirteen year old boy in Los Angeles who kept returning to the Chinese Theatre in awe. The dream in there mystified and moved him. "When I first saw King Kong I had to find out who was responsible for the technical effects, and I discovered Willis O'Brien, and I called him up while I was still in high school, and he kindly invited me down to MGM to see his preparation for War Eagles, and that's how I got acquainted with Willis O'Brien. But he was my mentor, and the greatest, high point of my life was to work with him on Mighty Joe Young, and Merian C. Cooper, because they were responsible for King Kong, which was my favorite film and put me into my career, and I haven't been the same since." For the next fifty years, King Kong lived on in a legacy of dinosaurs and mythological menaces: anything from moon calves to Venus or the stars beyond could be breathed into life by the wizardry of stop-motion animation.

On April 6, 2006, the Whatcom Film Association brought Ray Harryhausen, now 86, to Bellingham's Mt. Baker Theatre as part of a Pickford Cinema Sci-Fi retrospective that included showings of the 7th Voyage of Sinbad, 20 Million Miles from Earth, and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, the screening of which was attended by Mr. Harryhausen.

We waited, looking over the balcony while he stopped in the lobby to look at photos and posters of Sinbad and saucers, and then climbed upstairs to remember for us.

Interviewers: Mr. Harryhausen, my questions are about your monsters in your films--

Harryhausen: We don't call them monsters, we call them creatures.

Int: You're creatures. I'd like to know if you were attached to the creatures in your films.

H: Attached?

Int: Attached to them personally.

H: Well, you have to give them a personality, so in one sense you have to be attached to them. We tried to make them believable creatures. We tried to get sympathy for them, particularly if they were humanoid in form. Mythology and legends all have rather strange creatures that some people call monsters. But I think they all have a symbolism in the long run that goes way back into ancient Greek mythology.

Int: Well, given the sympathy that you try to elicit for your creatures, how do you feel that they're always destroyed in your films and that the first reaction to the creatures is to destroy them?

H: Well, we don't like to destroy them really, some of them we don't, but usually it's for dramatic sake. There's no drama if you don't have some kind of synthetic violence. All the fairy tales of the past are quite violent. Little Red Riding Hood is very lascivious in the original story as well as violent, and Hans Christen Anderson, and some of the Grimm's fairy tales are quite violent. But there's a big difference between realistic violence, or pseudo realistic violence, and mythical violence, and I think people are aware of that. But you have to have a certain amount of violence to create a climax in your pictures. And unfortunately, if you have a hero in your picture, you've got to let him win rather than the creature.

Next page: Logical Creatures