“Destination Moon” was good. We forgot about “The Thing,” and waited for the spate of s-f movies to come. They came, all right—right in the footsteps of that “Thing.” (What hurts, you see—way deep down—is that the mud-daubed parade of shambling papier-mâché monsters is still called “science-fiction.”) The following article, somewhat foreshortened, is editor Ray Russell’s report to Playboy readers on the “creature-movie” situation five years later.
“Have you a better animal?” inquired a Columbia producer of a screenwriter via interoffice memo earlier this year. “They gave up gorillas at Universal and created the creature from beneath the sea, and it gave horror pictures new life.”
The screenwriter, a good friend of the present chronicler, passed on the memo for my delectation. Being a rabid monster enthusiast from way back, I was at once seized by nostalgia for the simple horror films of yore; the days of the common, or garden, monster that could be whipped up in one’s home laboratory or discovered, after a little shopping around, in a friendly neighborhood graveyard. Being of delicate temperament, and rather highly strung, I grew a bit dizzy at this latest example of the growing complexity of modern living. Gasping desperately for breath, I reeled once, then struck a tragic posture and went to my bed with a raging fever of chagrin, “Frankenstein!” I apostrophized in my delirium, “thou shouldst be living at this hour. Dracula! Jekyll! Hyde! Dost thou he so low? And Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, George Zucco, Lionel Atwill, Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney Junior! Whence? Whither? Where are the ghouls of yesteryear?” A sea of titles swam before my eyes: Them, It (Came from Outer Space), It (Came from Beneath the Sea), The Thing (from Another World), The Day (the Earth Stood Still), The Day (the World Ended), The Beast (from 20,000 Fathoms), The Phantom (from 10,000 Leagues), The Creature (from the Black Lagoon), The Creature (from the Gray Flannel Lagoon ... I was, you see, far gone). Finally, moaning incoherently, I sank into sleep—a sleep fitful and beset by dreams.
I was in a theatre (in my pajamas, of course, bottom half only, let the Freudians make of that what they will), and a box of popcorn was in my hand. Among the other spectators, I recognized several friends of mine, an old flame, my dentist, my old flame’s dentist, Marilyn Monroe and John Quincy Adams, all in their pajamas, with the single exception of Miss Monroe: she was in the top half of mine. I doubt the significance of these details and pass them on only in the interests of documentation and good fellowship. A newsreel was in progress (I seem to remember something about Johnny Weissmuller being inaugurated President of the United States), but it was soon over and the main attraction smote the screen with an annihilating blast of neo-Stravinsky. The title was:
THE
And the subtitle:
STUFF FROM OUTER SPACE
My pulse quickened and my fingers clawed at the popcorn. . . .
“I can’t understand it.”
The words were spoken by a young fellow with white shoe-polish in his hair and a fascinating network of greasepaint lines on his face. These told me he was Elderly and lent weight to his next utterance: “Never in my entire medical career have I encountered anything remotely like it.”
The camera pulled away to reveal the body of a sumptuously shaped starlet, horizontal on a white slab. I was keenly disappointed to see her dead, for she had been unusually active in the newspaper ads—veritably entwined in horror around the H of THE, baring her thighs and eyeballs with equal vigor, and displaying a healthy supply of pearly molars. However, I was too excited to quibble.
A gentleman with prognathous jaws and a belligerent manner asked, “What’s the cause of death, Doc?”
The Doctor scratched his head, got a fingernailful of white shoe-polish, and replied softly, “Severe nausea, Lieutenant.”
“Brought on by what?”
The Doctor’s silence and tight-lipped headshake were eloquent. Eloquent or not, though, he had a line and, by Gadfrey, he was going to say it: “I . . . don’t . . . know,” he said. And added, “That’s more in your department, isn’t it— the police—rather than mine?”
It was the Lieutenant’s big scene. He played it to the hilt, stalking back and forth, shoving his hands in and out of his pockets, and casting hostile glances alternately at the Doctor and at the camera. “If we only had something to go on!” he ranted. “Anything,” he whined. “Anything at all,” he whimpered. “But there isn’t a thing.” A cogent line like this deserved expansion, and the Lieutenant was not a man to stint: “Not one single blessed thing!” Then, with a deprecating wave of his hand, he muttered, “Just these big fat globs of strange, unearthly-type goo all over the body, that’s all.”
“Mmmnnnye-e-ess,” said the Doctor (actorese for “Yes”), “but in those strange globs may lie the answer.”
“Whaddaya talkin’?” sneered the Lieutenant, growing more belligerent by the second.
“I suggest we get in touch with Bradstone.”
“Who’s that? I don’t want no Federal men musclin’ in on my precinct.”
“Dr. Bradstone,” explained the medico with withering condescension, “is the world’s foremost authority on viscosimetry.”
“Who? Ha?”
“Viscosimetry, Lieutenant, is the science of measuring viscosity.”
“What’s viscosity?”
The Doctor pointed to the body and the camera focused sharply on the strange, unearthly-type globs. “Goo,” he said, solemnly.
And here the Stravinsky got more neo than ever.
I chewed my popcorn furiously and stole a glance at Marilyn Monroe. She winked with abandon. “Goo,” I said, solemnly, and winked back.
On the screen, one scene was melting into another with head-swimming speed. Starlets of diverse dimensions were to be seen going about such workaday pursuits as cooking, gardening, screwing rhinestones into their navels, etc., with such a remarkable degree of studied unconcern that I knew their dooms were sealed. And—sure enough—in each case, a towering shadow entered the picture, the theramin began its timorous wail, and the beauty in question looked over her shoulder, uttered Scream of Mortal Terror, Female, No. 84-B (Full-Throated), and was promptly gripped by severe nausea just at the fade-out.
Newspapers loomed upon the screen:
goo strikes again!
strange stuff slays sexy siren!
And Variety, shocked at the death of a prominent girl vocalist, reported:
thrush hushed by mush
“Things,” said the Lieutenant, picking his nose with a matchstick, “are getting worse.”
“You are not just a-clackin’ your prognathous jaws, Buster,” quipped a melon-bosomed blonde, undulating into range with a crackle of taffeta and flapping her well-greased eyelids.
“Who are you?”
“Bradstone’s the name; Dr. Brenda Bradstone, Girl Viscosimetrist”
“You mean you’re the—”
“World’s foremost authority?” She struck an attitude. ‘The same. Where is the latest victim?”
“Well, uh—”
“One moment.” The new voice belonged to a young man with broad shoulders and a sincere tilt to his eyebrows who lumbered, profile first, into their midst. “Dr. Bradstone is not entirely correct, Lieutenant,” he blathered. ‘Though possessing a certain proficiency in the field,” and here he bowed low to the lady and sized up her ankles, “she is not the world’s foremost authority.”