So he tried to portray it through all his wonderful creatures.” “He wanted everyone to have that wonderful awe and excitement that he had. “It just stimulated his imagination,” Vanessa Harryhausen tells SFX. “Nothing like it had been put on the screen,” he remembered years later. Sat there in the dark, as projector light cut through the tobacco haze and Kong batted at biplanes atop the Empire State, Harryhausen knew he had a calling. He was blown away by what he saw on screen, the Promethean fire of special effects that sparked life in the starlet-snatching ape and the prehistoric inhabitants of Skull Island. When he was 13 he saw King Kong in its opening week at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. In junior high he modelled dioramas of old Californian missions and tar pits, adding the occasional saber-toothed tiger or elephant as his imagination leaked through. It does make you want to believe in fantasy and magic.”īorn in Los Angeles in 1920, Ray Harryhausen had clay on his fingers from a young age. And then you’d see it in the film, and it looks like it’s so big, and you go, ‘Oh my lord, that looks so real!’ It takes your breath away. ![]() Just the bare bones of the armatures upstairs, then you’d see the next stage with the rubber going on, and it formed into either a dinosaur or some other wonderful mythical creature, like a griffin. It was pretty amazing when you thought about it. Who did the stop motion for jack the giant killer 1962 tv#He used to circle the TV listings, whenever they came up. We used to sit and watch his films, when they came on TV. I guess when I went to boarding school and brought friends back home I realised it wasn’t quite normal to have all these wonderful creatures around. Our food slightly tasted of latex for a few weeks…”ĭid she assume everyone’s parents magicked fabulous beasts into existence as part of their day job? “I just thought it was the norm,” she laughs. ![]() He thought it would be a good idea to use mum’s Moulinex, too, to mix the rubber. Mum and I came back from a shopping trip to find he’d used our gas oven instead. Once, she recalls, the creatures even invaded the kitchen. It was really wonderful to see it all and have a hands-on experience.” When we went up into his office everything was on the walls and in the cabinets that he’d made. “They were all over upstairs,” she tells SFX. Mythology fused with technology in a London workshop – resulting in a private, hand-made magic he called Dynamation.Īs Vanessa Harryhausen remembers, the family home in Kensington – where her father quietly and diligently produced his effects, far from the glare of Hollywood – was a bestiary of fantastic creatures (tellingly, he never called them monsters). ![]() They were the stuff of legend, reborn for half-term cinema trips or bank holiday TV. Conjured into uncanny life through the painstaking process of stop-motion animation, Harryhausen’s creations seemed to haunt the borderland between celluloid and dream. I’d sit down on the couch and watch him sketch away or tinker at the table, making some wonderful creation.”Īcross his career, Ray Harryhausen scattered indelible screen images like so many Hydra teeth: undead warriors, all swords and bones lurching bronze giants angel-winged horses and snarling, tail-lashing prehistoric beasts. “He was always very good with me, if I was at home. One particular time he said, ‘Do you want to see which eyes would go well with which creature?’ Who did the stop motion for jack the giant killer 1962 full#“I know that sounds really ghastly, doesn’t it? But he had this little plastic cabinet, with all these wonderful drawers, full of bits and bobs, pieces of armature and dolls’ eyes. ![]() “I once had the luxury of choosing eyeballs,” says Vanessa Harryhausen, daughter of special effects genius Ray Harryhausen. This feature was originally published in the July 2020 issue of SFX Magazine. Fame by Frame: SFX celebrates filming legend Ray Harryhausen
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