Long before kids went Goth and cosplay turned them all into dolls, I was parlaying my interest in the monsters of classic literature and films into a potential career in makeup. God gave me some leash and then (mercifully) pointed me in another direction, but the memories still give me a kick.

This was during the early 1960s, after the previous decade’s horror and sci-fi B-movies had revived the popularity of the great Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff flicks of the ’30s.

Seeing these films on television rotated my bookworm radar to Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, and if their prose became too cumbersome for a kid, I always had the Classics Illustrated comic versions, about which I’ve gushed before, in fact twice.

From there it was a turn of the page to one of my all-time favourite magazines, Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Like all of its avid readers, I idolised the editor, Forrest J Ackerman, whose picture appeared often, usually in some fright pose and with one of the stars of the movies he was writing about. “Uncle Forry” died this past December 4 at age 92, and more in tribute to him in a moment.

There was a hobby shop at the corner of Guelph and Mill Streets in my hometown, Georgetown, Ontario, in Canada, where for a couple of years in my very early teens I helped beleaguer the long-suffering proprietor, a man who was older but not entirely unlike Comic Book Guy on “The Simpsons”.

He sold model kits, and I bought a lot — a Messerschmidt, a Spitfire, some batteships and destroyers, and then, ultimately, the monsters. I had quite a few of them and could often be seen in those days scraping modelling glue off my fingertips.

As near as I can tell from a survey of websites celebrating monster model kits, a company called Aurora was the originator, starting with Frankenstein’s Monster in 1961. Most of the beasts that followed lurched out of Universal Studios films, and in quick succession I’d assembled Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

There were others, but the Bride of Frankenstein didn’t have the same appeal (likewise the movie with Elsa Lanchester) and I had no interest at all in obscure characters like the Forgotten Prisoner of Castle Maré and didn’t fancy the glow-in-the-dark kits that followed.

I did not hesitate, however, to buy the plastic guillotine kit, complete with a victim whose head popped off into the waiting basket.

Such charming little elements wee what made the models so great, like the chained prisoner at the feet of the Phantom, the Mummy’s sidekick cobra and the Creature’s ghastly underwater grotto.

Spurred on by Basil Gogos’ cover illustrations for Famous Monsters of Filmland and the artwork on the model-kit boxes by James Bama, I got so good at re-creating the icons of scary cinema that I was awarded a Master Monster Maker plaque.

I hate to brag, but it’s okay because I’m not. My local Comic Book Guy probably had the competition foisted on him by Aurora to begin with, had to clear space in his shop window to display the few entries … and then gave everyone a plaque.

It was made of a single sheet of moulded plastic so thin you wondered if it would still be intact by the time you got it home to nail it on the wall. It was basically a framed portrait of Frankenstein (the monster, not the doctor) with room at the bottom for your name to be scratched in as “Master Monster Maker”.

Here’s a photo of somebody else’s local Comic Book Guy in Parsippany, New Jersey, and you can see the plaque on a shelf on the right, enlarged in the inset. The photo came from Amazing Figure Modeler magazine and I found it on the Flickr page of “toyranch”.

I hung onto that plaque for many years, recognising its camp value if nothing else, and finally bequeathed it to a nephew when I fled the country. What does my nephew do? He illustrates magazines!

Forrest Ackerman was tight with Vincent Price, but he was really big on Lon Chaney Sr, and it was through Forry’s mag that I met not just “the Man of a Thousand Faces” but Victor Hugo as well, and came to understand just what it was that made Chaney’s Hunchback so appallingly riveting.

I was fascinated by Chaney’s makeup kit, an elaborate, metal, multi-drawer box he hauled around from studio to studio. Naturally, I set about assembling a makeup kit of my own, with tufts of fake hair, charcoal, red paint, fangs I filed out of bits of wood, and wax — lots of wax. It was a little painful when applied hot, but you could create really amazing effects.

Chaney could transform himself to such a degree that I never did get a proper idea of what he looked like in real life. Not so his son, Lon Chaney Jr, who memorably portrayed the Wolfman but, without the makeup, had such a sad sack face (and was such a bad actor) that he couldn’t come near his dad’s elevated status.

God knows I tried my best …

Famous Monsters of Filmland had been coming out since 1958, but it took me a few more years to catch on. Wikipedia tells me it was supposed to be a one-time-only publication capitalising on the success of the “Shock” package of old horror movies that went on North American television the year before.

The magazine was an immediate hit and carried on into the early ’80s, although the entire final decade was a write-off for true horror devotees, who’d either grown up or were put off by the genre’s trivialisation.

“The disappearance of the older films from television,” Wiki says, “and the decline of talent in the imaginative film industry left it with a dearth of subject matter acceptable to both editor and fan.”

Forrest Ackerman, amazingly, kept on doing his thing right to the end. He’d had a nasty ordeal in the courts when another guy resurrected the magazine in 1993 and usurped the trademark and title, and then allegedly reneged on the editing deal he made with Forrest. A judge ended up ordering that Ackerman be paid $720,000, but he never could collect.

Instead, he had to sell off his 18-room “Ackermansion” in LA and move into the “Acker-mini-mansion” in the Horrorwood foothills. This became Forrest Ackerman’s Sci-Fi Mansion, still presumably in business on Glendower Avenue, within trick-or-treating distance of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House and Brad Pitt’s alleged abode.

Meanwhile a lot of people continue lobbying Aurora, or at least its current copyright holders, to reissue the monster model kits, but they’ve been told it’s not going to happen because parents might get offended. (Our parents got offended, but not that much.)

So while my generation had Famous Monsters of Filmland and Mad, the younger crowd had to settle for Creepy and far worse. The don’t make horror flicks these days unless every character is packing automatic weapons. The golden oldies are remade with pointless modern fluff piled on. They best you can hope for these days is to hear Bobby (Boris) Pickett’s “Monster Mash” being played on Halloween.

For more about monster models on the Web, check out Wesley Clark’s page and Renfield’s chatty site. All the Famous Monsters magazine covers are at MovieMags.com.