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. There’s more!
