In 1994, Wes Craven gave the world his New Nightmare, the seventh film in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. It imagined a “real” world invaded by his claw-gloved, disfigured bogeyman Freddy Kreuger (played as ever by Robert Englund), escaping from a new film about him to attack the actors and crew. It was a sometimes witty satire on Hollywood in the mid-1990s but back in 1958, director Herbert L. Strock and writers Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel had sort of beaten him to it with How to Make a Monster, a slight but not unamusing film that threatens to lift the lid, after a fashion, on the world of low-budget film-making in the late 1950s.

Robert H. Harris plays special effects make-up man Pete Dumond who has been working tirelessly and faithfully at American International Studios for 25 years. The film was produced by American International Pictures who gamely allow themselves to be sent up though as they didn’t actually own a studio of their own, How to make a Monster was shot at the ever-reliable Ziv Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard in between the many television series that were shot there. The fictional American International are taken over by NBN Associates and the new owners have no time for the horror films that had been the company’s stock in trade, presciently suggesting that teen musicals and comedies would soon be the flavour of the month. Dumond is fired and swears to take his revenge on the new bosses, Jeffrey Clayton (Paul Maxwell) and John Nixon (Eddie Marr). His last job for the company is to create the monsters for Werewolf versus Frankenstein (the make-ups will be familiar to anyone who had seen AIP‘s I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957)) and he develops a formula which, when applied to young actors Larry Drake (Gary Clarke) and Tony Mantell (Gary Conway) as part of his make-up, allows him to control them hypnotically and become the instruments for his revenge.

This was a transitional film for producer Herman Cohen. It looked back to his perennial favourite theme of adults exploiting young adults (mainly older men controlling younger men in subtexts that have frequently been read as homoerotic) while anticipating his later films, many made in Britain, which retained the exploitation theme but added themed serial murders to the mix. At one point early in the proceedings, a studio tour guide promises the latest party of visitors a look at the shooting of their latest horror film, Horrors of the Black Museum which, in real life, would go into production the following year in England.

There are plenty of these little tips of the hat to the monster kid faithful’s who were probably the only ones paying much attention on Saturday nights at the drive-ins while the older kids were otherwise engaged in the backs of their cars. Along with multiple AIP references (Dumond pauses beneath posters for I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein) several props and masks were borrowed from monster maker extraordinaire to flesh out Dumond’s little museum to his own genius – “his children” is how he refers to them. In the fiery climax (the final act was shot in colour while the rest of the film remains in black and white), several of the props, including those from The She-Creature (1956), It Conquered the World (1956), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) and Attack of the Puppet People (1957), were destroyed by the flames. Blaisdell later claimed that he had no idea that the items would be treated so shabbily and was dismayed at their loss.

Harris, usually a supporting player in films like The Invisible Boy, the marvellously titled The  Fuzzy Pink Nightgown and Peyton Place, all in a very busy 1957 and with an extensive background on the stage, brings a Donald Pleasence-ish feel to Dumond but is otherwise largely unremarkable. After How to Make a Monster, Gary Conway would be a familiar small screen presence, co-starring in detective drama Burke’s Law (1963-1966) before joining the cast of Irwin Allen’s Land of the Giants (1968-1970). Similarly, Gary Clarke would achieve a degree of fame on The Virginian (1962-1971) but the most famous name and face belongs to Morris Ankrum, nearing the end of his prolific career and playing Police Captain Hancock.

A face that would become famous a decade or so later, at least to lovers of low-budget horror, was that of John Ashley, later a key player in that wave of Filipino horror and monster films that turned up in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He turns up here in a pointless cameo, billed as “guest star”, as himself, a rock and roll singer in the Elvis Presley mode performing the timeless ditty You’ve Got to Have Ee-ooo. Co-producer James H. Nicholson had recently put Ashley under contract with AIP and although he’d lost out on the lead role in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, he played the title role in Teenage Frankenstein and had just released the first singles in his burgeoning singing career. His cameo has nothing to do with the rest of the film and is the very definition of something or someone being crowbarred into a film just because it or they were to hand.

How to Make a Monster is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s fun (certainly more so than it’s dreadful double-bill partner, Roger Corman’s Teenage Cave Man (1958)) but it’s never quite the incisive Hollywood satire that one suspects Cohen and Kandel would have wanted to make (it’s been suggested that Dumond’s plight mirrored that Universal’s famous monster maker Jack Pierce). It’s a passable time-killer but its title was well-enough remembered for it, like that of Teenage Cave Man, to be re-used in 2001 for an entry in the Creature Features series of television films, directed by George Huang. Like Teenage Caveman, it takes the title of the original film and abandons the rest, Huang’s film being about a sentient video game with evil designs on its developers.

Crew
Directed by: Herbert L. Strock; © MCMLVII [1957] Sunset Productions Inc; James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff present. An American International picture; Produced by: Herman Cohen; Original Story and Screenplay by: Kenneth Langtry, Herman Cohen; Director of Photography: Maury Gertzman; Editorial Supervisor: Jerry Young; Music Composed and Conducted by: Paul Dunlap; Wardrobe: Oscar Rodriguez; Makeup Created by: Philip Scheer; Art Director: Leslie Thomas

Cast
Robert H. Harris [Pete Dumond]; Paul Brinegar [Rivero]; Gary Conway [Tony Mantell/the Teenage Frankenstein]; Gary Clarke [Larry Drake/the Teenage Werewolf]; Malcolm Atterbury [Security Guard Richards]; Dennis Cross [Security Guard Monahan]; Morris Ankrum [Police Capt. Hancock]; Walter Reed [Detective Thompson]; Paul Maxwell [Jeffrey Clayton]; Eddie Marr [John Nixon]; Heather Ames [Arlene Dow]; Robert Shayne [Gary Droz]; Rod Dana; Jacqueline Ebeier; Joan Chandler; Thomas B. Henry; John Phillips [Detective Jones]; Paulene Myers [Millie]; John Ashley [himself]

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