Living with a monster (or two)
Harryhausen’s daughter speaks about growing up with legendary special effects pioneer
One hot summer morning, Vanessa Harryhausen heaved open a garage door and came face to face with a 74-year-old gorilla. It was 2008, and she had travelled to Los Angeles to clear out an old storage unit belonging to her father, Ray Harryhausen — the special effects pioneer whose stop-motion creations in films such as Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans expanded cinema’s capacity for spectacle and magic. The unit had been left undisturbed since he had moved to London in 1960, and almost half a century on, he couldn’t recall what he’d left in it.
“Dad was what we would call today a bit of a hoarder,” Vanessa, now 55, says. “He saved everything. But thank goodness he did.”
The gorilla was almost half a metre tall and made from papier-mâche and black felt, with the remains of marionette strings dangling from its wrists. It was also — as Vanessa discovered on her return — the first monster her father had ever made.
He had built it at the age of 13 after his parents took him to see King Kong on its original 1933 release: an experience that had left him seized by the sense that this was what he was going to do with the rest of his life, whatever “this” even was.
Ray’s own work would have a similar effect on entire generations of filmmakers, from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro.
And so, it’s fair to say, this matted, gangling ape was something of a pivotal figure in film history. Yet when Vanessa plopped it into her father’s lap back in London, the reunion was not especially emotional.
“He groaned, ‘Oh my God, you can’t show anyone this, it’s terrible!’” Vanessa says. “But I explained to him that, however bad he thought it was, it was important that young aspiring filmmakers who only knew his classic movies were able to see that everyone has to start somewhere.”
Other early works retrieved from the garage included a grinning skeleton puppet — a distant ancestor of those from Argonauts and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad — and a cave bear whose pelt had been repurposed from Ray’s grandmother’s fur coat, apparently with her consent.
All three will be on show at a forthcoming exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to mark Ray’s centenary year (he was born 100 years ago and died aged 92 in 2013). They also appear in Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema — an accompanying book written by Vanessa about a childhood surrounded by some of film’s most fearsome and fantastical creatures. She was born four years after her parents relocated to the U.K., where Ray came to refine the revolutionary process he called Dynamation, which allowed stop-motion animated figures to be seamlessly transplanted into live-action footage.
He went on to become what Vanessa describes in the book as a “one-man industry,” creating effects shots of extraordinary complexity and grandeur with minimal assistance and in surprisingly modest surroundings.
During the school holidays, she would visit her father on filming locations around the world, where the flesh-and-blood component of the sequences would be captured. (The creatures were added later in his studio, brought to life frame by painstaking frame.)
Ray’s workshop was a converted spare bedroom, with a pitted and paint-spattered workbench pushed up against one wall, and sketches and storyboards plastered over the others. Vanessa remembers sitting on a small couch watching her father draw and build for hours on end. Throughout his career he wriggled out of behindthe-scenes photographs, worried that they’d shatter the illusions he crafted, but this lone, small spectator — the only child of Ray and his wife, Diana — was permitted. One day, when she’d been especially good, he let her reach into a jar and pick out some eyeballs for a work-in-progress.
Each of his creatures began its life here — first as drawings, then as a poseable metal frame known as an armature, which was finally covered by a liquid foam latex that was cured in an oven he’d built himself for that specific purpose. One day, during the making of Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, this vital piece of equipment broke down, so the smaller oven in the kitchen was called into service. “Starting with that evening’s roast chicken, every meal we ate for weeks tasted of rubber,” Vanessa says, laughing. “It was just one of those things you had to put up with in the Harryhausen house.”
Yet despite the effort that went into his creatures, Ray wasn’t precious about them once they had served their purpose, and would let Vanessa play with them like dolls. The Tyrannosaurus and the circus elephant that do battle in the 1969 fantasy western The Valley of Gwangi were favourites. She was even allowed to take them out for walks, and remembers pushing them around Harrods Food Hall in a baby buggy while shopping with her mother. “We were queuing at the fish counter once and these two old ladies came up and wanted to have a look at my dolly,” Vanessa says. “So they pulled back the canopy on the stroller and saw this foottall photorealistic T-rex. They gave my mother such a telling off — ‘It’s not right to have her going around with these awful things,’ and things like that.
“But it was what I knew. They didn’t scare me, I just found them amazing.”