Movies

Stan Winston School Shares ‘The Monster Squad’ Behind the Scenes Photos

Published

7 years ago

February 21, 2017

The late Stan Winston and his team of makeup effects masters were busy in the mid-late ’80s, to say the very least. At the time, practical effects and men-in-suit monster movies were incredibly popular, and coming off James Cameron’s Aliens, Winston and company were hard at work on both Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad and Winston’s own directorial debut, Pumpkinhead.

As you might imagine, the team has countless stories to share from that crazy period of time, and over on the Stan Winston School website, they’ve just posted a blog that provides some behind-the-scenes insight into their work on The Monster Squad. They of course designed the new takes on the classic Universal Monsters for the 1987 film, which was a challenging task.

The blog explains:

The challenge was to suggest those classic creatures, without really copying them, because we didn’t have permission or the license to use those specific images. So we could do a ‘Gillman’, for example, but it couldn’t look too much like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was frustrating for us at first, because, of course, we wanted to do the original designs! But we couldn’t. We could only suggest those designs. So the Frankenstein monster looks a bit like the Karloff creature; but instead of bolts in the neck, he has bolts in the forehead. There was a certain percentage of changes we had to make to get away from any legal copyright infringement.

Stan Winston designed each of the characters for The Monster Squad, drawing sketches that were evocative of the original monsters, but within the legal restrictions.

Check out just some of the newly-uploaded behind-the-scenes shots below and be sure to head over to the Stan Winston School website to see more and read the blog!

Related Topics:Fred Dekker Stan Winston The Monster Squad

John Squires

Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has four awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

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Movies

‘The Invisible Man 2’ – Elisabeth Moss Says the Sequel Is Closer Than Ever to Happening

Published

2 hours ago

April 25, 2024

John Squires

Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.

First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.

Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.

Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.

Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.

“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”

She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”

At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.

Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.