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!
