When it came to breathing life into the monsters, Fred Dekker and the production sought out one of the masters in the field of special effects makeup and design, the legendary Stan Winston. Having just come of work on films like The Thing, Terminator and Aliens, Winston and his stable of artists were taking Hollywood by storm. With The Monster Squad, Winston left most of the heavy lifting up to his studio, in particular artists such as Steve Wang and Matt Rose who handled the Gillman, Tom Woodruff Jr. who took on Frankenstein’s Monster, Alec Gillis who took the reigns on Dracula’s bat transformations, contacts and fangs, Shane Mahan who worked on the Mummy, and John Rosengrant and Shannon Shea who handled the Wolfman…
But Stan was far from hands off on the project. Like the director on a movie set he was providing direction, guidance and conceptual design. Here’s a look at some of his sketches for the monsters, starting with his ideas for the Wolfman and Frankenstein’s Monster…
Part of what Winston was trying to achieve was to modernize the look of the creatures, but he also wanted to distance these designs from those of the classic Universal monsters since those likenesses were copyrighted. So with Frankenstein’s monster the flat top head and features that resemble Boris Karloff and Jack Pierce’s design had to be avoided. So he rounded the head and made the sutures on the forehead more prominent. Later, when Woodruff started sculpting and augmenting Winston’s concept he’d make the monster look more natural and would shift the neck bolts to the temples.
With the Wolfman Winston wanted to avoid making the character into an outright werewolf, still retaining the feel of a man, yet bringing more of the wolf into the design of the face, straying from the Pierce Lon Chaney Jr. look. He did this by adding a small snout and making the eyes more wide set. He also shifted the ears to the top of the head. In the end the design sit on the line in between Universal’s incarnation and the designs in the Joe Dante Howling film.
For his Mummy design, Winston made the creature more decrepit than Karloff and Pierce’s incarnation by accentuating the sunken features to an extent where the face is almost a living skull. He also upped the gore/decay factor a bit by having the lips shrunken and drawn back from the teeth on his left side giving the impression of a seriously old, dried up monster. Mahan would again take this design even further and make the mummy a true ancient walking corpse…
Probably the most drastically altered character in the group would be the Gillman. Winston’s initial pass at the creature was very alien and way more toned down then the character’s design would become…
On his second pass he accentuated the amphibian features, added prominent top and side head fins, and he gave the creature fangs.
As a small bit of trivia, it’s said that John Rosengrant sculpted the Wolfman’s face to resemble that of Winston. I don’t know, what do you guys think?
Now for today’s card!
Today’s card is #17, Wolfman’s got Nards…
