ON THE CENTENARY OF HIS BIRTH, SFX CELEBRATES FILMMAKING LEGEND RAY HARRYHAUSEN

WORDS: NICK SETCHFIELD

"I ONCE HAD THE LUXURY OF choosing eyeballs,” says Vanessa Harryhausen, daughter of special effects genius Ray Harryhausen. “I know that sounds really ghastly, doesn’t it? But he had this little plastic cabinet, with all these wonderful drawers, full of bits and bobs, pieces of armature and dolls’ eyes. One particular time he said, ‘Do you want to see which eyes would go well with which creature?’

“He was always very good with me, if I was at home. I’d sit down on the couch and watch him sketch away or tinker at the table, making some wonderful creation.”

Vanessa Harryhausen with a few friends.

Havoc reigns in 1957’s 20 Million Miles To Earth.

Cowboys vs dinosaurs in The Valley Of Gwangi.

I’d sit down on the couch and watch him sketch away or tinker at the table

Harryhausen, basically the best uncle ever.

Across his career, Ray Harryhausen scattered indelible screen images like so many Hydra teeth: undead warriors, all swords and bones; lurching bronze giants; angel-winged horses and snarling, tail-lashing prehistoric beasts. Conjured into uncanny life through the painstaking process of stop-motion animation, Harryhausen’s creations seemed to haunt the borderland between celluloid and dream. They were the stuff of legend, reborn for half-term cinema trips or bank holiday TV. Mythology fused with technology in a London workshop - resulting in a private, hand-made magic he called Dynamation.

As Vanessa Harryhausen remembers, the family home in Kensington - where her father quietly and diligently produced his effects, far from the glare of Hollywood - was a bestiary of fantastic creatures (tellingly, he never called them monsters). “They were all over upstairs,” she tells SFX. “All around the landing. When we went up into his office everything was on the walls and in the cabinets that he’d made. It was really wonderful to see it all and have a hands-on experience.”

Once, she recalls, the creatures even invaded the kitchen. “His own kiln had conked out. Mum and I came back from a shopping trip to find he’d used our gas oven instead. He thought it would be a good idea to use mum’s Moulinex, too, to mix the rubber. She wasn’t very happy with that at all. Our food slightly tasted of latex for a few weeks…”