In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Editor Ira explores the life, legacy, and misfortunes of creature designer Paul Blaisdell.

I'm a cinephile in my mid-40s, which means I've spent roughly 30 years complaining about the state of movie effects these days. You've heard the whole spiel before, if not from me then from somebody who might as well be me: “All these new action movies are so green-screened they’re basically cartoons.” “No computer-generated Godzilla is ever going to have the impact of the old rubber suits.” “God, those flames look phony compared to when they’d just set a stunt guy on fire.”

It's a tiresome diatribe, even if I’m right (and I am). But I’m not so naive as to think the Good Old Days were actually all that great for the people who had to live and work in them. Case in point: today’s Friday Know-It-All subject Paul Blaisdell, an artist who built a legacy in a field that eventually reduced his life’s work to a literal pile of ashes.

For a certain type of film fan, costume designers and makeup artists are celebrities almost on par with actors and directors. Artists like Tom Savini, Milicent Patrick, Eiji Tsuburaya, Carlo Rambaldi, Jack Pierce, Ruth E. Carter, and Ray Harryhausen all have their own dedicated followings today.

That category includes the lesser-known but still revered Paul Blaisdell, a New England-born artist who got his start drawing technical designs for Douglas Aircraft while contributing artwork to various science fiction magazines. The latter eventually caught the eye of magazine editor, literary agent, and B-movie historian Forest J. Ackerman. That relationship led to Blaisdell’s first work in Hollywood, as creature designer for a sci-fi horror film called “The Beast with a Million Eyes,” produced and co-directed by legendary low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman.

Like many Corman productions, “The Beast with a Million Eyes” was something of a bait-and-switch. While the title and movie poster promised a creepy evening in the company of an all-seeing space dragon, the titular “eyes” were a metaphor for the unseen alien antagonist’s psychic abilities. Late in the production, Blaisdell was paid a flat fee of $200 to design a spacecraft and its extraterrestrial pilot who were added at the last minute so as not to send the audience home completely un-monstered.

With his square jaw, wiry frame, and pencil moustache, Blaisdell looked the part of a working artist in 1950s Hollywood. He accordingly went on to design a number of weird creatures that would eventually rank among the most iconic of his era’s genre filmmaking. In the moment, though, his role probably couldn’t have felt much less essential. He worked for Z-grade productions cranked out by budget studios, mostly the Corman-affiliated American International Pictures (AIP). These studios put a premium on getting things done quickly and cheaply. That meant not only that he was usually rushing to assemble a reasonable-looking monster with limited resources, but also that his designs were frequently cannibalized for future, even cheaper movies.

Blaisdell worked with some of the biggest names in 1950s trash cinema — that is, directors cherished by creeps like me and totally unknown to better-adjusted members of society — on a bunch of movies with perfect titles. He worked directly under Corman on “Day the World Ended,”“It Conquered the World,” and “Not of This Earth.” For former Friday Know-It-All subject Bert I. Gordon, he built miniature props for “The Amazing Colossal Man,” giant props for “Attack of the Puppet People,” and massive tarantula legs for “Earth vs. The Spider.” The assorted aliens he designed for Edward L. Cahn’s “It! The Terror from Beyond Space,” “Invasion of the Saucer Men,” and “The She-Creature” helped define the look and vibe we associate with ‘50s sci-fi today.

Beyond designing the costumes, Blaisdell frequently did double-duty on the inside. Whenever one of his adorably lumpy, barely mobile creatures appears on screen, there’s a good chance that the man under the foam rubber suit is the designer himself. That’s fitting, as Blaisdell seems to have had a genuine affection for bringing his grotesqueries to the best imitation of life the budget would allow. His performances as the cone-shaped vegetable creature in “It Conquered the World” and the titular “She-Creature” — an impressive costume that Blaisdell affectionately named “Cuddles” — in particular have become the stuff of B-movie legend.

There’s a cliche in writing that says as an author, you need to be willing to kill your darlings.

That means recognizing and cutting sentences, phrases, and characters that don’t serve the greater purpose of your story, even if you’re proud of your work on them. Paul Blaisdell’s creature designs were his darlings, and he eventually grew tired of watching other people kill them. His costumes, props, and puppets were routinely altered and repurposed by other filmmakers, with bits and pieces resurfacing in dozens of other low-rent productions. His “She-Creature” suit alone had featured roles in at least four movies. That’s one more movie than James Dean!

The disposability of his craft began to make Blaisdell disillusioned with the creature effects game, a feeling that came to a head with 1958’s “How to Make a Monster.” It’s a kind-of clever little meta-movie starring Robert H. Harris as a disgruntled Hollywood make-up artist who employs his old costumes while he murders studio executives who did him wrong. Those costumes were pulled from AIP’s closet and included a number of Blaisdell’s original designs.

In the film’s climax, Harris’s studio burns down with him and his beloved creatures trapped inside. The cheapest way to accomplish that effect? Just going ahead and actually burning all of the original costumes, of course! While Paul reportedly gave the OK for some of his work to be thus destroyed, other items he’d intended to preserve were immolated as well. That makes the final moments of “How to Make a Monster” a real conundrum for a trash fan like myself. While it’s grim to know I’m watching history go up in flames, the onscreen destruction itself is also a kind of cinematic history.

That was only the most proactive defilement of Blaisdell’s work. Most of his other designs were left to decay in the studio’s insufficiently protective storage facilities. His original “Beast With a Million Eyes” alien prop was on display in Forest J. Ackerman’s home, but it was eventually reduced to dust due to constant exposure to direct sunlight. By the time he cut ties with AIP in 1959, the only keepsake Blaisdell had to show from his prolific decade in Hollywood was his mutilated “She-Creature” body costume, the mask having been sacrificed on the altar of “How to Make a Monster.”

By 1960 Paul Blaisdell was mostly out of the monster-making business. His friend Ackerman had found success with his (still-running!) horror movie magazine “Famous Monsters of Filmland,” so Blaisdell followed suit by launching a more insider-focused publication called “Fantastic Monsters Of The Films” along with film archivist Bob Burns III. Paul contributed a regular creature design how-to column called “The Devil’s Workshop.” The magazine was well received, but — and here’s where I start to suspect Paul Blaisdell did something to anger the gods — it was discontinued after a suspected arson at the print shop burned up all of the materials for its would-be eighth issue.

That was, understandably, the last straw. Blaisdell quit show business altogether and pivoted to carpentry and property management for the rest of his working days. Eventually, though, he found himself something of a hot commodity again.

Turns out one of the bonuses of making profit-minded cinema is that people keep finding new ways to profit from it. Much of the AIP film catalog was licensed out for syndicated TV airings by tongue-in-cheek horror hosts like Svengoolie and Morgus the Magnificent. That introduced a new generation of film lovers to the homemade charisma of Paul Blaisdell’s creature designs.

Fans and filmmakers began seeking him out for his perspectives on the glory days of B-movie monsters. When the hugely influential horror movie magazine “Fangoria” launched in 1979, one of their first orders of business was to run an extensive, two-part interview with Blaisdell. Hobby companies introduced model kits of classic Blaisdell creatures. Up-and-coming exploitation legend Fred Olen Ray even tried to commission some new designs for his late ‘70s monster films, but by this time Blaisdell was unfortunately too sick to follow through. He died of cancer in 1983 at the age of 55, having lived long enough to see the world start to appreciate the artistry it once seemed determined to obliterate. So it goes.

As for Paul Blaisdell’s beloved “She-Creature” costume, you can view it today in a pristine restoration at… Nah, I’m playing. It was destroyed when his house flooded in 1979. I’m telling you, the universe REALLY didn’t want these costumes to exist!