Jack Pierce

That's a vampire.

Like, when we talk about Dracula, there's a reason we're not bringing up, um, Jack Pierce's name on it is because, like, he didn't have to do much.

Jack Pierce complained that he didn't have a lot to do with Dracula.

But Frankenstein, obviously, he made Frankenstein.

There's a lot going on.

It's a lot of fun, and part of the fun is the very obvious mask that the creature is wearing.

You definitely won't confuse the monster with the iconic makeup that Jack Pierce did for Lon Chaney in The Wolf Man, not at all.

The makeup for Monster on the Campus was done, however, by Bud Westmore of the famous Westmore family that included five generations of makeup artists.

So it makes me wonder, I mean, for a guy that's worked on everything from Man of a Thousand Faces, Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequels, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and The Munsters TV show, I'm gonna have to say that maybe the budget hampered his efforts in Monster on the Campus.

What is truly fascinating about the legacy of Frankenstein is the visual dominance of the 1931 James Whale film.

The makeup designer, Jack Pierce, created an aesthetic, the flat, squared off head, the heavy eyelids, the industrial bolts jutting out of the neck.

The green skin.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, the Jack Pierce makeup design for Karloff is incredible work, creating the flat head and the electrodes we all recognize.

But what that film does on a narrative level is strip the creature of his most dangerous weapon.

His voice.

Relatively, yeah.

But i- in this 1958 radio interview, Karloff detailed the reality of Jack Pierce's original makeup process, and, uh, it wasn't a mask he could just slip on.

That sounded like a nightmare.

It involved applying layers of collodion, which is this flammable syrupy solution, along with cotton and spirit gum directly to his bare skin.

Yep.

That was the inspiration.

But how did Jack Pierce actually achieve that look on a living person in 1935? Like, there's no hairspray strong enough for that.

No, it required actual structural engineering on the actor's head.

He only played Frankenstein's monster three times, each time benefiting from the brilliant but apparently grueling makeup effects of monster master Jack P.

Pierce, a makeup designer on this film who lived 1889 through 1960.

Yeah.

Uh, we've talked about Jack Pierce before.

Of course, a, a huge input on the, uh, the impact of the Universal Monster films, having done many of these makeup designs.

Um, uh, so I was reading in that book that came along with my, my disc set, um, that despite having designed so many iconic monsters for the big screen, uh...

So, you know, he defines the look of the Frankenstein monster.

He does, I think, The Wolf Man and many of these other, uh, just really indelible designs.