Man of a Thousand Faces

And of course, I came to it from Lon Chaney Sr., you know, which I only really knew about from Famous Monsters of Filmland.

But the whole legacy, I'd also seen the movie Man of a Thousand Faces.

So I was very invested in the tragedy of Creighton Chaney, which is to say Lon Chaney Jr. and the pathos of him growing up under his father's shadow.

And so You know, this is the thing about my love of horror is it's all the stories associated with it, which were brought to life by famous monsters.

But he was just taking what was handed to him.

But I think a big part of this, for him, he seemed to hold onto it so tightly.

I think this is kind of his version of, His dad was the man of a thousand faces.

Well, this is his most famous face.

For this Halloween show, we're going to do something a little different.

With the help of some very special guests, we're going to talk about the 1957 feature, The Man of a Thousand Faces.

If you've never heard of the film, you may well ask what are other flicks doing including this in their Halloween lineup this year? Has Graham finally lost it? Notice how I quickly shift the blame to Graham there.

But let me make this clear.

The Man of a Thousand Faces is a dramatic retelling of the life of Lone Chaney, the first horror star.

It's hard to imagine today the impact this man had on horror, or as it was called in the 1920s, spook cinema.

The term horror movie didn't come into being until the universal cycle of the 1930s.

However, it does give an impression of the man.

Yeah.

He was inspired by Lon Chaney Sr., the Man of a Thousand Faces.

And he was an actor, I think, who took on the persona of one of his villains or something like that.

And I think he didn't really show up that much in the Golden Age.

Well, I just think it's funny that you said that it would be a really, it would have been a really, really good idea for the new Batman series to sort of take this approach to Clayface because this version of Clayface that we see in this movie, he's an actor named Matt Hagen.

He is, I think in the show it might have been an accident, but whatever, in the movie and maybe the show, he gets in trouble with some goons and they cut up his face and he pursues a experimental treatment.

to bring back his movie star look so he can regain his career but the treatment of course isn't you know isn't finished it isn't good yet and he ends up having like his face starts falling off but he finds out he can like mold it to look like other people and that's a neat idea and uh although maybe in the movie maybe in the series it was just in a way to sort of do a man of a thousand faces i'm trying to remember that specific detail but the point is he was an actor who became like a clay monster basically and if you watch the original clay face episode and that was a relatively that was kind of an amalgam of a couple of different clay face ideas um That kind of became the version of the character that everyone knows, and that was basically a universal horror monster episode.

And a lot of the Batman the Animated Series from the 90s was taking Batman villains and turning them into their own kind of universal monster.

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.

The effects just were not... [laughs] They just weren't.

But again, it is a fun flick worth checking out.