The Monster of Piedras Blancas was a big shocker for me as a kid. It featured a creepy looking monster, at least one onscreen severed head and a dead child. I’d seen other movies with creepy looking monsters but I’m pretty sure this was the first I’d seen with a severed head and a kid killing monster. In the past if monsters killed kids it was accidental i.e. the kid got stepped on while the monster trashed the city. Usually children survived monster attacks.

This is the pre-Photoshopped version of my revision of the creature. The final version can be found in my Epilogue.net gallery.

Here is another of the original illustrations I did to build up my gallery at Epilogue.net. This one is a new interpretation of the alien from The Thing from Another World. Since the creature is a mobile sentient vegetable I wanted him (it) to look, well, look like a sentient mobile vegetable. As I wrote elsewhere at the time –

My reworking here was fairly easy. The original monster looks a lot like the Universal Frankenstein monster and it’s supposed to be a kind of ambulatory plant. The biggest thing I had to think about was why a plant would wear clothes. And what would they be made of?

And it wears the silk to retain moisture during its travels.

I’m a fan of both versions of The Thing. I don’t really consider the 1980s version a remake. It’s actually a more faithful adaptation of John Campbell’s original story Who Goes There?. Both films use the story’s idea of a thawed alien menacing an isolated base but the 1950’s version chances the nature of the alien and therefore the nature of the story. The final illustration can be found here.

In 2003 I set up a gallery at Epilogue.net. Of course, a gallery isn’t much good unless it’s got art in it so I got to work creating new illustrations to post. At the time I didn’t have much work that I thought would fit. I had a lot of sketchbooks but most of my finished work was either comics or Labor of Love designs or so old that I didn’t want to post it.

This is a scan of the original art for A Hot Dry Hunger, one of the illustrations in my B-Movie Re-Imagination Project series. BRIP is my occasional foray into redesigning the monsters of old, usually low budget, movies. I try to retain as much of the original design of the creature as possible while letting the design evolve in ways it couldn’t originally because the original costume had to be created cheaply and fit on a human actor.