Tweet

This article was originally published in 2012 following an interview with Ray Harryhausen, and serves now as our tribute to the late special effects legend, allowing him to talk us through his groundbreaking career.

An unremarkable trip along the Central Line takes you to Holland Park, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in West Central London. And in a typically large but deceptively anonymous Holland Park corner townhouse... live the monsters.

All right, that might not quite be true. But in that enormous town house does live Ray Harryhausen, monster-creator extraordinaire (although he prefers the term “creature”) over a career spanning at least six decades. Astonishingly, he practically always worked alone, and uniquely while he never directed per se, it’s his authorship stamped over Dynamation classics from Mighty Joe Young to Clash Of The Titans. “They were my films,” he chuckles. “The directors worked for me.”

Our walk down the austere hallway of chez Harryhausen takes us past closed doors behind which we’re certain may lurk gorgons and hydras, but the room into which we’re ushered contains just Ray himself, and a small bronze cast of one of the Argonauts skeletons. Modestly, he seems baffled that we’d be interested in talking to him, more than once telling us: “It’s all in the books!” With a new documentary, Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan, celebrating his life and work, we persuaded the master to talk us through a few of his creations first-hand...