How to Make a Monster

How to Make a Monster is a 1958 horror film released by American International Pictures. The film is a follow up to both I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. Filmed in black & white, with the last reel filmed in color.

Pete Dumond, Chief Make-up Artist for 25 years at American International Studios, is pink-slipped by the new management from the East, Jeffrey Clayton and John Nixon, who plan to make musicals and comedies instead of the horror pictures for which Pete has created his remarkable monster make-ups and made the studio famous. In retaliaton, Pete vows to use the very monsters these men have rejected to destroy them. By mixing a numbing ingredient into his foundation cream and persuading the young actors that their careers are through unless they place themselves in his power, he hypnotizes both Larry Drake and Tony Mantell, who are playing the characters Teenage Werewolf and Teenage Frankenstein in the picture "Werewolf Meets Frankenstein" currently shooting on the lot.

Through hypnosis, Pete causes Larry in werewolf make-up to kill Nixon in the studio projection room, and later he wills the unknowing Tony to wait for Clayton in his garage at night and brutally choke him to death. Studio guard Monahan, a self-styled detective, stops in at the Make-up Room on his rounds one evening and shows Pete and Rivero—Pete's reluctant assistant and accomplice—his little black book in which he has jotted down many facts such as the late time Pete and Rivero checked out the night of the first murder. By this show of initiative he plans to get a promotion. Apprehensive, Pete, made up as a terrifying primitive monster, one of his own creations, kills Monahan in the studio commissary at a later point on his beat. Richards, the older guard sees and hears nothing until he uncovers Monahan's body. Police investigators uncover two clues: a maid, Millie describes the Monster Frankenstein (Tony, in make-up) who struck her down as he fled from Clayton's murder, and the Police Laboratory Technician discovers a peculiar ingredient in the make-up left on Clayton's fingers from his death struggle with Tony. The formula matches bits found in Pete's old Make-up Room, and the Police head for Pete's house—where Pete has taken Rivero, Tony and Larry for a grim farewell party to his home which is a museum of all the monsters that he has created in the 25 years in the studio. Pete has stabbed Rivero to death secretly in the kitchen and hidden his body. Finding Tony and Larry trying to escape the locked living room, he attacks them with a knife, but Larry knocks over a candelabra, setting the living room on fire and Pete is burned to death trying to save the lifelike heads of his monster "children" mounted on the wall. The Police break through the door before the flames reach the boys.

DRACULA Gets Into a LOT of FIGHTS

31 Days of Helly Homoween Corntinue.....

CRISWELL'S HAUNTED HISTORY'S MYSTERIES OUIJA SEANCE CHAMBER

"Criswell here! I'm gonna do you a BIG favor and not even pretend that this here is anything other than a lame effort to recycle some shit from a different blog. I was gonna go into this whole big routine about summoning spirits and learning the truth behind some of history's greatest conundrums, but quite frankly, I don't feel like fucking with it. It's Friday, I'm tired, I have better things to do. If you don't, poor thing, then read on..."


Kommandant Oberst Wilhelm Klink
(1891-1946)

Kommandant Oberst (Colonel) Wilhelm Klink was a German Luftwaffe (Air Corps) officer of aristocratic (Junker) Prussian descent. He was born in Leipzig in 1891, though he referred to Düsseldorf, where he attended the Gymnasium, as his home town. After failing exams to study law and medicine, he received an appointment from Kaiser Wilhelm II to a military academy, through the influence of his uncle, the Bürgermeister's barber, and graduated 95th in his class.

A veteran aviator of the First World War, Klink served as commandant of the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag 13 during WWII. Colonel Klink was awarded the Citation of Merit-Second Class in 1944.

Although Klink had no connection to the concentration camps, nor does it appear to modern historians that he was guilty of any war crimes, he was among the defendants tried at Nuremberg after the end of the war. It is believed that his frequent-- and totally groundless-- boasting about his closeness and importance to the late dictator Adolf Hitler was taken seriously by Allied investigators who ordered his arrest.

Klink, like many officers in the German military, was never a member of the Nazi party. Nevertheless, he was tried for war crimes along with the high-ranking Nazi defendants. Klink was found guilty on October 1, 1946, on a four-count indictment: Conspiracy to commit crimes alleged in other accounts, Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity.

Sergeant Johann Schultz (pictured left), who served under Klink at Stalag 13, was compelled to testify at the trial. The Sergeant, who went into diabetic shock several times during the proceedings, claimed under oath that he "knew nothing" of Klink's wartime activities. However, he did recount for the court a number of his former commander's anecdotes and claims regarding his, Klink's, importance and influence among the higher echelons of the Nazi government. Though dismissed by the defense as hearsay, many believe that Schultz's recitation of Klink's grandiose claims tipped the balance among members of the tribunal in favor of a guilty verdict. Until that point, it was agreed among spectators and other trial participants that Klink would receive a lenient sentence, if not outright acquittal.

In the event, Wilhelm Klink was sentenced to death by hanging. His sentence was carried out at Landsberg prison on October 16, 1946.

There has been a great deal of speculation about Klink's enigmatic last words. Witnesses say that the condemned man shouted, in a strident voice, the syllables "Colonel Ho..." just as the trap beneath his feet was sprung.

Though histories of the period are filled with competing theories, we will probably never know the identity of the mysterious Colonel to whom Klink cried out with his last breath.

(Article researched and written by Chuck Miller)