NE OF AMERICAN International Pictures’ horror hits of the 1950s, the Herman Cohen production How to Make a Monster (1958), was
BARBARA STEELE, the dark madonna of the Italian horror film, turns her face to the camera in a never-before-seen color shot.
a darkly comic reflection on the waning popularity of the horror genre. In this movie, “Old Pete” (Robert H. Harris), a Hollywood makeup man specializing in movie monsters, is fired from “American International Stu- dios” when the “studio” is taken over by new manage- ment. In a telling scene, Pete’s laments about the fad- ing genre are shrugged-off by a sympathetic director (Thomas B. Henry), who explains that it wouldn’t take very much to turn the trend around: “One picture can do it—maybe one of those foreign imports—and the whole monster cycle is on its way again!” This dialogue is prescient, not only because this is indeed what soon happened, but because the tide was turned, in no small part, by a foreign import released under the banner of American International: Black Sunday. Made in Italy as La maschera del demonio, it marked Mario Bava’s official debut as a motion picture director.
