The Little Man of Horror: Jack Pierce The FX Master At Universal

Ramsey Seikaly

Los Angeles -- If you were a kid, yes if, with technology the way it is today you wonder if there was a time when a kid could be a kid instead of a computer geek and worse yet, a text phone addict. Well I am glad to say there was a time when kids like me, I am still in the mental infancy stage, were naive slaves to the boob tube and/or the Saturday matinee at the Bejou where a good scare meant watching one of the ghoulish Universal characters make us feel like goulash after ninety minutes of fiendish horror and over the top acting. Who cares whether there was a plot or not. Come to think of it I never noticed.  Well it went something like this a young couple gets stuck in a God forsaken place usually sounds like Pennsylvania but with a T instead of P and some guy with a busted back picks up there luggage as this ginormous storm kicks in out of nowhere just in time for a Bela Lugosi look a like or a Karloff knock off enters looking like a walking corpse from Dawn of The Dead, for nothing else but effect and to say Boo I can see you!  Wasn't that the something called Rocky...no not the Stalone meat market vehicle the other meat market vehicle and really less meat...thin as a rail Tim Curry. No pork on that boy, then.  Now, well?  

New paragraph.   

Now if you really want the low down on who is to blame for all the hyped up evil. And you do. Put the blame on Jack Pierce, who is dead now, what else is new, who habituated the Universal back lot on Lankersheim and Ventura, now a Universal knock off Disneyland.  Oops never mind. Let's continue, and came up in his sanitized make up bungalow on the back lot that looked like a medical boudoir from Ben Casey with lab coats and...you get the the picture. Hey that's Dr. Frankenstein!  

Jack just might have been the inspiration for the notoriously tragic, misguided, delusional grander character personality trait that is Dr. Frankenstein.  He did create the make up.  WHAT!  True, true, true but he is dead now and he can't come out of his grave to scare you, only his creations who reside online, with such cyberspace platforms as Youtube, Netflix, Hulu and an occasional pirated DVD from Cyprus.  The country not the tree.  

OK, truth be known, I have a wild uncontrollable vivid imagination.  So sue me.  But for lack of any seriousness on my part.  I lost it when I went on overdrive after "If you were a kid" and forgot to down shift from 5th to 3rd. 

If there was a This Is Your Life and there was with Karloff, Jack entered stage right that is left if you are a spectator, and looking like a shoe in for Frado Baggins dad mumbled a a couple of soundbites to Karloff's This Is The Best Make Up Man.  Yes Boris he made your career along with Bela and Lon Chaney Jr., all the Hunchbacks except the French guy who had a penchant swinging from the rafters of the bell tower of Notre Dam.  No doubt if he lived long enough probably would look more like Gandalf and would probably have created those characters too. But alas poor Jack he is none.  

Well here below we have a featuret, what shorts were called in the day, about the legacy and influence Jack Pierce has had on every make up artist and master since his bloody make up reign at Universal as the father of filmed special effects make up.  To learn more about this Greek immigrant. You can learn more about this wunderkind by clicking here the link to his Wikipedia bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Pierce_(makeup_artist)

BOO! Cut and print.  Make up!

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