The Hideous Sun Demon (1959): Part Two.

Greetings, Boils and Ghouls, and welcome back to our After-Action Report on rogue isotopes, lusty lounge lizards, and sun-addled were-reptiles. As always, this will all gel together a whole lot better if you’ve read Part One of our Two Part Retrospective on Robert Clarke’s The Hideous Sun Demon (1959) first. It’s OK. We’ll wait.

For those of you returning, and thank you for that, you will remember how in Part One we talked about Clarke’s varied film career and how it all invariably / inevitably led to him producing his very own, low-budget feature film. 

See, having starred in several one-lung genre films -- The Man from Planet X (1951), The Astounding She-Monster (1957) -- the actor picked up a few tricks here and there, watched how the sausage got made with very little money, and thought, hey, if they can do it, so could I, right? Right?!

Well, so far, so … well, reasonably good, but the final verdict is still out as Clarke would take on the role of producer, director and lead actor in The Hideous Sun Demon. And here, we catch up with his character, Dr. Gilbert McKenna, cursed to turn into a hideous monster whenever exposed to the sun, as he checks himself out of the hospital against the medical advice of his doctor. 

He then returns to his gloomy seaside manor, where he lurks like a ghost during the day and only ventures out at night for long walks along the beach or to prowl around in his ‘56 MGA convertible. 

During the daylight hours, he pours over all the relevant literature, looking for an answer to his regressive, ‘half-man / half-lizard’ condition, bemoaning his luck as it proves stubbornly elusive. “Darwin never scratched the surface,” he silently rages, caught in a woe-be-me spiral. And even though Bickell has contacted Dr. Jacob Hoffman (La Porta), a noted radiation specialist, days turn into weeks with no answer. 

Still, the ever-pining Ann encourages the distraught McKenna not to lose hope, but I fear it's already too late.

At this point, McKenna can barely stand the reflective moonlight, which proves the final straw. He starts to compose a suicide note but ultimately crumples it up and tosses it aside. He heads outside to the beckoning cliffside and the crashing surf below. 

His intentions are clear, but before McKenna can muster that one final step into oblivion, he hears the laughter of several beach revelers below. The spell is broken and he retreats. For now.

Cut to a gas station in town, where a curious attendant asks McKenna why he’s wearing sun glasses at night. (Editor’s Note: Insert Corey Hart joke here. Kids? Ask your parents. No. Wait. Ask your grandparents instead.) After explaining its a medical condition, he then queries on where a person could buy some cigarettes at this late hour. 

Pointed to a nearby dive bar, McKenna orders a drink and a pack of smokes; but his attention is soon drawn to a beautiful, blonde and busty woman playing the piano and quickly becomes infatuated.

A much needed distraction, our hero returns the very next night and approaches the piano player. Her name is Trudy Osborne (Peterson), and after making goo-goo eyes at each other as she finishes her set, he buys her a drink and they start to get acquainted. 

But they’re soon interrupted by a mug named George (Similuk), who claims to be Trudy’s boyfriend, and he’s none too happy about being stood up by her over this other clown.

When he starts man-handling Trudy, saying they’re leaving, only she doesn’t want to go, McKenna steps in. It comes to blows, with McKenna coming out on top. 

He and Trudy then flee into the night, fast as they can, and wind up back at the beach, where the driver shows his passenger his secret booze stash hidden in his center console.

Here, under the moonlight, one should note, McKenna suddenly becomes more aggressive as he essentially molests the girl. Who, in her efforts to extract herself from his wanton embrace, winds up falling into the water.

Coming to his senses, McKenna retrieves a blanket from his car, which a now naked Trudy wraps herself up in. He then builds a fire to dry her clothes and offers his jacket for further warmth. 

This all proves to be some kind of hair-brained foreplay as McKenna pulls Trudy in close, they willingly kiss, and we pan down to see the blanket drop to her feet, which in 1950s speak means [whispering/] they just had sex [/whispering].

Come the dawn, McKenna awakens next to Trudy, but they’re still on the beach; apparently both passed out after all that drinking and boot-knocking. And as the sun rises higher, he panics and abandons poor, bewildered Trudy on the beach as he races for home.

But he’s already starting to change, and by the time he arrives the metamorphosis into his alter-ego is complete. Worse yet, Ann was there, looking for him. 

He tries, and fails, to avoid her, entering the house through the basement, where he takes his frustrations out on a passing rat, gruesomely crushing this innocent bystander in his clawed hands

Ann follows and eventually finds McKenna hiding in a darkened closet, reverted back to human form, curled up in a fetal position, weeping. Obviously at the end of his rope, they embrace and she begs him to hang on just a bit longer. 

Turns out the reason she was there in the first place was to bring good news. Apparently, Dr. Hoffman has isolated the isotope that is triggering the change. And while not a cure, it is definitely a huge step in the right direction. At this very moment, Ann assures, arrangements are being made to get McKenna transported to Hoffman’s clinic for treatment somewhere on the East Coast. 

Until then, fearing the reactions are accelerating, meaning even less exposure is needed to trigger a change, and even longer to revert back, McKenna is told to remain secluded indoors for the duration with no exceptions.

All well and good, but he just can’t do it. He can’t help himself. Is this the sun demon asserting himself, trying to get out? His darker impulses? Who can say, as McKenna’s fitful sleep is plagued by Trudy’s sultry voice and her signature song -- her only song, really -- “Strange Pursuit.” And as if mesmerized by the Sirens’ call, McKenna once more abandons his house and heads back to the bar.

But the jilted Trudy isn’t happy to see him. Still miffed at being left deserted at the beach, naked, she throws a drink into his face when he tries to apologize. Exacerbating things further, George is there, too; and once Trudy reveals what happened the night before, the hoodlum and several of his hooligans drag McKenna outside and start pummeling him in a darkened alley. And they might’ve killed him, too, if a suddenly contrite Trudy had not intervened.

And so, once more, McKenna wakes up somewhere else and at the wrong time of day. Apparently, Trudy, feeling guilty, took him to her apartment after the curb-stomping, which she sorta instigated. He asks her not to open the curtains, and then begs to stay until the sun goes down. 

Trudy is agreeable, even though he won’t say why, but then someone knocks on the door. It’s George, who barges in and catches the two of them together.

Convinced the two slept with each other, an enraged George pulls a gun and forces McKenna outside, ready to finish what he started last night. But once exposed to the sun, a possessed McKenna lunges for the gun. And as Trudy watches from the window, the men continue to struggle for the weapon. 

But the tide officially turns once McKenna’s fully transformed into the Sun Demon, who kills the gunmen, crushing his throat, before fleeing up a nearby hillside, chased by Trudy’s frantic screams.

Meanwhile, back at his seaside home, Ann and Bickell are waiting with Dr. Hoffman but are baffled that no one is home. When they hear someone approaching, Ann rushes to the door, opens it, and comes face to face with the Sun Demon and screams.

Once he reverts back to normal, McKenna confesses to everything: Trudy, killing the gangster, coming upon a group of school children while fleeing, and killing a dog who tried to defend them. 

Off to the side, Hoffman confers with Bickell, who expresses they must act fast; McKenna is becoming more bestial with each transformation, he fears, and it may soon become irreversible.

Then, the police arrive, looking for McKenna. Trudy has pegged him as George’s killer. Here, Ann runs interference to allow a panicked McKenna to sneak out the back. But not sneakily enough as one of the police officers tries to stop him in the driveway as he roars off in Ann’s car, who is run over and killed.

Now responsible for two deaths, a city-wide manhunt is on for the fugitive McKenna. Here, Hoffman pleads with Lt. Peterson (Hampton), saying his patient is sick and not responsible for his actions; but to Ann’s lament the police don’t seem all that interested in any excuses. But all efforts to locate the suspect have turned up nothing.

So where is McKenna? Well, he is currently hiding out in the shadows of a shack in a derelict oil field, where he has befriended a little girl named Suzie (Conkling), who promises to bring him some food.

Unfortunately, Suzy’s mother (King) becomes suspicious of her daughter’s elusive behavior, who finally admits there’s a man hiding in a nearby shed. And putting that together with the constant radio broadcasts about a fugitive wanted for murder, she immediately calls in the police.

Thus, as the dragnet closes in, McKenna contemplates using Suzy as a hostage but quickly abandons this notion when he feels the change coming on as he's forced to flee into the sunlight. 

Once transformed, he leads the cops on a chase through the nooks and crannies of a rail yard and an abandoned industrial area, beating another officer to death, before coming upon a large storage tank.

With sirens approaching from all sides, with nowhere to go but up, the Sun Demon starts climbing the stairs that lead to the top of the tank.

A lone patrolman pursues him all the way to the steel summit. There, with nowhere left to run, the Sun Demon turns and attacks his pursuer.

But during the struggle over the gun, it goes off, point blank, right in the monster’s chest. 

In its death throes, the monster knocks the officer away, loses its balance, topples, then plummets toward the ground below, where Ann was watching, horrified; who then screams as she follows his trajectory until the final fatal impact.

Here, Bickell consoles the grieving woman, encouraging Ann that it’s okay to mourn, and then officially wraps this one up by hoping aloud that,“The rest of us can only hope that his life was not a waste.” Which is debatable, sure, so draw your own conclusions for we have officially reached…

DEFEND YOUR THESIS:

If you’ll notice at the conclusion of The Hideous Sun Demon, McKenna is not given a redemptive transformation back into his human form when he expires after falling off the gas tank. Nope, our irredeemable lout remained true to form, his true nature, his lizard-brain Hyde, isotope or no isotope, negating any notions of a tragedy.

This, according to Clarke, was done on purpose, telling Weaver, “I wanted to make it a more realistic, multi-dimensional character, with some bad qualities as well as some good.” Well, mostly bad.

“The Hideous Sun Demon had two surefire novelties in the Jekyll-Hyde genre,” noted D. Earl Worth in his delightful book Sleaze Creatures: An Illustrated Guide to Obscure Hollywood Horror Movies (1995). “One, that the normally purifying sunlight helped bring out the monster and, two, the monster was a Fallen Man. By soiling McKenna with nasty habits, Clarke made some pointed observations about hedonism with no brakes … Due to the nature of his violence, it seemed like Gil was performing actions of panic, when actually, the Sun Demon was exercising a passion for violence.”

Clarke would play McKenna as a self-absorbed, self-sabotaging, and self-destructive jackass. His constant laments over his hopeless condition bring to mind the bemoaning of Glenn Manning from The Amazing Colossal Man (1956). But unlike Manning, who became irradiated through the selfless act of trying to save someone in a downed airplane on an atomic bomb test site, McKenna’s accident was due to his own gross negligence tied to his rampant alcohol abuse.

That’s why his childish temper tantrums over his fate ring true; and why his enablers -- Ann, Dr. Bickell -- only make things worse by, essentially, treating the symptoms and not the disease. McKenna knows whose fault this really was all along, but will not admit to it and instead lashes out, which is why The Hideous Sun Demon could also be seen as a parable on a doomed alcoholic disguised as a rampaging monster, who refuses to admit he has a problem. He essentially runs away from rehab not once, but twice.

And this refusal to sober up and accept that he has a problem, and to heed the rather simple advice of just staying out of the sun until they get it sorted, leads to his doom and a fatal plunge off the gas tank. Said Worth, “With thudding literalism, [McKenna] hits rock bottom. The cancer had eaten all of the patient except the parts of him it needed to move around.”

With the class loads of the student crew during the week, and trying to stay off the union’s radar, Clarke’s film would be shot guerilla style over twelve consecutive weekends. They would find a suitable location, and if they got permission they would shoot; and if they didn’t get permission, they’d still might shoot anyway, whether it be a bar in Santa Monica, out at Bass Rock along the ocean, a Catholic school in Glendale, a mansion on Lafayette Boulevard, the derelict oil fields at Long Beach, or the huge natural gas storage tank near Union Station.

“The gas storage tank was made available to us through the Southern California Gas Company,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). The height of that gas tank was something over three hundred feet, and when I took the dummy of the Sun Demon up to throw it off, my voice, as big and loud as it is, could not be heard by the camera crew down below. We had a very difficult time communicating.”

This ‘catch as catch can’ modus operandi served the film well and added a layer of rotgut verisimilitude to the action. But it also necessitated three different cinematographers. “Some of them were not available weekend after weekend. Some of these fellows would say they weren’t available, so we’d get someone else. We didn’t actually start out with Vilis Lapenieks, but we found that his was the best work. John Morrill did at least half of it. Stan Follis worked with us throughout the picture as assistant cameraman and did some first unit work.”

Follis wouldn’t do much else, career wise. But Morrill pitched in on Hell Squad (1958), and would carve himself out quite a little niche with trippy horror films like Hollywood Horror House (alias Savage Intruder, 1970), a latter day Hagsploitation entry; the totally brain-bending The Brotherhood of Satan (1971); and the eco-terrors of Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). And Lapenieks hitched up with Arch Hall squared (Senior and Junior) and Fairway International on the Nudie-Cutie The Magic Spectacles (1961) and their caveman epic Eagah! (1962), and would shoot both Night Tide (1961), a bewitching tale of mermaids, and the alien egg-laying vampire in Queen of Blood (1966) for Curtis Harrington.

Meanwhile, things would get so hectic behind the scenes that Clarke would relinquish the director’s chair. Said Clarke (Weaver, 2000), “When I was in the monster outfit, it was extremely difficult to be doing that and also laying out the shots and so on. And it was also kind of an accommodation for Tom Boutross -- he was the editor, and he thought a co-director credit would be a nice gesture. But Tom did a lot in the editor’s room to make that picture work.”

“The Man from Planet X obviously was more artistically done than Sun Demon, but I’d learned from Ulmer,” said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994), defending his thesis. “We tried to get as much production up on the screen as possible, like when we used the gas tank for the shootout. But I can’t take credit for all of those artistic angles, because our editor Tom Boutross, who later went on to do work for Disney, did some of the directing.”

Boutross, of course, would also go on to edit most of Charles B. Pierce’s features, starting with The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) and ending with The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976). Said Clarke (ibid), “I was really lucky to get these guys from the USC cinema department. We were all film nuts trying to do something good.”

Of course, none of that would really matter if the actual Sun Demon didn’t pass muster with audiences, which could either make or break the picture.

To realize his monster, Clarke aimed high and first approached Jack Kevan, who was part of the legendary crew at Universal that created the iconic Gill-Man suit for Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). At the time, Kevan was also in the middle of producing his own independent Creature Feature, The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959), which we covered here. But Kevan’s asking price ranged anywhere from two to $5,000, depending on which version you’ve read, just for materials alone.

“He wasn’t overpricing it,” admitted Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “But I was thinking more along the lines of $500 (laughs).” And so, Clarke needed a (much) cheaper Plan B, and luckily he found it with Richard Cassarino.

Richard Cassarino. 

Born Gian Richard Cassarino circa 1929, the native New Yorker would attend the School of Industrial Arts, which would later rebrand as the New York School of Art and Design. Upon graduation, Cassarino worked as a magazine illustrator and as a toy designer at Mattel. Then, after serving in World War II, he moved to California where he landed a job at Walt Disney Studios.

“I spent several years working on the animated features plus design concepts for Disneyland and Mouseketeer programming,” said Cassarino in an interview with Paul and Donna Parla for Filmfax Magazine (August / September, 1997). “It was my privilege to work with many of the animation greats, including the Nine Old Men of Disney: Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, John Lounsberry, Eric Larson, Les Clark, Woolie Reitherman, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.”

Here, Cassarino would contribute to classic films like Lady and the Tramp (1955) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). But a salary dispute would ultimately end the illustrator’s 10-year run at the House of Mouse. From there, he would work freelance on set designs for theatrical productions, which eventually bled into production design on independent films. And in that capacity, Cassarino became an invaluable cog in a merry band of filmmakers affectionately known as The Bootleggers.

“While part of the Bootleggers -- so named because we shot on location without benefit of permits or union crews -- I must have worked on at least 60-odd films by various filmmakers,” recalled Cassarino (Parla, 1997). “Many of them were still film students at USC and UCLA, like Francis Ford Coppola, who was working on his film school thesis, which later became his first feature, You’re a Big Boy Now (1966).” (Editor’s note: technically, that was 1962’s The Bellboy and the Playgirls, Coppola’s notorious skin-flick, which predated his work on Roger Corman’s The Terror and Dementia 13, both 1963.)

Don Post and Fiends. 

This was probably how Cassarino got on Clarke’s radar after Kevan proved too expensive. As for how he got from illustrating and set design to monster maker, he explained to the Parlas how he had help from two renowned sources:

“At the time, the Don Post Studios were famous for creating Halloween masks that were popular throughout the country. They were also in demand to create special makeup FX and masks used in films. Don Post Sr. showed me how to mix-up the formula for foam latex and cure it in an oven. The mixture was critical and the curing even more so. He was happy to help me achieve the best results.”

(L-R) John Chambers, Cornelius D. Chimp.  

Also, “John Chambers, who was working for Don Post Studios at the time, demonstrated to me the syringe that Don had invented to inject liquid foam latex into a closed mold to fill them with the proper consistency.” Chambers, of course, would go on to win an Academy Award for his ground-breaking makeup FX and appliances for Planet of the Apes (1968).

With the budget so tight, Cassarino would only make half a monster from the waist up. “I made a life mask of Clarke and proceeded to sculpt the Sun Demon mask that you see in the film,” explained Cassarino (Parla, 1997). “I created a body suit over a lightweight neoprene diving suit, on which I glued foam appliances covered with scales. This body suit was like an oversized t-shirt; it was opened and fastened by Velcro on the back. Only the legs were exposed. Even then it was sheer murder to wear the entire suit together with the head and the rubber gloves covering the hands.”

And suffering in that suit for the whole picture was Clarke. “No other actor played the Sun Demon,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “All the stunts -- all of the running, jumping and fighting -- I did myself.” According to Cassarino, it took about fifteen minutes to get Clarke buttoned-up inside the costume and ready for shooting, and how “it was hotter than blue blazes.”

Added Cassarino (Parla, 1997), “The most outrageous factor was that the monster was the SUN Demon -- the rays of the sun transformed poor Bob into the monster. The whole thing had to work under direct exposure to the sun. The temperature inside the suit was insufferable. Bob literally sweated gallons of water. Frequently, he would start to stagger and pass out from the heat generated in the suit.”

“I sweat so much, I perspired clear down to my pants,” said an embarrassed Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “It looked like I needed a diaper or I couldn’t make it to the men’s room [in time].”

I would definitely put the design and execution of the Sun Demon solidly in the win column for the production. It’s Blaisdell-esque in appearance, impractical at first glance but so practical in filming. The seams are showing, the flaps of the head piece are sometimes loose and out of control, sure, but it's effective -- and more importantly, its hideous visage was memorable.

Cassarino wound up wearing many hats on the production: creature designer (uncredited), art director (as Gianbattista Cassarino), and makeup (as Ben Sarino). As for all the nom de plumes, “We didn’t want it to appear that one person was doing so many different jobs,” explained Clarke (Weaver, 2000), thinking it would make them look cheaper than they already were. A tactic he would borrow from fellow no-budget filmmaker Jerry Warren. (More on him in a sec.)

Cassarino would also show up in front of the camera, too (as Cass Richards), filling out a bar stool or crowd scenes at the beach. But he also had a more substantial role as one of the featured uniformed police officers. Thus, it was only appropriate that Cassarino was allowed to kill his creation during the climax. “He’s the one that kills the Sun Demon at the end of the film,” said Clarke. “He’s the policeman that I fight on the rooftop.”

“The reason I played the cop was to keep an eye on Bob and catch him before he fell,” said Cassarino (Parla, 1997). “The police are chasing the Sun Demon, who climbs up this storage tank that’s about 500 feet high. As the cop, I chase the monster to the top of this huge curved dome covering the tank. It was made of aluminum -- the largest reflector in the world. And if you think the inside of a car is hot after sitting in the sun, you should try the top of this gas tank. Bob and I were supposed to have a knock-down drag-out fight on top of the dome but Bob was almost incoherent as he knocked me down and ran off. It was like falling onto a hot iron.” 

As mentioned, there were no stunt-coordinator or stuntmen hired for the film, meaning that was actually Cassarino climbing up to the top of the gas works through an array of stairs and ladders, which nearly ended in tragedy. "I momentarily lost my grip and fell about three rungs before I caught hold of the ladder," said Cassarino (Parla, 1997). "My feet were swinging wildly in mid-air about a hundred feet over the dome as I pulled myself together. Everybody was screaming and shouting in horror." But the story doesn't end there. 

"[They] got it all on film. But it was a long shot. Vilas asked, 'Could you do that again for a close shot?' I said, Sure, why not? Such was the insanity of my youth. So, without the benefit of a net and with no wires or harness, I repeated the near-disaster of falling off the ladder." 

Even after tossing the effigy of the Sun Demon to its death from the top of the tank, wrapping the location, they still had one problem. “You know, I can’t remember how we got down the ladder after the final fight sequence,” said Cassarino (Parla, 1997). “Bob was practically delirious from heat exhaustion. I was also a bit overcome by fatigue and heat. Villis was on the verge of collapse; he actually dropped one of the Bell & Howell cameras off the top of the tower. I had to help both of them [down]. But I guess some of the others in the crew helped us off because we’re all still here.”

The film would also save money by having McKenna change into his Sun Demon persona through editing, with cutaways; McKinna would be writhing in the sun, cut to someone’s horrified reaction, cut back to McKinna now in full Sun Demon mode. The most effective was its introduction, when the monster flees the roof at the hospital and is first revealed in a mirror, which is then smashed into thousands of reflections after the fleeting glimpse. It’s startlingly effective.

This, of course, saved even more time and money as no special trick photography or dissolves were needed, which would’ve proven even more difficult in that these would’ve been shot outside and not in the controlled environment of a studio. (In fact, by my eye, there are no sound stage shots at all in the film.) As I recall, there was only one quick cut, where we see McKenna in mid-transformation during the climax, that required a different makeup appliance than the usual mask.

“Except for a brief time, most of the makeup was the latex rubber mask and body suit,” confirmed Cassarino (Parla, 1997). “Foam latex appliances were utilized only briefly during the transformation sequences, which required careful and detailed application.” 

This may be considered a bit of a cheat in some circles, but Boutross pulled it off in the editing booth with nary a misstep.

Cassarino would also contribute to the film’s most notorious scene, when the Sun Demon squishes the rat; a delightfully gruesome gag that had been cut-out of most TV broadcasts once the film went into syndication, which was A-OK with Clarke:  

“It happened at the spur of the moment. We were trying to make a macabre type of sequence out of it. Similarly, when the monster killed the dog, that was somebody’s idea of showing the violence of the monster; that the man had changed into a real malevolent type of creature. We probably shouldn’t have used [the rat]; it was not in good taste and I’m glad that it was cut. I don’t even recall how we got the rat in the first place?!”

“I bought the rat at a pet store and kept it until we shot the scene,” said Cassarino (Parla, 1997). “It was a friendly rat that was almost lovable. I used fruit dyes to color him an ugly dark brown, then I used Vaseline all over him and covered him with dirt and glycerin. He wound up looking like the rat that spread the Bubonic Plague.”

“We didn’t hurt the rat,” assured Clarke. “We put some ketchup or something on it and squeezed it so that the ketchup would come out between the fingers.” Which it does, in a satisfying splurt. Added Cassarino, “When Bob squeezes the rat, I used ketchup for blood. No matter how many times Bob would squeeze the rat and fling him into the bed-sheet, the rat happily came back for more.” And when it was all over, “It was allowed to go free,” said Clarke.

According to the Parla interview, while filming this sequence, several local kids gathered and watched the proceedings. And as Cassarino recalled, “One of those kids, I believe, was named Spielberg.” As Robert Ripley once said, “Believe it, or not.”

“We were all youngsters learning the craft of filmmaking,” said Cassarino. “Low-budget cost factors, shooting without the aid and experience of professional union people … mistakes were inevitable. But all in all, it was a reasonable attempt.” 

Like several others, Cassarino would also pitch in on Hell Squad, and he would continue to contribute to other Creature Features, most notably designing and building the Amphibian for Destination Inner Space (1966). "I got a call from Don Post Studios who told me a producer (Earl Lyon) was in need of a sea monster," recalled Cassarino (Parla, 1997). "For that costume, I mixed a sea creature with dragon-like proportions and gave it the head of a demonic serpent."

Here, Cassarino would have a slightly larger budget and designed the monster suit with enough room to allow the wearer to also sport an aqualung for the necessary underwater scenes -- though Cassarino would later admit the suit was not water tight. "We first tested the suit in a swimming pool. It was absolutely eerie to see the creature come to life as it glided effortlessly underneath the water."

But that was freshwater, and when it came time to film in saltwater on location in Florida it ate right through the adhesive holding it together. "We did a short test in the shallow water. Within moments, the scales of the suit started to float off on the tide." Still, it managed to hold together and his creation is easily the best thing about that movie.  

Also of note, Cassarino was able to parlay his creations into a spot as a mystery guest for an episode of the game show To Tell the Truth in 1966, where a group of panelists grill three people and try to find out who is the real person in question. Here, the Amphibian would also make an appearance -- and the Sun Demon gets a brief mention, too. Alas, his answers were too good and the panelists unanimously nailed him as the real Richard Cassarino, maker of monsters. 

Joining Clarke in front of the camera was a cast of relative unknowns. “We got them through members of the crew that knew aspiring actors and actresses around USC,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “We told them that this was a non-union picture and had them come out and read.”

The Hideous Sun-Demon would be the screen debut of both Patricia Manning and Nan Peterson, and both would go on to modestly successful acting careers. Manning comes off the best as McKenna's long suffering girlfriend, Ann -- though the film never really tags them as a couple outright and it's mostly audience implication. She’s in love with a bad boy, and wants to save him, even though he obviously does not want to be saved. Thus, their relationship is doomed from the jump.

Seemingly molded from Marilyn Monroe, Peterson got the role of sexpot Trudy because of her "voluptuous figure” according to Clarke, and the film sure did like to hover around her ample cleavage, much to her co-star’s amusement. “When Nan was playing piano at the bar, she had those big knockers, you know, and she kept singing and playing the piano and -- like my wife pointed out -- it looked like one of her knockers was gonna hit the keys,” said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994).

“I did not have an agent then,” Peterson recalled to Weaver (A Sci-Fi Swarm and Horror Horde: Interviews with 62 Filmmakers, 2004). “That was when I was doing a lot of modeling for Catalina Bathing Suits and touring all over the country as ‘Miss Vornado’ -- Vornado was an air conditioning firm. It was during that time that Bob Clarke came along. [He] interviewed different girls for the role of Trudy. I don’t know if I read for him -- I probably did -- and then he told me I had the role. I had to do my own makeup, use my own clothes -- it was a very low-budget film!”

Sadly, according to the Weaver interview, the main reason Peterson’s career fizzled was due to several skeevy ultimatums from co-stars, producers, and casting directors, who demanded sex or else she would be fired, losing recurring roles in both Sea Hunt and Lawman and at least one feature film for Roger Corman.

For the record, despite playing a letch to her on screen, Peterson said Clarke was a complete gentleman off screen, even though she wasn’t sure if she ever got paid. “I don’t think I got paid much for Sun Demon, but I did get something, I’m sure. Even if they didn’t pay, I was so happy to have a part.” Also worth noting, as I found nothing to show they were dubbed over, both Manning and Peterson were excellent screamers. 

Not so excellent and the worst of the amateur lot was Peter Similuk as the gangster, who tried, and mostly failed, at channeling George Raft. But coming in a close second was Robert Garry as Dr. Stern, whose plot dump about McKinna’s odd condition wasn’t really acting but line reading. But that slide show with the alleged radioactive bugs was an absolute hoot in a, “No, sir, that’s a spider,” sense.

Beyond that the rest of the cast was strictly a family affair. Xandra Conkling, the little girl who befriends McKinna in the oil fields, was Clarke’s niece. And it was her real mother, Donna King, who played her mom on screen, too, making her Clarke’s sister-in-law. And the old lady asking for a magazine, the first to bear witness to the Sun Demon, was played by his mother-in-law, Pearl Driggs. “The King Sisters’ real name was Driggs, which they changed for obvious reasons,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “Who would go and see the Driggs Sisters?”

I’m also pretty sure that was the same dog used in The Astounding She-Monster, where it met a similar fate at the hands of the Antarian invader. Now, I believe that collie was actually Clarke’s own dog, but I’m damned if I could find where I sourced that in my notes.

Also of note, Marilyn King, another sister-in-law, wrote the original song “Strange Pursuit” for the film. Originally, Marilyn was considered to play Trudy but had to drop out at the last moment due to her becoming pregnant. However, according to Warren, she still appeared in the film, dubbing over Peterson while she sings. The youngest King sister would also successfully sue the producers of It Came from Hollywood (1982) for royalties when they featured the song in one of the segments, according to Clarke, when Gilda Radner mocks that Peterson played the song not with her knockers but a slow right hand. 

As for the rest of the soundtrack, John Seely was the credited music editor but I believe no other original music was written. And so, all the tracks were canned stock music from composers like Philip Green, Alexander Lazlo and William Loose. The familiar track whenever the Sun Demon was on the run will ring familiar, too, because it was the very same punctuating, horn-heavy track used so effectively later in Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Once it was finally completed, the final budget on The Hideous Sun Demon had ballooned well past the original $10,000 nest egg. “Eventually our overall costs came to a little under $50,000,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “I even borrowed several thousand dollars from my brother and sister. Our lab bill came to around $8,500, and they were very lenient and allowed us to pay that off over a period of a couple years.”

Like Ashcroft before him, and hoping for the same financial result, Clarke’s first stop for a distribution deal was Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff at American International Pictures. Said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994), “I made an arrangement for Nicholson to take the print and show it at his home. His daughters liked it very much, so he said take it to Arkoff and let him see it.”

After Arkoff’s screening, he asked Clarke what he wanted for it. “I told him I wanted to use it as a door opener, to produce other pictures.” But Arkoff wasn’t interested in that at all, saying they'd had too many problems with staff producers already like Herman Cohen and Bert I. Gordon, who had been grumbling about skimmed profits on their pictures. And while Arkoff still offered distribution, Clarke, at the finish line, would perhaps make the biggest tactical blunder of the whole enterprise -- a decision that haunted him for years.

(L-R) Good Cop (Jim Nicholson), Bad Cop (Sam Arkoff). 

“They offered me a flat distribution deal but I turned it down,” said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994), “because I heard they were thieves, which was pretty well known at the time. I mean, they gave you distribution but you never saw money.”

And so, Clarke continued to shop the picture around but with little success. He then entertained the notion of just four-walling the picture on his own when his brother, a sales manager at a TV station in Amarillo, Texas, hooked him up with the owner of a local drive-in theater chain.

The Amarillo Globe Times (August 29, 1958). 

Thus, on August 29, 1958, under the title The Sun Demon, Clarke’s film would hold its official world premiere at Amarillo’s Tascosa Drive-In, with Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters (1958) as a co-feature, where both Clarke and Peterson would make a personal appearance.

“We had a lot of fun later with the premiere,” said Peterson (Weaver, 2004). “We premiered at a drive-in in Amarillo, Texas, where [Clarke’s] brother worked at a radio station [sic] -- that’s probably why we had the premiere there. At one point we went up on top of the concession stand and we were being interviewed. Then Bob snuck off while I was speaking, changed costume, and came back dressed as the monster! Which was fun.”

The Amarillo Globe Times (September 1, 1958).  

The film would play for five nights at the ozoner but that was it as far as I could unearth. This regional plan might’ve continued, too, if not for a chance meeting with Les Guthrie, a production designer Clarke had worked with before, who clued him into a brand new outfit run by John and Mike Miller called Miller Consolidated Pictures (MCP), who had their own distribution arm, Pacific International Releasing. Said Clarke:

“They were preparing a picture called A Date with Death (1959) starring Gerald Mohr and Liz Renay, who was [mobster] Mickey Cohen’s girlfriend, and they told me they were going to need a companion feature. I indicated that I might be interested if they’d make me the right kind of deal.” And what Clarke wanted was a contract to produce three more pictures. The Millers agreed on the stipulation that he charged no upfront money for The Hideous Sun Demon. Clarke agreed, and would even take a supporting role as the heavy in A Date with Death, which tallied yet another notch on Clarke’s genre belt.

See, the film would be produced by William Edwards, who also produced the previous year’s My World Dies Screaming (alias Terror in a Haunted House, 1958), which was also filmed in Psycho-Rama. Now, the tenants of Psycho-Rama were fairly simple, with single flash-frame inserts of grotesque images or warnings to add an “extra subliminal shudder.” At least in theory. But it didn’t really catch on and, as far as I know, the process essentially died with this picture.

Thus, The Hideous Sun Demon would finally be officially released as part of Pacific International’s inaugural double bill with A Date with Death -- and not to get ahead of ourselves, but, ominous foreshadowing ahoy, this would also prove to be their last.

The San Angelo Times (January 31, 1959).

The Abilene Reporter-News (February 2, 1959). 

Opening rather quietly at the Pitts Theater in Culpepper, Virginia, in September, 1958, the film would regroup and open wide in January, 1959, once again starting in Texas. All efforts to find any contemporary reviews turned up nothing, but I did uncover that Clarke would join Mohr and Ed Erwin, co-stars of A Date with Death, for personal appearances during this opening salvo, unearthing a few hilarious newspaper candids of Clarke running amok in the Sun Demon costume. Clarke, Mohr and Erwin would be joined in these shenanigans by Penny Edwards, who, I think, was scheduled to star in an undetermined upcoming film for MCP.

Speaking of which, before the bankruptcy hit the fan, Clarke would get to work producing his second feature, and the first for the Millers, Beyond the Time Barrier (1959), for which he brought in his old friend Edgar Ulmer to direct. “Working with Ulmer again was a lift because he was an extremely imaginative, creative director, who got the most out of whatever was available and gave his all to the pictures,” said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994).

Another outre tale of science fiction, Clarke played a test pilot who gets sucked into a time-warp that deposits him in the far flung future of 2024, where a global plague has completely sterilized the planet, leaving him as Adam looking for a new Eve.

And while Clarke was able to finish Beyond the Time Barrier, and even announced his next project, The Frozen Continent, it was already too late because, by then, Miller Consolidated Pictures had dissolved into total insolvency due to a “lack of business ability in the area of distribution,” said Clarke (ibid). “And in a matter of 18 months or so they went bankrupt.”

The Abilene Reporter-News (January 31, 1959).  

Apparently, the Miller brothers had bitten off more than they could chew financially, and lacked the savvy of Jim and Sam at AIP. This is personified by the film posters, where the evocative lure of The Astounding She-Monster brought audiences in, while The Hideous Sun Demon's had us questioning the monster’s sobriety.

“Once they went under, I didn’t receive anything except my actor’s salary, $1000 a week for two weeks, on Time Barrier.” And worse yet, Clarke wound up eating the entire $50,000 budget for The Hideous Sun Demon. And perhaps the cruelest, most ironic cut of all came when American International swooped in like vultures and picked the bones of the still warm MCP, picking up both Beyond the Time Barrier and its companion piece, The Amazing Transparent Man, for, essentially, peanuts. “They bought them, at auction almost, for whatever lab costs were involved,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). "They made out like bandits.”

The Paris News (February 8, 1959). 

Clarke never saw a dime on Beyond the Time Barrier, but he was smart enough to retain the TV rights to Sun Demon and recovered at least some of the money when he sold it off into syndication -- at least enough to pay off the lab. “And that was the end of my efforts as a producer / director,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000), “because, the way I saw it, you really couldn’t make any profits unless you handled your own distribution or got into it the way Nicholson and Arkoff did."

But Clarke would continue acting, and his next film found him working for a producer who was even cheaper than Ronnie Ashcroft: the aforementioned Jerry Warren. Ashcroft had edited the film Man Beast (1956) for Warren, a totally bonkers tale of yetis looking for breeding stock. Said Clarke (Weaver, 2000), "I forget which one recommended me to the other. But I considered it not so much of a favor."

The film was The Incredible Petrified World (1959), a somnolent shocker filled to the brim with stock footage abuse and endless plot dumps. The film actually predated Sun Demon and went into production in 1957. Clarke’s co-star was John Carradine, their biggest scene was shot in Warren’s garage next to a potted plant.

“Talk about making them cheap,” said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “Take this for a crew: one cameraman -- didn’t have an operator, Jerry worked it himself; didn’t have a clapboard assistant, one of us actors did that; a guy named Brydon Baker lit the set, worked the camera and reloaded the film; one sound man, and guess who held the boom? Whatever actor wasn’t in the scene. Sure, I held the sound boom. Oh, it was the lowest … That was the damndest experience.”

Thus, Clarke would learn from both Ashcroft and Warren when he made his debut feature -- mostly on what NOT to do. But he would continue to work with Warren on both Terror of the Blood Hunters (1962) and Frankenstein Island (1981). And while he mostly switched to TV in the 1970s and ‘80s, he would still act in an occasional feature, joining Fred Olen Ray for Alienator (1990), where an alien prisoner escapes to Earth but is pursued by a busty bounty hunter; and Haunting Fear (1990), a preternatural tale of gaslighting from beyond the grave.

“Fred says Alienator was a remake of The Astounding She-Monster,” said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “At least that's what he says.” For Haunting Fear, “Fred took Poe’s Premature Burial and built a screenplay around it. I admire Fred for what he’s done. And he seems to admire some of the stuff I did. The pay is not great. [But] he gets these guys that haven’t had any work in the last three or four years, hires ‘em relatively cheap and puts them in his movies.”

Clarke wasn’t above parodying himself either in films like Midnight Movie Massacre (1988), where a Martian attacks a movie theater showing a low-budget science fiction film starring, you guessed it, Robert Clarke. Or his last credited feature, The Naked Monster (2005), where he joined other genre stalwarts like Ken Tobey, John Agar, Lori Nelson, and Robert Cornwaithe in battling off a giant three-eyed mutant. Sort of.

Clarke would even sign off on a spoof of his own film in 1983, even though he had long since relinquished the rights to Wade Williams. This all started, essentially, back in 1966 when Henry G. Saperstein struck a production deal with Toho Studios, providing American actors for their films in exchange for domestic distribution, netting Toho Nick Adams and Russ Tamblyn and Saperstein the rights to Invasion of the Asto-Monsters (alias Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, alias Kaijū Dai-sensō, 1965), Frankenstein Conquers the World (alias Furankenshutain tai Chitei Kaijū Baragon, 1965), and War of the Gargantuas (alias Furankenshutain no Kaijū: Sanda tai Gaira, 1966).

San Antonio Express-News (December 10, 1963).

Having had success with these kaiju films, Saperstein then decided to cash in on the concurrent James Bond / Secret Agent craze by importing several of Toho’s espionage thrillers, including International Secret Police: Key of Keys (alias Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi, 1965). But instead of straight-up translating the film into English, Saperstein kinda stole an idea from Jay Ward and Bill Scott instead.

Ward and Scott, probably best known for The Bullwinkle Show (alias The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, alias Bullwinkle and Friends, 1959-1963), also produced a show called Fractured Flickers (1963), where host Hans Conried would introduce clips from old films dubbed over by the familiar voices of Scott, Paul Frees, and June Foray to great comical effect. (Seriously, check ‘em out on YouTube.)

Perhaps Conried summed up the whole enterprise best (S1, E12, Rod Serling, 1963): “It’s time to take another boob’s eye view of the movies of yesteryear. You know, many persons have asked us what we call the procedure by which we fracture a flicker, the way we add modern words and music to pictures made many years ago by someone else. Well, the process does have a name; it’s called Adding Insult to Injury.”

And so, Saperstein would come up with a whole new substitute version of the dialogue and music with the intention of turning his action import into a full-frontal comedy about a missing chicken salad recipe. He first approached comedian Lenny Bruce to write the needed nonsensical script but he turned him down flat. Saperstein then hired Woody Allen, who agreed to the project, which was originally intended as a TV special; but it turned out funny enough that it was expanded further and released theatrically as What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966).

Inspired by Allen’s efforts (-- whom, for the record, I find repugnant as a person, but found his efforts here rather hilarious), Craig Mitchell and Allan and Mark Estrik would give The Hideous Sun Demon the same makeover … admittedly to lesser effect. Yeah, their efforts just weren’t that funny. At least the version I saw, as this rehash would go through several different permutations over several years, one of them where the lead was dubbed over by Jay Leno; another featured Clarke’s son, Cam Clarke, famous for voicing Leonardo in the Ninja Turtles cartoon; and it was released under several different titles ranging from The Hideous Sun Demon: The Special Edition, or Revenge of the Sun Demon, to the more blatant What’s Up, Hideous Sun Demon?

I'm just not sure why they went through all that trouble with a do-over when a ready made sequel was already there to exploit. I mean, The Son of the Hideous Sun Demon was right there! The whole time! A nine-month later end-result of McKenna and Trudy's canoodling on the beach, if you know what I mean. And as a wise man once said, I think you do. (Hollywood, call me. I have a spec-script ready to roll.)

San Antonio Express-News (January 29, 1959).

Looking back on his varied acting career, “Clarke was a hero who knew his limitations around dangerous company,” noted Worth (Sleaze Creatures, 1995). “He wasn’t always Richard Carlson bright, Kenneth Tobey stolid, or John Agar courageous.” To translate, Clarke was completely serviceable but excelled in his comfort zone.

And Clarke would have few regrets over his stillborn career as a producer. “I would never say I was sorry because if I had not done it, I think I would have later regretted it,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “It was an interesting experience. I wish, of course, that it had turned out more profitably and that it had led to other things that would have been more mainstream. With Roger Corman, pictures like these were stepping stones to bigger productions. But I took such a bath with the bankruptcy on both Sun Demon and Time Barrier that I just felt there was no way to make another one and come out with anything.”

The Morning Call (September 21, 1960). 

Still, he always remained philosophical on his mini-oeuvre, taking immense pleasure that, despite a lack of certain qualities, his films were remembered fondly -- for whatever reason you choose.

Said Clarke (Weaver, 1985), “That’s what we made ‘em for -- entertainment. Whether it's for what we intended -- to scare kids, or to have them be interested in the adventure part of it, or if it’s good for a laugh -- whatever the final result, the fact is that the entertainment value is what we are after … In pictures of this genre, the money you put into them doesn’t always add up to box-office dollars, it’s sometimes the idea -- the concept was sort of a magical one [for] pictures of that ilk.”

Now, I hadn’t watched The Hideous Sun Demon in, wow, at least a couple decades. Wait. Maybe even longer than that? Thinking on it, I believe the last time I actually watched the whole thing was when I bought one of those Channel 1000 Elvira Mistress of the Dark double-VHS box sets off the shelf. It had the film in question paired with Richard Cunha’s Missile to the Moon (1958). Still have it, too, which I bought when first released back in … checking … 1994?!

So, by my math, the last time I actually watched The Hideous Sun Demon was 32 years ago. My memories of it were nothing special; something cheap and shoddy, not helped by a shitty VHS transfer, with a fairly cool looking monster in it. But perhaps most damning of all, there was nothing there to bring me back for another visit for over three decades.

That is, until I wrote-up The Astounding She-Monster earlier this year, buffed up on Clarke’s career, and was struck by his cavalier comments on how certain he was that he could make something better than Ronnie Ashcroft or Jerry Warren on a similar budget. And so, I was curious to see if Clarke’s mouth had written a check his butt could not cash. Glad I did, too, as the film proved a lot better than I’d remembered.

Clarke was all in on his character, 100-percent. You can almost smell McKenna’s bourbon sweats and his desperation is palpable. And he and his motley crew were all in on the production, too. I was honestly struck at how well the shots were staged and the action executed -- imaginative even.

And I don’t even want to think about the nightmare of lighting those locations or night shoots; or the logistical nightmare of shooting on that gas tank. In my notes I scribbled Hellinger, meaning the way it was shot on actual locations reminded me of The Naked City (1948). Now don’t presume, it’s nowhere near as good as that movie -- not even close, sure, but the bones are there. And Clarke's climax on top of the gas tank truly echoes the climax of Hellinger's film, when his villain is cornered on top of the Williamsburg Bridge, is fatally shot, and plummets to the waiting ground below.

Making The Hideous Sun Demon a fever dream of a film that deftly towed the line between all-out schlock and a squalid little sleaze-noir that really tapped into something; something that gets under your skin like a bad case of prickly heat.

So credit to Clarke. He thought he could make a better film than Ashcroft’s The Astounding She-Monster and Warren’s The Incredible Petrified World. And while that really doesn’t sound very hard, given the evidence, quality is both subjective and an individual assessment; but one cannot deny that Clarke’s film was definitely more ambitious.

And when considering the budget limitations, I would say Clarke and his inexperienced crew succeeded and pulled off a simple but effective Creature Feature -- just like Topper pulled off an excellent no-budget war film on very little money. Expectations were not only met on The Hideous Sun Demon, but I would argue they were exceeded -- again, relative to the budget and end result, as the odds were overwhelming that Clarke’s theoretical check would bounce all the way to the sun and back again.

Originally posted on October 25, 2026, at Confirmed, Alan_01.

The Hideous Sun Demon (1959) Clarke-King Enterprises :: Pacific International Releasing / P: Robert Clarke / AP: Robin C. Kirkman / D: Robert Clarke, Tom Boutross / W: E.S. Seeley Jr., Doane R. Hoag (additional dialogue), Robert Clarke (story), Phil Hiner (story) / C: Stan Follis, Vilis Lapenieks, John Arthur Morrill / E: Tom Boutross / M: John Seely / S: Robert Clarke, Patricia Manning, Nan Peterson, Patrick Whyte, Fred La Porta, Peter Similuk, William White, Robert Garry, Donna King, Xandra Conkling, Richard Cassarino.