Creature from the Haunted Sea

In 1959, following the completion of The Little Shop of Horrors, Roger Corman assembled a small cast and crew and arrived in Puerto Rico to direct Last Woman on Earth and produce a World War II film titled Battle of Blood Island.[3][4] According to Corman, "I had discovered that tax incentives were available if you 'manufactured' in Puerto Rico. That included making movies."[3] When Corman still had unused film left over from The Last Woman on Earth, he decided to make another film. Part of the budget came from funds he had not spent on a film called The Wild Ride.[5]

Corman called Charles B. Griffith, who was Corman's main screenwriter, and "told him I wanted to make a comedy-horror movie while I was in Puerto Rico. He had six days to come up with the script. I told him how many actors I had and explained that I couldn't fly any additional cast members in because I just didn't have the budget for it." Corman agreed with Griffith's suggestion that Corman play one of the roles himself.[6]

Griffith wrote a script using the same structure as two earlier Corman pictures he had done, Naked Paradise and Beast from the Haunted Cave, and would use again on another Corman film, Atlas. "Everything was the same," said Griffith, "The crooks were waiting to get away in an airplane, the gangster’s moll falls for the rented hero and there’s the speech about security; everything was the same. "[7]

He felt he was not being paid enough for the job and decided to punish Corman by writing him a part of Happy Jack Monahan, the most difficult role he could think of, requiring the character to be laughing hysterically in one scene and crying like a baby in the next.[4][8] "This fellow was a tropical Hamlet," recalls Corman, " crying one moment, laughing the next, going from killer to victim—the works. Brando would have had trouble with this role."[9] Corman s"realized Happy Jack practically became the lead. I know Chuck did this to drive me crazy. It was too big a role, and required an actor."[3] Corman gave the role to Robert Bean an actor who wanted to work on a Corman film. Corman told Bean if he could pay his own way to Puerto Rico he could work on the crew and play a role in one of the films.[4] Bean was boom operator on the second Puerto Rico film and appeared in Creature; he also played the role of the Creature.[10][11] Griffith was paid $1,500 for his script.[12]

Corman claims "Chuck had sent us the script on a Thursday. I read it Thursday night, rewrote sections of it between takes on the set Friday, had it duplicated Friday afternoon, passed it out and rehearsed it Friday, Saturday and Sunday, prepared it on the location on Sunday, and started shooting on Monday."[13]

In his memoir, Corman said:

I's been suggested that Creature from the Haunted Sea is my most personal film. That's actually not a bad suggestion, considering it's got my favorite ending of them all — a last scene I invented on a whim and literally phoned to Chuck Griffith from Puerto Rico. This was the story about a band of Batista's generals making off with a treasure chest of gold from Cuba. The man they hire to captain their boat is a mobster. He murders the generals and covers up the crimes by inventing a story about an undersea monster who devours people. But there is an undersea monster. "We have always killed off our monsters with fire, electricity, floods, whatever," I told Chuck. "This time, the monster wins. The final shot in this picture," I insisted, "is the monster sitting on the chest of gold at the bottom of the ocean floor. The skeletons of all the people in the picture are scattered around him and he's picking his teeth. That's it. The monster wins."[14]

Creature from the Haunted Sea was shot in five days.[5] Locals appeared in the film as extras, reportedly being paid $1 an hour.[10] According to Corman, "I was trying to get more movement into long dialogue scenes. Chuck had one scene in the script that especially bothered me because I couldn't figure out how to give it some action. We were shooting in a palm grove, and I had these Americans playing touch football with a coconut[...]If nothing else, there was a lot of movement in that scene."[3]

During a scene in which the character Renzo Capetto is shown assembling an automatic pistol, actor Antony Carbone was given a real gun which fell apart unexpectedly. After shooting a take that "worked perfectly", Corman decided that the first take was funnier, and used it in the film with added narration to achieve humorous effect.[3]

Renzo Capetto and Mary-Belle Monahan kiss as the Creature sneaks up behind them.

According to Beach Dickerson, the creature was made from "a wetsuit, some moss, lots of Brillo pads[...]tennis balls for the eyes, ping-pong balls for the pupils, and pipecleaners for the claws. Then we cover him with black oilcloth to make him slimy."[3] According to Carbone, the cast "really had to do some deep concentration in order not to laugh when we saw it".[10]

Carbone felt that Corman should have shot the scenes featuring the creature from its point-of-view, so that the audience would never see the creature. "That would at least keep a semblance of some fear. Because when you see this creature, you gotta laugh! Not that the laughter isn't good, but the laughter should not be about the creature, it should be about the actions of the creature. For example, when the creature kills, you should take the action from the actor to make it funny—his eyes pop out, or he puts his finger in his mouth like a child, or some humorous little bit that the person being killed could do. Therefore you sustain both the secrecy of this thing and bring out the comedy. Then I think it would have been at least plausible, in a way." Despite Carbone's feelings about Corman's filmmaking, he stated that the film was "very funny" and he "had a lot of fun doing it".[10]

When the cast and crew had difficulty getting out of the country, the cinematographer hid the film from Corman until the cast and crew got paid for the production.[5] Actress Betsy Jones-Moreland stated of the production that "the only problem with that movie is that it started out to be a takeoff on everything Roger had ever done before. It was to be a comedy, a laugh a minute. Then all of a sudden, somewhere in the middle of it, that got lost and it got to be serious." Moreland continued to state that she "just assumed that nobody would ever see it. In the beginning, because it was going to be a 'sophisticated' spoof and it was going to be an inside joke, I was not ashamed of it. Later, when it didn't turn out to be that way, when it got off the track and got dumb, then I wished that I'd never heard of it."[5]

Robert Towne later said " I didn’t really see myself as an actor. And that movie confirmed my suspicions. It underlined that I most definitely did not have a career as an actor."[15]

The film's musical score, written by Fred Katz, was originally written for A Bucket of Blood. According to Mark Thomas McGee, author of Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts, each time Katz was called upon to write music for Corman, Katz sold the same score as if it were new music.[4] The score was used in a total of seven films, including The Wasp Woman and The Little Shop of Horrors.