In one way I’m fairly conservative and set in my ways and that’s when it comes to special effects. I work in an industry where discussion of the latest computer generated special effects are almost mandatory and practical effects of the past are viewed with disdain. Yet there are a still few of us who talk lovingly about rubber suits, stop-motion and all manner of tactile effects. One place where these monsters of legend still reside is in Bob Burn’s Basement, the legendary home of classic props, costumes and effects.

In Bob’s Basement, for example, you can meet the biggest movie star in the world: the original King Kong, or at least the only surviving 18-inch armature that the sculptor Marcel Delgado created for the special effects wizard Willis O’Brien, whose painstaking, frame-by-frame animation brought Kong to life in the 1933 film. Kong is a bit slimmer these days, having lost the foam rubber padding and rabbit-fur coat he wore when he climbed the Empire State Building. Today he stands as a marvelously intricate metal skeleton, fashioned out of nuts, bolts and forged steel. His soulful eyes are empty sockets now, but somehow Kong’s personality still clings to this totemic object.

Like Ray Harryhausen has said, “If you attempt to make fantasy too real, you bring it down to the level of the mundane.” It’s nice to see a place that honours those sentiments.

A few weeks back I spent some time getting nostalgic over the gradual decline in stature for the practical special effects artist. One aspect of that equation that I didn’t take into account was the subsequent slide in demand for the people behind the prosthetics, or, professional monsters. The Toronto Star conducts an interview with Pan’s Labryinth star Doug Jones, the man behind the mask, and one part of their conversation concerns the fear one feels as technological advances threaten your livelihood.

“We all were worried. At some point you’re looking at the wave of digital coming in and thinking `We’re all going to be replaced one day.’”

The entire article gives a terrific behind-the-scenes look at an oft-neglected corner of the world of film, from Jones’ predecessors to how he fell into that particular line of work to the love for monsters.

Rue Morgue magazine has a regular section devoted to strange sites on the internet called Roadkill on the Info Highway. Kind of like a print blog. This month’s selection includes a site called Max and Courtney Make Monsters, in which the titular duo attempt to replicate every experiment in creature design from Dick Smith’s Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-Up book.

It is our plan to go through this book and create every single monster and make-up effect that Smith describes, although perhaps not in the order he indicates. We shall document this, and then we shall make our own little movies.

Each entry contains plenty of pictures and a snappy little film clip. It’s a fun little venture and perfect for the Monster Kid in all of us.

Really, who doesn’t love physical special effects work? I have nothing against computer graphics, especially with the advances that they’ve made, but no matter how good they get they never seem to have the charm of something that’s really there, inhabiting the same space as the actor and the sets.

Industrial Light and Magic has sold off their physical effects department. In case you think this is just about Star Wars, films that they’ve worked on include Ghostbusters, Labryinth, Dark Crystal and Poltergeist, among many others. When we were little, my cousin and I rented Poltergeist and watched it ten times in a row, over and over again, and at least part of the magic that kept us glued to the screen was watching a man rip his own face off. Sigh.