page_title: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
section_title: Production
hierarchical_section_title: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms / Production
caption_attribution_description: English: Rhedosaurus, from The Beast from 20,000 fathoms.
context_page_description: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a 1953 American black-and-white, science fiction, grindhouse, monster film from Warner Bros., produced by Jack Dietz and Hal E. Chester, directed by Eugène Lourié, that stars Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, and Kenneth Tobey. The film's stop-motion animation special effects are by Ray Harryhausen. Its screenplay is based on Ray Bradbury's 1951 short story "The Fog Horn", specifically the scene where a lighthouse is destroyed by the title character.
  The film's story concerns a fictional dinosaur, the Rhedosaurus, which is released from its frozen, hibernating state by an atomic bomb test in the Arctic Circle. The beast begins to wreak a path of destruction as it travels southward, eventually arriving at its ancient spawning grounds, which includes New York City.
  The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was one of the early atomic monster movies, and it helped inspire a generation of creature features and directly inspired Godzilla.
context_section_description: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had a production budget of $200,000.
  The film was announced in the trades as The Monster from Beneath the Sea. During preproduction in 1951, Ray Harryhausen brought to Dietz and Chester's attention that Ray Bradbury had just published a short story in The Saturday Evening Post titled "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (it later was anthologized under the title "The Fog Horn"). This story was about a marine-based prehistoric dinosaur that destroys a lighthouse. A similar sequence appeared in the draft script of The Monster from Beneath the Sea. The producers, wishing to share in Bradbury's reputation and popularity, promptly bought the rights to his story and changed the film's title to match the story's title. Bradbury's name was used extensively in the promotional campaign. It also had an on-screen credit that read "Suggested by the Saturday Evening Post Story by Ray Bradbury".
  An original music score was composed by Michel Michelet, but when Warner Bros. purchased the film, it had a new score written by David Buttolph. Ray Harryhausen had been hoping that his film music hero Max Steiner, under contract at the time with Warner Bros., would write the film score. Steiner had written the landmark score for RKO's King Kong in 1933. Unfortunately for Harryhausen, Steiner had too many commitments, but Buttolph composed one of his more memorable and powerful scores, setting much of the tone for giant monster film music of the 1950s.
  Some early pre-production conceptual sketches of the Beast showed that, at one point, it was to have a shelled head and later was to have a beak. Creature effects were assigned to Ray Harryhausen, who had been working for years with Willis O'Brien, the man who created King Kong. The film monster looks nothing like the Brontosaurus-type creature of the short story. It is instead a kind of Tyrannosaurus rex-type prehistoric predator, though quadrupedal in stature. The monster was unlike any real carnivorous dinosaur and more closely resembled a rauisuchian. A drawing of the creature was published along with the story in The Saturday Evening Post. At one point, there were plans to have the Beast snort flames, but this idea was dropped before production began due to budget restrictions. The concept, however, was used for the film poster. Later, the creature's nuclear flame breath was the inspiration for the original Japanese film Gojira (1954, Godzilla).
  In a scene attempting to identify the Rhedosaurus, Professor Tom Nesbitt rifles through dinosaur drawings by Charles R. Knight, a man whom Harryhausen claimed as an inspiration.
  The dinosaur skeleton in the museum sequence is artificial; it was obtained from RKO Pictures prop storage where it had been constructed for its classic comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938).
  The climactic roller coaster live-action scenes were filmed on location at the Pike in Long Beach, California and featured the Cyclone Racer entrance ramp, ticket booth, loading platform, and beach views of the structure. Split-matte, in-camera special effects by Harryhausen effectively combined the live-action of the actors and the roller coaster background footage from the Pike's parking lot with the stop-motion animation of the Beast's destroying a shooting miniature of the coaster.
caption: The Beast destroys a lighthouse, an original concept from the Ray Bradbury short story "The Fog Horn"
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