Paul Davids’ career in film and TV took off when he was the production coordinator for 79 episodes of the original TRANSFORMERS shows and wrote several of the episodes. He is co-author (with his wife, Hollace) of six STAR WARS sequel books for Lucasfilm. The many films (including films for television) he has produced and/or directed include: ROSWELL, TIMOTHY LEARY’S DEAD, STARRY NIGHT, THE ARTIST & THE SHAMAN, THE SCI-FI BOYS, JESUS IN INDIA and BEFORE WE SAY GOODBYE. He also has writing credits on all those films plus his first feature as screenwriter, called SHE DANCES ALONE. Four of his films are in release to either DVD or TV through Universal Pictures Home Entertainment or Universal Pictures International TV Division. He is in the process of completing THE LIFE AFTER DEATH PROJECT. Paul Davids is also a noted artist, and some of his works can be seen at his online gallery at www.pauldavids.com. Other website to explore his work include www.starrynightmovie.com, www.jesus-in-india-the-movie.com and www.beforewesaygoodbyethemovie.com A member of the Writers Guild of America and the Producers Guild of America, Paul is also a member of the Magic Castle in Hollywood, and he is now also creating comedy music. His song “WE LOVE YOU, WE HATE YOU,” was featured as the start-off song on Dr. Demento’s program of March 19th (see www.drdemento.com) and he hopes to soon emerge as a rap singer with some very funny, very contemporary rap music.

TheoFantastique: Paul, thanks again for discussing your forthcoming documentary as it touches on Forrest J. Ackerman and your paranormal experiences. To set the stage, can you describe how you came to know Forry?

Paul Davids: In issue #24 of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND in August of 1963, Forry announced his Project 6000, a cross-country trip from Los Angeles to New York to attend the World Science-Fiction Convention (he had only missed one convention in 1951, when his father passed away and he had to turn back to L.A. while he was en route to New Orleans). As part of that journey, Forry came to Washington, D.C. (joined by his publisher Jim Warren from Philadelphia) and met fans there in a hotel. I showed up with a friend, Jeff Tinsley, who I’d been making amateur monsters movies with for a couple of years using stop-motion animation techniques. I met Forry and Jim Warren at that hotel on a Saturday, and they invited me back for a Sunday morning fan gathering there and suggested I bring some of my amateur films and a projector. It was a thrill to show my work to them that Sunday. The Washington Evening Star had recently published a full-page in their Teen section on our amateur movies, and so Forry invited me to submit photos and material about our amateur efforts to FM. We were rewarded with a two-page spread in issue #27 of FM, followed later by photos and more in issue #35 when we received an Honorable Mention Award in the FM contest for our version of “Siegfried Saves Metropolis” based on Forry’s screenplay. Then in 1969, upon graduating from Princeton University, I set out cross-country myself, having been accepted as one of the first Fellows at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies in Beverly Hills. I looked up Forry at his Ackermansion soon after I arrived and visited him many times. In 1970 I invited both Forry and George Pal together to the AFI to give a seminar, and Forry wrote about that wonderful day in FM #68. Our relationship grew through the years. He invited me to write (with photo byline) for MONSTERLAND and even invited me and my wife, Hollace, to the Ackermansion on Glendower to join him and Wendayne for dinner with Ray and Diana Harryhausen and Zsoka Pal (George Pal’s widow) in 1986, the year our FIRES OF PELE book came out (Forry wrote the Foreword for our first book). When Hollace and I began writing STAR WARS sequel books, we dedicated PROPHETS OF THE DARK SIDE to Forry. Forry saw all of the films I made during his lifetime and especially appreciated STARRY NIGHT. He went to see TIMOTHY LEARY’S DEAD with me in a theater in L.A. And then, in 2002, I began working on THE SCI-FI BOYS, which dealt above all with Forry’s influence on the generations who followed him and who became professionals in the worlds of imagi-movie productions and special effects. In 2003 I filmed him at George Pal’s grave re-reading the eulogy for Pal he had presented at George Pal’s funeral in May of 1980 (I had been there at the funeral to hear him that day), and that became a scene in THE SCI-FI BOYS. When the film was completed and accepted for distribution by Universal Pictures for DVD and television, Forry came to a Universal Pictures Golden Globe party accompanied by his great friend, assistant and caretaker Joe Moe. There’s a well-known photo from that evening with Peter Jackson, Forry, Rick Baker, Basil Gogos, Bob Burns and me all together (the photo is on the back of THE SCI-FI BOYS DVD box and is in the book of Basil Gogo’s art). The pinnacle of my years of friendship with Forry was in the spring of 2006 when Universal Pictures showed THE SCI-FI BOYS (edited by my son Scott M. Davids) at the Egyptian Theater in a double-feature with Peter Jackson’s short about SKULL ISLAND (which is on the DVD of Jackson’s KING KONG). Forry spoke at a panel discussion there with me, Rick Baker, effects designer Steve Johnson and Basil Gogos. Forry told Joe Moe upon departing, “Well, I guess it doesn’t get any better than this. This may be the best night of my life.” I attended many of Forry’s birthday parties and we were friends to his death, December 4, 2008. The last photo of us together was taken at his Acker Mini-mansion on Halloween of 2008.

TheoFantastique: In your article in FATE you note that Forry was a skeptic, but you and Joe Moe had some curious paranormal experiences that makes you wonder. Can you summarize some of this?

Joe Moe at Ackerman Estate Auction

Paul Davids: First, some background on Forry’s skepticism. He was an avowed atheist, having had negative experiences with organized religion while growing up. When his brother Alden was killed in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, his feelings of the meaningless of his brother’s death, combined with the horrible atrocities of that war, further estranged him from any beliefs in a Supreme Being. Forry rejected belief in ghosts, the afterlife, the supernatural and UFO’s (and UFO’s were always a topic of dispute between us). This was ironic because he was a world authority on all such things in the world of fiction, but he felt fiction and only fiction was where those topics belonged. Nevertheless, he did write one short story about a young fan of Lon Chaney who dies and goes to heaven and talks to God. To friends, he told the story frequently of a Ouija Board incident which seemed to tell his grandfather to undertake the design of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles – and he kept the evidence an the “automatic writing” message on display. There are other such incidents reported in Deborah Painter’s book, FORRY. Forry frequently asserted, however, that he assumed that when those who had known him personally were all deceased, he would be completely forgotten, and that except for his writings, which he thought wouldn’t survive far into the future, it would be as though he had never been born. And he thought he would have no consciousness to ever know he had been alive. After Forry passed away, there were very strange things that happened to a group of people. It started months after his passing, the weekend of the memorial for him at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood in March, 2009. The first two to have strange experiences were Mike MacDonald and Ian Johnston, two Canadian documentary filmmakers who made a film called FAMOUS MONSTER: FORREST J ACKERMAN. They have written about what happened, how after visiting Forry’s crypt the Ackerman name popped up on their computer as code and a second computer burst out with a voice as if it was a message. Then Joe Moe had a lucid dream of Forry coming into his bedroom and talking to him about the memorial. The dream seemed like a real experiences and the things Forry said to Joe Moe seemed to really be from Forry. I did not know of Joe’s incident when, a few days later, one of the strangest incidents of my life occurred. I was alone in our vacation house in Santa Fe, and while I was out of a room for just five minutes, the first page of a document of mine was changed by some moist ink that suddenly appeared, and there was no one there who could have changed it. Four words were precisely blacked out, with two different levels of opaqueness. Everyone who sees it says it looks completely deliberate and targeted, that it was no accident. The blackout seemed to indicate the message: “Spoke to Joe Moe.” I have written about the incident in FATE magazine, and also at Whitley Strieber’s Unknown Country website. It was as if Forry was confirming for me, to tell Joe, that he really did speak to Joe Moe, that Joe’s experience was not a dream.

TheoFantastique: You even had some scientific testing done to apply to this. How does that apply and add to the mystery?

Paul Davids: I spent over six months working with chemists at two universities to try to get to the bottom of the mystery about the ink on my document. The Chairman of the Chemistry Department at Indiana University studied it with gas chromatography, the electron microscope and other instrumentation. A chemistry professor at New Jersey University studied it using mass spectrometry. Trying to duplicate the opaque ink became a class project at New Jersey University. After exhaustive tests of many kinds, both professors could not duplicate this and felt that the reasons for the chemistry of the ink were not possible for them to explain using all their extensive knowledge of paints, inks and solvents. Furthermore, some strange things happened to them while they were conducting the studies. This included a stack of pages related to the experiment being inexplicably scattered off a chair across the floor of a room while no one was present. Later, I discovered that the current tenants of what used to be the Ackermansion on Glendower in Los Angeles feel that the house is haunted. Without knowing what happened regarding the scientists I worked with, they reported incidents of pages being scattered onto the floor (from a music stand) repeatedly, in much the same way. The shadows of a man have been seen at night on the wall of what used to be Forry’s office, and the shadows always disappear without anyone being present. This is a complex case and there are now many other unexplained incidents that have happened relating to it. Two years before Forry passed away he signed an autograph for me in FAMOUS MONSTERS right above a line of text that reads: “The invisible ink men strike again.” There is also a painting (by L. J. Dopp) showing the exact minute of his death that was made four years before he died.

TheoFantastique: Why did you decide to make this the subject of your forthcoming documentary THE LIFE AFTER DEATH PROJECT?

Paul Davids: I made the decision to begin documenting all of this after the incident with the ink occurred. I filmed at the chemistry labs that tested it. This led to compiling interviews with many authors and researchers on the topic of life after death. Whitley Strieber’s wife, Anne, came aboard as an executive producer, along with my wife, Hollace Davids. The project kept expanding so that it now has a long list of notables and deals with many aspects of apparent communication from those who are deceased. The film does not deal with certain aspects of life after death, such as reincarnation, and it only touches briefly on near-death experience. It does deal with spiritual mediums, apports, photographic evidence of communication from deceased persons and other strange experiences that resemble what happened to me. If I was ever a skeptic about spiritualism and afterlife communication, I can say that I now think it is a very real phenomenon, and I think it seems very real that the group of us, including author Deborah Painter, really did hear from Forry after he was gone. Perhaps he is not a skeptic about the afterlife now!

TheoFantastique: Where will interested readers be able to find out more about this film when it is near release?

Paul Davids: It is too early to say when it will be ready. It is in an advanced stage of editing. I have tentatively agreed to screen it in October at the ASPE Conference in Taos (ASPE stands for Alliance Studying Paranormal Experiences), provided it is finished by then (it should be). I gave a lecture at the last ASPE about the strange case of Forrest J Ackerman and some of these experiences. My films usually make it to TV and DVD and sometimes play in some festivals. THE SCI-FI BOYS (available on DVD) played on the SyFy Channel and the Sundance Channel. ROSWELL was a Showtime movie, and JESUS IN INDIA played on the Sundance Channel. My latest film, BEFORE WE SAY GOODBYE (www.beforewesaygoodbyethemovie.com) now has a deal to play in Spanish on TV and throughout Latin America and South America, but we do not have a deal for an English language broadcast in the U.S. yet. Hopefully that will come. Interestingly that film has a life after death theme too, with a Latino cast. It deals in part with the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and part of the film was made at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico where the famous tilma of St. Juan Diego with its unexplained image of the Virgin has been on display since the 1500′s. The DVD is available at the movie’s website. As for THE LIFE AFTER DEATH PROJECT, when it is available it will surely be announced at www.pauldavids.com and you will start to see publicity for it, including in FAMOUS MONSTERS magazine, which is being published these days by publisher Philip Kim.

TheoFantastique: Paul, thanks again for letting us now about your new film, and for sharing your experiences with Forrest J. Ackerman in both is mortal life, and perhaps beyond. Maybe Dr. Acula will have the last laugh after all, even beyond his own expectations.

Related posts:

“Paul Davids: Sci-Fi Boys and the Pied Pipers of the Imagination”

“Bader, Mencken, and Baker: Paranormal America”

Jeffrey Kripal – Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred”

Philip Kim, Senior Manager for Famous Monsters, shared a few responses to some questions in a recent interview.

TheoFantastique: Phil, thanks for making some time for us to talk. To begin, can you share how you came to appreciate horror and science fiction, and the original Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine?

Philip Kim: Silicon Valley in the 70′s was the most incredible place on the planet. The amount of energy and technology that was developing was unreal. Science fiction became fact. I suppose I was a product of that environment. I grew up in San Jose watching Creature Features on Friday nights, Godzilla reruns on rainy Saturday mornings and playing D&D and building models. I spent a large amount of my preteen time and income at the comic-shops. Just couldn’t get enough. I don’t remember where it was but my first issue was in 1977, #137. I saw the Yearbook with all the Star Wars pics on the cover and had to have it. Much like Forry, I was a huge sci-fi fan. It was a valued part of my literary arsenal. Unfortunately, that issue was the beginning of the end for Warren Publishing.

TheoFantastique: For those who may not be familiar with some of the history, can you briefly sketch Forrest Ackerman’s founding of the magazine, the legal problems for the publication that followed, and how you eventually came to be involved with the project?

Philip Kim: Okay, so a brief synopsis. 1958, Warren and Ackerman give birth to a phenomena. FM becomes part of our culture until it shuts down in 1983. There was much speculation about the reasoning for the demise. Warren Publishing had lost out to newcomers such as Fangoria, Starlog, etc. Some say that the move away from a painted cover to a more conventional photo cover had been the start…consequently this happened to be my introductory issue. Go figure. In 1993, a fan named Ray Ferry revived FM with Ackerman back at the helm. Between the conventions and the print, things were going well until egos flared. Ferry stopped paying Ackerman and Ackerman walked. Ferry continued to print under pseudonyms of Ackerman, which ended in a victorious lawsuit for Ackerman. Unfortunately, the settlement would never be paid. Ferry filed bankruptcy and seven years later, I was awarded the ownership after a successful bid through the bankruptcy courts. But the fun didn’t end there.

TheoFantastique: What will your approach be for the new magazine? Will you attempt to blend the ways in which the original magazine dealt with its subject matter, coupled with new treatments of the topics to appeal to contemporary readers, or will you consider a different way forward?

Philip Kim: FM has birthed a lot of fans. These fans went on to do great things. All of them had an idea of how FM impacted their lives and career. This was the essence of the publication, to get aspiring creatives to reach their goal. To make fantasies and dreams a closer reality. FM wants to be a part of that again but our challenge is a new generation and an ever-changing landscape. Unlike a new publication, FM does not have the luxury of trial and error. Existing fans will expect a certain element of nostalgia; young readers will want current relevance. It’s not hard to weave the two together if you have the people and the talent.

TheoFantastique: Do you think the web format for the magazine presents new opportunities not possible for a more traditional print publication?

Philip Kim: I can tell you that the Internet has forever changed print. The days of deadlines and breaking news are over for print. The web is where you get the news, rantings and social connections. The web gives you a connection that print could never do. But print gives you the longtail. Print becomes historical reference. Print gives you legitimacy because it is tactile and rich. A website without a print companion can disappear faster than it came in.

TheoFantastique: Every horror and sci fi fan loves a good trailer of coming attractions. Do you have any projects you’re working on for viewers and readers that you’d like to share?

Philip Kim: I came to own FM during the production of two sci-fi features. The first is Radio Free Albemuth (a Philip K. Dick novel adaptation), which is still in post-production, and my second film which is Downstream. Downstream is an original story that I wrote. About three years ago, my hometown had lost power for 36 hours. The meat and milk went bad and we couldn’t get on the Internet. I had never been without power for that long. I realized that our civilization is always 36 hours away from the Dark Ages. Downstream is releasing in a limited number of theaters around the country.

TheoFantastique: Phil, thanks again for your time and for sharing your great work.

The Los Angeles Times online discussed Forry’s passing with the following:

Forrest J Ackerman, who influenced a generation of young horror movie fans with Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and spent a lifetime amassing what has been called the world’s largest personal collection of science fiction and fantasy memorabilia, has died. He was 92.

Ackerman, a writer, editor and literary agent who has been credited with coining the term “sci-fi” in the 1950s, died Thursday of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles, Kevin Burns, head of Prometheus Entertainment and a trustee of Ackerman’s estate, told the Associated Press.

As editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Ackerman wrote most of the articles in the photo-laden magazine launched in 1958 as a forum for past and present horror films.

“It was the first movie monster magazine,” Tony Timpone, editor of Fangoria, a horror movie magazine founded in 1979, told The Times in 2002.

Timpone, who began reading Famous Monsters as a young boy in the early ’70s, remembers it as “a black-and-white magazine with cheap paper but great painted [color] covers. It really turned people on to the magic of horror movies.”

Primarily targeted to late pre-adolescents and young teenagers, Famous Monsters of Filmland featured synopses of horror films, interviews with actors such as Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price, and articles on makeup and special effects.

Famous Monsters reflected Ackerman’s penchant for puns, with features such as “The Printed Weird” and “Fang Mail.” Ackerman referred to himself as Dr. Acula.

“He put a lot of his personality into the magazine,” said Timpone, who later became friends with Ackerman. “It was a pretty juvenile approach to genre journalism, but as kids, that’s all we had.”

TheoFantastique: Paul, thank you for responding positively to my request for an interview. I caught a showing of your documentary, The Sci-Fi Boys on the SciFi Channel and enjoyed it immensely. I ended up purchasing a copy for my further review and reflection and I’d like to ask you some questions to tease out some of the thinking behind it. This documentary is obviously the result of your personal interests and passions on the subject matter. How did you develop these interests and what led you to produce this film?

Paul Davids: At specific moments in time, things burst upon the scene that capture the imagination of youth in a way that changes everything. Look at the advent of video games, from the first primitive Pong and Pacman and Space Invaders games, and how for awhile video games became an all-consuming entertainment and then got massively more sophisticated, eventually losing their novelty. You can name a hundred technological developments in our lifetime that had great impact like that. When I was a kid (pre cell-phone, pre-computer, pre-Internet, pre-video game) special effects in film were great novelty. It was like being fascinated with a magic trick. Gigantic monsters in movies and other effects would cause kids to wonder: how did they do that? And if you ever got over that question, the next question was can I do that too? And so the games began. There were no courses, textbooks, rules – it was (a) figure it out on your own or (b) find the magazine with an article that will give away the secrets. And there were few, because the techniques were largely guarded as “trade secrets.” Special effects were really special – even just the simple effect of making someone disappear or become gradually invisible…it all seemed so complex and ingenious. We had nothing that approached what can be done with high end graphics today that gives us moving imagery, sweeping us through heights and unusual angles to watch impossible things happening on screen. There is something similar or parallel in the personalities of those who embraced special effects and those who loved sleight of hand and other forms of magical illusions. I had those particular attractions. (I’ve been a member of the Magic Castle in Hollywood since the late 1980’s and try to go there once a week when I’m not traveling.) The “tricks” that are taken for granted in cinema today (and get a “ho hum” response now) were at one point in time impossible to accomplish and only vaguely imagined. Thus the pioneers of the field, men like Willis O’Brien, George Pal and Ray Harryhausen, were really brilliant inventors with soaring imaginations to take us as far as they did, each in their primes and their own time… they were master magicians of cinema who could fool the eye and trick us into imagining the impossible. Brilliant inventiveness keeps getting overtaken and supplanted, generation after generation. The generation of telegraph Morse Code could hardly conceive (except as science-fiction) the advent of the eras of telephone and television. The cycle continues.

TheoFantastique: The film focuses on the work and influence of Ray Harryhausen and Forrest J. Ackerman on several generations of young men that you call “the sci-fi boys.” How did you come to recognize the strong and ongoing influence of these men on professional filmmakers and average viewers alike?

Paul Davids: Their influence was impossible to ignore growing up in the late 1950’s and the 1960’s if you were a person who liked visual stimulation that was “out of the mainstream.” Whether you are talking about sci-fi imaginative imagery or sexual imagery or horror imagery, there was much less access and availability for any of that kind of sensory stimulation. If Forrest Ackerman caught your attention with his FAMOUS MONSTERS magazine, you got hooked. He always listed dozens of titles of upcoming monster or imaginative movies that were in the planning stages to be made. You waited and waited…. Half of them or more never were produced, or when they came out they had a different name and had changed so much you couldn’t recognize them from what he had described. But he teased and whetted your appetite and did something that great movie trailers do…created a sense of anticipation. If you became a Ray Harryhausen fan, you felt starved like a wanderer in the desert during a great drought in between the release of his films. You had to wait one or two years for the next one to come out! And there was hardly anything comparable to compete with him. There were a few imitators (anybody remember JACK THE GIANT KILLER?) but never would you think they were as good, as clever, as original. So like any forceful and inspiring personalities who dominate their professional field, these men became the Pied Pipers for males with intense imagination. They had vast followings. The kids whose lives were dominated by sports could have grown up and had very happy childhoods without ever hearing of them. But most of us horror/sci-fi fans lived for that Saturday afternoon double-feature, and we could only hope against hope that one of them would be a Ray Harryhausen film.

TheoFantastique: Those who might not consider themselves fantasy, sci fi, or horror fans and who enjoy films in these genres infrequently may not appreciate the impact of these men on the industry. Can you touch on some of their contributions to contemporary special effects as well as to the revitalization of the fantastic in films, and how they came to capture the imagination of numerous young people as filmgoers over the years?

Paul Davids: I think I’ve wrapped this answer into the preceding ones. But there was a small group of producers in the early days who believed totally in the power and importance of special effects. George Pal used to say that special effects were the “star” of any science-fiction motion picture. The impact of his influence, not just on entertainment, but on rallying a generation to the U.S. space program, was immense. George Pal made DESTINATION MOON, CONQUEST OF SPACE, WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE and WAR OF THE WORLDS…four major feature films dealing with different implications of man’s relationship to outer space, both exploration of space and outer space life. He was like a one-man NASA recruitment center. It’s worth noting though that the popularity of special effects ebbed and waned in cycles, like any other genre. When special effects were out of favor, George Pal couldn’t get any films to be greenlighted. It was the success of STAR WARS that really gave new life to special effects and to space films.

TheoFantastique: One of the things that struck me most as I watched your documentary was the strong connection I shared (and still share) with several generations of young boys from the 1950s through the 1970s who were captivated by the fantastic and the monstrous. The noted horror historian and author David J. Skal has expressed his feeling that these films and the monsters they portray function in some kind of function as participatory ritual for those who are a part of “Monster Culture”. He also feels that some expressions of the fantastic include “religio-mythic overtones”. Do you have any thoughts as to what was taking place in American culture during this timeframe that might have contributed to the hunger and thirst for the fantastic that helped make these men and their crafts so popular, and how they might have functioned beyond entertainment?

Paul Davids: The monster in movies, whether the gigantic beast or the slimy blood-sucking vampire, was the destroyer of civilization or the destroyer of souls. You’ve always had soul destroyers throughout the centuries, thus the concept of the Devil has been deeply ingrained. He deals with people on a one-to-one basis. But as for mass destruction, except for the plagues of the Middle Ages, the Baby Boom generation was the first to grow up with consciousness of the very real possibility of the total destruction of civilization as we know it. We were the first to grow up with the reality of nuclear weapons. So there was unconscious, suppressed fear and horror that was part of “normal” life. It was new to Western culture. In eastern culture, in Hinduism, the destroyer of worlds is built into the religious mythos. The triple godhead of the Hindus consists of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma creates the worlds. (And note that that’s plural — there are untold millions of worlds and Hinduism has always assumed that.) Vishnu preserves the worlds. But Shiva is the destroyer of worlds, and yet Shiva is worshipped and loved, not just feared. Hinduism, like Buddhism, recognizes the cyclical nature of life, that creation and destruction are the ultimate wheel, and that wheel turns round and endlessly, bringing worlds into existence and then shattering them. It’s a natural process. It’s God’s own original conception of creation. If not, why did God give stars a limited lifespan too and build into them the finality of exploding into a super-nova in their end? The Western concept of the Devil as an entity separate from God seems much more confining and limited. Western religions give a personality (in the form of the Devil or Satan) to the existence of evil – and at one level the monster is the cinema’s personification of evil. But the monster is not always like a demon — often the monster is simply the mindless force of absolute destruction and in that sense shows us different aspects and faces of Shiva, ultimate destroyer of worlds. In the West we should enlarge our dualistic concept of creation to something beyond just absolute good and absolute evil. The monster reminds us that we are stuck on that “wheel,” because although the monster destroys (thereby expressing our own inner primal rage and infantile fury) the monster is himself almost always destroyed too. The destroyer also has a destructive demise. Or at least he did before sequels came to rule the film business. Now many of those gigantic creatures simply must live to come again. (Anybody want to make a prediction about CLOVERFIELD?)

By the way, I must end with a plug for my new film, as long as we’re discussing religious mythology. Check out my website: http://www.jesus-in-india-the-movie.com/. This one will open your mind.

TheoFantastique: Paul, thanks again for participating in this interview, and for your fine documentary that helps preserve the legacy of those pioneers of the imagination that have been so influential.