That group of horror bloggers, the League of Tana Tea Drinkers (LOTTD), of which I am a part, has come up with the theme for their latest roundtable group of posts. By early April those participants will have posted on their favorite villainess. It’s been a while since I’ve done something on the lighter side, so I am throwing my at in the ring with my choice in the form of Medusa from Clash of the Titans (1981). In my view, overall the film is not one of the best efforts that involved the special effects stop-motion animation genius of Ray Harryhausen as his team’s preferences for fantasy did not evolve in dark enough fashion with a changing culture. Nevertheless, the film includes one of Harryhausen’s best stop-motion sequences with the Medusa who can turn men to stone with a mere gaze. The scene includes a number of great elements, including key lighting, sound effects, creature design, and of course, Harryhausen’s animation. In my view this segment ranks among the top of his animation efforts over the years, right up there with the skeleton battle sequence from Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

In Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life (Billboard Books, 2004), with his co-author Tony Dalton, Harryhausen describes the process he went through in coming up with the look and design for this creature. For her face and head he consulted art, literature, and film. He describes how this process influenced the design of her torso:

In most renditions of Medusa [the torso] is unseen, but when shown (as in the Hammer film The Gorgon, 1964), she is usually wearing a diaphanous gown which would have been impossible to animate. I decided to give her a non-human body and expose as much of it as dignity would allow. In fact the drawing of Medusa was the earliest I completed for Clash (dating back to 1977), and it shows her wearing a discreet boob tube. However, when it came to designing the model, I experimented with her wearing a bra-like garment, but it looked vulgar, so in the end everyone agreed that the offending garment should be removed (I suppose one could say she was the first lady to burn her bra) and Medusa’s potentially offending nipples were painted to blend in with the rest of her torso.

Harryhausen goes on to describe how the Medusa scene was received on the screen:

The Medusa sequence is perhaps the one I am most proud of. Everything in it — the model, the actions, the pace, the lighting — works so perfectly….When director Desmond Davis saw the completed sequence, he kindly called to congratulate me.

I don’t know who my fellow LOTTD members will be highlighting in their favorite villainess posts, but I’d be willing to put my money on Medusa in a horror celebrity villainess death match any day, perhaps as they fight to the death to the tune of Electric Light Orchestra’s tune “I turn to stone.”

Check the LOTTD page, as well as those of its members, for posts on this topic as they are assembled.