The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms - Production

Production

This movie had a production budget of $210,000. It earned $2.25 million at the North American box office during its first year of release and ended up grossing over $5 million. Original prints of Beast were sepia toned.

When the short story "The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury was published in The Saturday Evening Post, Dietz and Chester were negotiating with Bradbury to write the screenplay when he reminded them that both works shared a similar theme of a prehistoric sea monster, and a lighthouse being destroyed. The producers who wished to share Bradbury's reputation and popularity, bought the rights to his story and changed the film's title. The film was promoted as being "suggested" by a Ray Bradbury story and Bradbury credited as a writer.

The original music score was composed by Michel Michelet, but when Warner Brothers purchased the film they had a new score written by David Buttolph. Ray Harryhausen had been hoping that his film music hero Max Steiner would be able to write the music for the picture, as Steiner had written the landmark score for King Kong, and Steiner was under contract with Warner Brothers at the time. Unfortunately for Harryhausen, Steiner had too many commitments to allow him to do the film, but fortunately for film music fans, Buttolph composed one of his most memorable and powerful scores, setting much of the tone for giant monster 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 at another point was to have a beak. Creature effects were assigned to Ray Harryhausen, who had been working with Willis O'Brien, the man who created King Kong, for years. The monster of the film looks nothing like the Brontosaurus-type creature of the short story. The creature in the film is instead some kind of prehistoric predator. A drawing of the creature was published along with the story in The Saturday Evening Post. Later, the Beast's nuclear flame breath would be the inspiration of the original 1954 film of Godzilla.

In a scene attempting to identify the Rhedosaurus, Professor Tom Nesbitt rifles through dinosaur drawings of Charles R. Knight, a man whom Harryhausen claims as an inspiration. Knight died in 1953, the year Beast was released.

The dinosaur skeleton in the museum sequence is artificial; it was obtained from storage at RKO Pictures where it had been constructed for 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 views of the structure from the beach. Split-matte in-camera special effects by Harryhausen effectively combined the live action of the actors and coaster background footage from The Pike parking lot with the stop-motion of the Beast destroying a model of the coaster.