Not of This Earth

An alien infiltrates Earth in order to collect blood for his race that is dying from anemia in Roger Corman’s well-crafted but somewhat uninspired urban thriller from 1957. 6/10

Not of This Earth. 1957, USA. Directed by Roger Corman. Written by Charles Griffith & Mark Hanna. Starring: Paul Birch, Beverly Garland, Jonathan Haze, Morgan Jones, William Roerick, Dick Miller. Produced by Roger Corman. IMDb: 6.1/10. Rotten Tomatoes: N/A. Metacritic: N/A.

The film opens ominously, with a young woman whos is confronted in a park by man in a black suit, hat and sunglasses. The man takes off his shades, and the woman collapses, screaming. The man opens a suitcase, in which we see a strange contraption with tubes and vials. He sticks a needle into the woman’s neck, pushes a button, and a machine starts draining her of blood.

Later, the man, introducing himself as Paul Johnson (Paul Birch), visits a private clinic, where he demands Doctor Rochelle (William Roerick) give him a complete transfusion. After an examination, Rochelle realises that Mr. Johnson’s body causes his blood cells to degrade, thus creating a constant need for fresh blood. Johnson removes his glasses and reveals a pair of white eyeballs, which seem to radiate mind control, and he explains that he has put a restrain in Dr. Rochelle’s mind, which prevents him from revealing any of the details regarding Johnson’s health to another person. While at the clinic, he also recruits nurse Nadine Storey (Beverly Garland) to live at his mansion and give him daily blood transfutions, as approved by Dr. Rochelle.

Thus begins Not of This Earth, made in 1957 on a shoestring budget by schlockmaster Roger Corman, released by Allied Artists as a double bill with the subject of my last review, Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). As Nurse Storey, arguably the heroic lead of the movie, moves into Mr. Johnson’s house, we meet the two last main characters, Johnson’s newly hired butler, chainsmoking Brooklynite and Jerry Lewis copy Jeremy Perrin (Jonathan Haze) and Storey’s police officer boyfriend (Morgan Jones). The nosy butler and the suspicious policeman eventually manage to convince Storey that all is not as it seems with Mr. Jones, and together, the three (or mostly Jerry and Nadine) start to unravel the mystery behind the man, even if the audience is keyed in a lot earlier.

Namely, Mr. Jones comes from the planet Davana, one of several alien agents that have travelled from their home world after a devastating nuclear war, which has left them with the incurable malady of dying blood. In Los Angeles, Jones is not merely draining young girls of blood for his own sustenance, but also invites bums and Chinese to his home in order to beam them over to Davana as blood vessels for the few survivors of the war. His beaming device is conveniently situated in a cleaning cabinet, and doubles as a video conference screen with which he communicates with his contact on his world, a floating head belonging to assistant director Jan Boleslavsky. And, as part of his mission, he is manipulating Dr. Rochelle into creating a remedy for his people’s suffering. Of course, when our heroes realise that Mr. Johnson is guilty of several murders and plans a world-wide invasion scheme, they try to put an end to his business. But with his hypnotic eyes, Mr. Johnson is a capable adversary.

Analysis & production background

I got stuck writing this review, because I found it peculiarly hard to say very much about it. Not of This Earth is generally considered as one of Roger Corman’s best 50’s SF movies, and from a certain perspective it is. It has a tight-ish, economical script, a neat, self-contained plot, an interesting idea and good acting. Corman’s direction is a masterclass in low-budget filmmaking. Most scenes are filmed in and around a single house, borrowed or rented by Corman at a significantly lower price than a week in a studio would have put him down. Almost everything else is filmed on the streets or in the parks of Los Angeles. Frequently, Corman relies on long takes, moving the camera and the actors around instead of cutting. Filming in the streets gives the urban scenes almost a feeling of Italian neorealism. I say almost, because mostly the shots are so tightly framed that you actually see very little of the city itself.

The idea at the heart of the film would be extremely easy to write off as a joke — Vampires From Outer Space! But screenwriters Charles Griffith’s and Mark Hanna’s matter-of-fact approach and original angle makes it work without being laughable. Furthermore, stocky Paul Birch in the lead sells the character splendidly, never once winking at the audience, and carrying a film he must have felt was beneath him with dignity. Beverly Garland was one of the best actresses Corman worked with in the 50’s, and had already showed her chops in Corman’s 1956 productions Swamp Women, Gunslinger and particularly opposite Lee Van Cleef and Peter Graves in It Conquered the World (review). In Not of This Earth, she again excels in her portrait of a spunky, witty and independent young woman with her heart in the right place, without turning the character into too much of a cliché. Nurse Storey is the de-facto heroine of the film, even though her boyfriend gets the final showdown with Mr. Johnson. Jonathan Haze had turned up in most of Roger Corman’s films at this point, in larger and smaller roles, but he had seldom had a chance to show off his chops like in Not of This Earth. And while Hollywood was stuffed to the rims with Brooklynite Jerry Lewis imitators at the time, Haze pulls off his role as the nosy, sloppy and annoying bellboy splendidly. Morgan Jones as the policeman boyfriend and William Roerick as the doctor don’t get much material to work with, and especially Jones comes is completely forgettable, but at least they don’t stick out like sore thumbs. One of the greatest moments of the film is the short sequence with legendary Corman favourite Dick Miller as an over-enthusiastic vacuum salesman.

The special effects are minimal but work effectively. Paul Birch’s white contact lenses give his Mr. Johnson an eerie and otherworldly habitus, and the teleportation device/video phone (with a remote control) in the cleaning closet does its job. There is also an actual monster in the movie, although it only shows up very briefly to kill Dr. Rochelle. The idea, however, is rather clever. The monster is alluded to a couple of times, as it is kept by Mr. Johnson in a “dried” state in a transparent cylinder. When he releases it, it transforms (in a dissolve) into a sort of leathery flying “umbrella”, or jellyfish, which flies off and lands on to of Dr. Rochelle’s head, killing him slowly and painfully.

The props were designed and constructed by Corman’s usual monster maker Paul Blaisdell. In the biography Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker, Blaisdell says he found the assignment appealing as the film contained no large monsters. The umbrella monster was built over a frame of wire coat hangers, padded and sculpted with foam rubber and given a finish with liquid latex and airbrush. To make the monster fly, Blaisdell used the same fishpole rig he had used for the “space bats” in It Conquered the World. As the creature landed on Dr. Rochelle’s head, actor William Roerick grabbed the coat hanger frame and pulled in tight around his head, as to “simulate a horrendously slow strangulation”. The blood seeping from the mouth of the dead doctor was actually grape juice.

Lead actor Paul Birch was not a happy camper on set, due to the contact lenses he had to wear. Actress Beverly Garland explains in an interview with film historian Tom Weaver, contact lenses in movies those days were not remotely comparable to those we have today — basically, it was like wearing sliced ping pong balls on your eyes. Possibly, Birch also had an allergic reaction to the material. Birch wanted to keep the lenses in as little as possible, meaning: only when they had to show up on screen. However, as Corman shot fast and cheap, he didn’t want to lose precious shooting time by having to wait for Birch to get the lenses done, so he demanded Birch wear them all day long. Finally, the tension between actor and director resulted in a physical altercation. According to screenwriter Charles Griffith, it was just a bit of push and shove, but it was enough for Birch to pack his things and walk off the movie. Luckily, Corman had already shot most of his scenes, and since Birch wore a hat and sunglasses most of the time, it was fairly easy to replace him with a stand-in in the few remaining shots (it is the same stand-in that walks towards the camera in the final shot of the film).

Another “special effect” was the low-cut, figure-revealing bathing suit that Beverly Garland wore around the pool in the movie. Garland tells Tom Weaver the bathing suit was considered extremely risqué at the time, and she was even a little embarrased to walk around in it, especially after having jumped in the pool. She also remembers a scene with Jonathan Haze, in which she bares her legs in order to put on her stockings; “that was a bit much for the time”, she says, and laughs at how tame those shots come across as today.

Despite its outlandish central premise, Not of This Earth comes across almost like a mystery thriller, with Nadine and Jerry stuck in what is basically a sort of “old dark house”, slowly working out the secrets of Mr. Johnson. Garland’s and Haze’s energetic performances drive the story forward. The film also feels fresh thanks to it having a clear-cut female protagonist. Female protagonists weren’t exactly anomalies in Hollywood in the mid-fifties, but a woman carrying a science fiction movie was hugely irregular.

One of the main reasons Not of This Earth is compelling is the central character of Mr. Johnson. Here Griffith’s writing is once again on display, as the menace of the movie is not simply a monster which is by nature compelled to use its superhuman powers to kill or invade. Mr. Johnson is trying to find a cure for his people’s malady, so they won’t have to use humans as blood banks. He is utterly dependent on human blood, preferably through transfusions, for his survival, and puts his life in the hands of nurse Storey. A brief encounter with another alien agent living undercover in Los Angeles widens the picture of the aliens: they are confused, lost desperate, and Mr. Johnson’s colleague is on the brink of throwing in her towel. Furthermore the alien race is not invulnerable, but extremely sensitive to loud sounds, a fact which comes into play in the film’s finale. All in all, Mr. Johnson is an interesting villain, which whom the audience can easily sympathise, from time to time, at least.

All of the above contribute to the fact that Not of This Earth is generally considered one of Corman’s better 50’s B movies, and rightly so. On the other hand, it is not one of his most memorable, due to its lack of a silly monster and the subdued script and action. With a few notable exceptions, such as Dick Miller’s vacuum salesman, the movie isn’t as imbued as many of his others by Charles Griffith’s quirky humour and out there ideas. Despite the lean script, the film suffers from a bit of a sag in the middle of the film, where very little actually happens. And as opposed to many of Griffith’s scripts, this one doesn’t really delve into any “big issues” or interpersonal drama, as its focus is squarely on the central gimmick of the story. So while Not of This Earth is objectively “better” than a lot of Corman’s more outrageous science fiction films, it’s also less fun and less memorable.

Roger Corman produced not one, but three remakes of Not of This Earth. The first was directed by Z-movie legend Jim Wynorski (1988), and is best known for being the non-porn debut of former porn star Traci Lords, and the second was a TV movie produced for Showtime, starring Michael York as Mr. Johnson (1995). He produced yet another remake in 1997, the straight-to-video movie Star Portal, with significant changes to the story.

Reception & legacy

The original film, unsurprisingly, received little interest from the press at the time if its release, and what small reviews it got were not always positive. For example, Peter Davalle at the Western Mail wrote of the double bill of Not of This Earth and Attack of the Crab Monsters that “it is of no use pretending that [the films] are anything but cheap and nasty strips of sensationalism which I urge you to miss so that such artless things will not be inflicted on filmgoers any more”. However, not all critics in the daily press were such snobs as Mr. Davalle. Hank Billings at the Springfield Leader and Press who wrote that “devoted s-f fans will find both films acceptable thrillers. Ditto for those who glory in gory movies […] Others may be bored or amused.”

However, the trade press saw the film’s commercial possibilities, with Variety calling it “a handy entry for exploitation playdates”, and Harrison’s Reports comparing it to the films of Boris Karloff, and noting that “it should hold the interest of those who enjoy horror films”. Some even looked past the cheap production and the exploitation premise. The Exhibitor wrote “This science fiction hokum has been almost intelligently presented and is a better example of its type of horror film making”. The critic lamented the “inept way” in which the aliens transported humans to Davana, and opined that this was “the only weak link” in the story. Performances from Birch and Garland were deemed “okay” and production “adequate”.

As the years have passed and Corman’s ouvre re-appraised, Not of This Earth has garnered praise from critics in particular. In his 1984 book The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, Phil Hardy calls it “the best” of Corman’s 50 SF movies, naming it an “elegant thriller” that “anticipates the themes” in his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Hardy also praises the way in which Corman, as opposed to many of his contemporaries, manages not to stuff the movie full of cold war analogies: “In other hands the film would have been undoubtedly full of reds-under-the-beds implications which Corman eschews in favour of an other-worldly nightmare in brittle shades of grey”.

In his magnum opus, Keep Watching the Skies!, film scholar Bill Warren notes that while Paul Birch walked off the set, in Not of This Earth, he “had what was almost certainly the best role of his career”. Warren writes: “Roger Corman’s direction creates some tension, but overall Not of This Earth is not one of his most enterprising directorial efforts. […] The movie’s quality stems from the clever and imaginative script.”

Today, IMDb has a 6.1/10 audience rating — rather high for a 50’s Corman SF movie, but the movie is too obscure to have enough critic mentions for a Rotten Tomatoes consensus. AllMovie gives it a whopping 4.5/5 rating, with Hal Erickson writing: “One of Roger Corman’s finest science-fiction endeavors of the 1950s, Not of This Earth is an excellent film by any standards”. TV Guide calls the movie a “well-paced […] winner”.

Glenn Erickson at DVD Savant calls the film “a touchstone picture for aspiring low-budget filmmakers”; “With little more than a pair of contact lenses and a couple of barely-adequate props, Not of This Earth conjures an interesting story of an invasion by vampires from a distant planet. […]  Not of This Earth may appear insubstantial, but Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna’s neatly constructed screenplay never drags its feet.” However, Richard Scheib at Moria doesn’t award it more tgan 2.5/5 stars, writing: “The film has something undeniably creepy to it, despite Roger Corman’s typical low-budget direction.”

Cast & crew

Quentin Tarantino dedicated his retro-grindhouse film Deathproof to screenwriter Charles Griffith, and has called him one of his favourite screenwriters. Film critic Tim Lucas wrote of him in Video Watchdog: “Irreverent, acerbic, edgy, well-read, flippant, disdainful of the hoi polloi yet also generous, transcendent. Griffith was an unpolished gem of a screenwriter, a beatnik/stoner/outsider who smuggled those crazed and (then) highly individual sensibilities into the mainstream via Corman’s commercial cinema.” Vlogger and critic Robin Bailes at Dark Corners Reviews calls Griffith “The King of Weird”. Wikipedia tells us: “He was credited with 29 movies, but is known to have written many more. He had also directed at least six films, acted in six films, was second unit director in six films, produced three films and was production manager of two films.” Corman himself called Griffith the “funniest, fastest and most inventive writer I ever worked with”.

Born in Chicago in 1930 to a family of actors and performers, Griffith cut his teeth in radio, writing for a show in which his mother and grandmother starred. He moved to Hollywood in the mid-fifties, where his friend Jonathan Haze showed Roger Corman some of his scripts. Corman liked Griffith’s style (and the fact that he had never had any of his scripts filmed made him cheap). Griffith wrote two scripts for Corman that were never filmed, before making his debut with the western Gunslinger in 1955, which featured Beverly Garland in the lead as a female sheriff. He wrote the film along with Mark Hanna, with whom he collaborated on a number of films in the late 50’s. Griffith wrote almost exclusively for Corman, and in all genres, although his off-kilter humour and wild ideas were generally served best by the SF and horror genres. One of the reasons Corman liked Griffith was that he wrote scripts as fast as Corman shot them. In an interview with Tom Weaver, Griffith says that this way of writing came natural to him, as he was used to working in radio, where the pace was very different than in the movie business: “I didn’t know you were supposed to take a long time writing movie scripts”.

As so many former Corman adepts who watched the master at work, cobbling together films with shoestring and moth balls, Griffith also got it into his head that he might make it as a director. According to Jonathan Haze in a Fangoria interview (probably with Weaver yet again), it was one of Griffith’s lawyer friends who convinced the execs at mid-tier studio Columbia that Griffith was the real talent behind Corman, and gave him a two-picture contract as writer, producer and director. Griffith did have some directing experience, as he worked as second unit director on a couple of Corman’s movies, but not much. Griffith himself says the project was doomed from the start, as Columbia thought he was putting them on, and picked two of his ideas that enabled them to send him to a remote spot in Hawaii with budgets that weren’t nearly adequate for making the films. When he realised the first movie was going to go over schedule, he called in Fred Sears to direct the other one. Both films were critical and commercial flops.

Griffith returned to Corman in 1959, and in 1960 wrote was had probably become his most lasting legacy, the horror comedy The Little Shop of Horrors, filmed in two days on leftover sets from another Corman movie on what was basically a zero budget. When Corman’s regular studio AIP in 1960 decided to start producing more prestige films in colour, and assigned him a 300,000 dollar budget for the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation House of Usher, Corman shunned his usual ragtag team of cast and crew, and hired author Richard Matheson to do the screenplay. This became a pattern – as soon as Corman received larger budgets, he hired more expensive actors and crew. Although he did return to Griffith on a number of occasions, most notably for the groundbreaking biker movie Wild Angels (1966) and the cult classic Death Race 2000 (1975). In between, Griffith was also called in to do uncredited writing on Paramount’s classic SF sexploitation comedy Barbarella (1968). He returned to directing in 1976 with the film that Ron Howard agreed to star in in exchange for his own directorial debut — Eat My Dust! Griffith directed and handful of other films in the 80’s, generally with little success. Critics have described all of them as — in a word — terrible. Griffith passed away in 2007.

Gunslinger was also the debut of second screenwriter Mark Hanna, born in Rhode Island, Florida in 1917, the son of Lebanese immigrants. In his biography, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman at Schwab’s Drugstore, Hanna writes that he started out as an actor, doing theatre at the Little Theater in Jacksonville, Florida, one of the US’ oldest and, at the time, most well-regarded community theatres. After working, among other things, as a welder, he served as an aviation metalsmith in the US navy during WWII, after which he relocated to Hollywood, where he found work as a set builder and theatre director, and also acted on stage.

There is not much information on Hanna online, and his memoirs are an almost unreadable mess of anecdotes, mainly about his childhood and every single star he brushed shoulders with in Hollywood. After leafing through it I still can’t tell how Hanna got into movie acting or screenwriting. However, he did act in small bit-parts, mostly uncredited, in a good dozen movies between 1951 and 1954, before finding more success as a screenwriter. Between 1955 and 1958 Hanna wrote half a dozen films for AIP, most of them with Griffith. However, The Amazing Colossal Man (1957, review) was co-written with director Bert I. Gordon and author/screenwriter George Worthing Yates. A commercial success, it was his second-to-last script for AIP. However, shortly after, a producer for Allied Artists commissioned Hanna to write a very unofficial sequel of sorts to that film — but about a giant woman. The result was Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, the movie which has become Hanna’s most lasting legacy. He had a small critical success with Raymie (1960), which won a prize at the Munich Children’s Film Festival. His credits become sporadic after 1961, with the decline of the classic B-movie, although he did still write a few low-budget films in the 70’s and 80’s. His last credit was the straight-to-video movie Star Portal (1997), which used the central premise of Not of This Earth. Hanna is credited for his original story.

Stocky, barrel-chested lead actor Paul Birch was an original member of the Pasadena Playhouse stock, and worked as an acting teacher. On the side of his stage career he appeared in 39 films and was a popular guest star on over 100 TV shows between the mid-forties and late sixties. His first brush with science fiction came in 1953, when he was among the first to be disintegrated in George Pal’s The War of the Worlds (review). In the mid-fifties he became part of Roger Corman’s stock company. Corman gave him leading roles in all the three SF movies he appeared in. He played the family father fighting the alien in The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955, review) and the stern former military man who runs the safehouse in Day the World Ended (1955, review). Other SF films he appeared in was Columbia’s The 27th Day (1957, review), where he had a supporting role as an Admiral, and Allied Artist’s Zsa Zsa Gabor vehicle Queen of Outer Space (1958), in which he played Professor Konrad.

Beverly Garland is by many aficionados considered the B-movie queen of the 50’s. She made her screen debut in a substantial supporting role in Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1949), as Beverly Campbell. She married actor Richard Garland in 1951, and although the marriage only lasted two years, she kept the name. She worked mainly in B-movies of every conceivable genre, but also quickly established herself as a very popular guest actress on TV shows. Her first leading role came in a 1954 B-western and she did her first of a number of films for Roger Corman with 1956’s Swamp Women, followed by Gunslinger (1956), It Conquered the World (1956), Naked Paradise (1957) and Not of This Earth (1957). Other early genre outings were Curt Siodmak’s Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956) and Roy del Ruth’s The Alligator People (1959).

In a conversation with Tom Weaver she says working for Roger Corman was hard work and as far away from glamourous as one can get. However, she says she had a good time, as she got along well with Corman, whom she “dated a little”, and liked him for his mind. She also says that the Corman’s pace suited her: “I don’t like to fool around, I like to get the work done. I found Roger to be very professional — except when it came to putting us up in a good hotel or feeding us a decent meal or paying us any money. […] I didn’t ever bitch because I could see what he was trying to do.”

Garland made her first TV splash in 1955, when she was nominated for an Emmy for a guest spot in the TV series Medic. She also turned heads in Decoy (1957-1958), playing the lead as a female police officer. Not only was her character the first female police officer in a starring role in an American TV series — the show was also, according to some sources, the first American dramatic TV show with a female protagonist. Garland’s mainstream breakthrough came with her recurring role as Barbara Harper Douglas on the CBS sitcom My Three Sons (1969-1972), and she is also remembered for playing Dotty West on the adventure comedy show Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983-1987). Of her later film roles, worthy of mention are at least the Vincent Price SF/horror mystery Twice-Told Tales (1963), the crime comedy Pretty Poison (1968) and the family drama Where the Red Ferns Grow (1974), in which she all played the female lead. She also had a small role in the disaster film Airport 1975 (1974).

Apart from the above mentioned, the she also appeared in the SF movies The Neanderthal Man (1953, review), The Rocket Man (1954) and If (2004). She also guest starred in a around 160(!) TV shows, a number of them SF, like: Science Fiction Theatre (1955-1956), The Twilight Zone (1960), The Planet of the Apes (1974), The Six Million Dollar Man (1977), and in several episodes of Lois & Clarke: The New Adventures of Superman (1995–1997) as Lois Lane’s (Teri Hatcher) mother. She was married to businessman Fillmore Crank for 39 years, who built named a hotel outside the Universal Studios the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn, today The Garland. After he passed away in 1999 she focused on managing the hotel along with her four children. She passed away in 2008.

Legend has it that Roger Corman “picked up Jonathan Haze at a gas station” when producing Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954, review) However, Haze was no stranger to showbiz. Born in Pittsburgh in 1929, he was the cousin of jazz drummer Buddy Rich, and at a young age started working stage production for Rich, eventually becoming stage manager for Josephine Baker. He worked for Corman as a as unit manager on The Fast and the Furious in 1954. Haze also started working as a bit-part player outside of AIP, as in Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955) and tbe TV seires Dragnet.

After giving him a few minor roles, Corman soon realised Haze’s on-screen talents, and started placing him in bigger parts, often as comedic relief. Jeremy in Not of This Earth was probably his biggest and most substantial part to date, and he got another starring role in Irvin Kershner’s Stakeout on Dope Street (1958). But it was in the lead as Seymour in The Little Shop of Horrors that he became a cult star. However, after 1960 he acted only sporadically, and moved back into behind-the-screen roles, eventually becoming a very successful producer of TV commercials.

Morgan Jones as the romantic lead was a bit-part and supporting actor who appeared in a good two dozen films and over 150 TV eposides in his career. He was one of the US navy men who crash landed on an island of Amazons in Untamed Women (1952, review) and had a small role as a spaceship crewman in Forbidden Planet (1956, review). In 1957 he had a small supporting role in The Giant Claw (review). He appeared in a number of SF TV shows, including The Twilight Zone, The Invaders and Knight Rider. He played one of the security officers detaining Spock and Kirk in the 1968 Star Trek episode Assignment Earth.

In one scene, Mr. Jones invites three bums to his home, in order to transport them all to his home planet. One of the bums is played by Hank Mann, born 1887 and a pioneer of silent era comedy. Mann was one of the original Keystone Kops, in fact it was Mann who came up with the concept. He starred as the police chief in the first short film featuring the Keystone Cops (as it was actually written), Hoffmeyer’s Legacy (1912), but was demoted to the rank of constable in The Bangville Police (1913), which is generally considered as the first canonical Keystone Kops movie.

Beefy character actor Lyle Latell, best known for playing Pat Patton in a string of 40’s Dick Tracy movies, was Paul Birch’s stand-in. This was the final movie of cinematographer John Mescall, who shot films like The Black Cat (1934) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935, review). Sound engineer Herman Lewis went on to become one of Hollywood’s top sound mixers, and was nominated for three Oscars and one Emmy. He worked on films like Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). Apart from a number of sci-fi B-movies, he also worked on the original Planet of the Apes trilogy and Superman (1973).

Janne Wass

Not of This Earth. 1957, USA. Directed by Roger Corman. Written by Charles Griffith & Mark Hanna. Starring: Paul Birch, Beverly Garland, Jonathan Haze, Morgan Jones, William Roerick, Dick Miller, Anna Lee Carroll, Pat Flynn, Barbara Bohrer, Roy Engel, Tamar Cooper, Harold Fong, Lyle Latell, Gail Ganley, Ralph Reed, Hank Mann. Music: Ronald Stein. Cinematography: John Mescall. Editing: Charles Gross, Jr. Set decoration: Karl Brainard. Makeup artist: Curly Batson. Sound: Philip Mitchell, Herman Lewis. Special effects: Paul Blaisdell, Bob Burns. Produced by Roger Corman for Los Altos Productions and Allied Artists.