Art: "The Undead," 1957
Reynold Brown was a successful illustrator whose images appeared in magazines like "Popular Science," "Argosy" and many others in between lush paintings for paperback book covers. It was as a teacher at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena Brown met an art director at Universal Pictures and began an entirely new career.
Brown created stunning, colorful artwork for a slew of films, many of which were genre entries like 1960's "The Time Machine," 1957's "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," 1955's "Tarantula," "Ben-Hur," "The Alamo," "Spartacus," "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" and many, many more."The Undead" itself is entirely forgettable, churned out in just six days by professional cheapskate Roger Corman and shot almost entirely in a converted supermarket. Tellingly, Corman and the studio for which he did much of his directorial work, American International Pictures, had the practice of creating lurid posters first, floating it by a gaggle of overexcited teens at the local mall and deciding to fund it or kill it based on their reactions.
You should browse the beautiful gallery of Reynold Brown's work over at the what is inarguably the best blog in the whole entire world, Monster Brains, a superbly curated repository of monster artwork from all sorts of artists across all sorts of mediums. It is described as "a never-ending celebration of monsters" by site overlord Aaron Alfrey, whose superhuman ability to locate and post high-quality images of everything from VHS box art and pulp comics of every generation to gorgeous publicity stills from 1931's "Frankenstein" to bizarre Russian coloring books is surely the by-product of immense doses of radiation.
