The Stan Winston School of Character Arts recently posted this great, but all-too-brief video about the history of monster suit performance featuring Tom Woodruff, Jr., a veteran creature maker and suit performer who has worked on dozens of Hollywood movies. This video is actually an excerpt from a much longer video about monster suit performance available through the Stan Winston School’s fantastic paid subscription service (you can watch the full video by signing up for a free trial).
The 1948 movie Tom mentions, Unknown Island, is actually in the public domain and available to watch online via the Internet Archive (it’s also probably available on YouTube and other video streaming sites). Just as Tom points out, it features a lot of crude, but impressive-for-their-day monster effects and it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of the genre, or just want to see some some classic movie monster magic.