Call them the Malevolent Seven: the little band of skeletons armed with sword, spears, and shields, who, born from Hydra’s teeth scattered on the ground by Aeëtes, the villainous king of Colchis, rise from the earth in “Jason and the Argonauts,” to attack the appalled Greek hero (Todd Armstrong) and two of his men. Stills and excerpts from the terrifying sequence are all over the Internet today — there is no more fitting tribute to the memory of its creator, Ray Harryhausen, who has died at the age of 92 in London.
I was an infant when – unattended! – I saw “Jason and the Argonauts,” on its first British run, at the Ritz, an art-deco cinema in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, in 1963. The English Channel, a few hundred yards away, never gleamed as bluely as the Mediterranean on which Jason’s Argo sailed, but the small, grey coastal town inevitably became entwined with my memories of Harryhausen’s nightmarish fantasy. The Ritz has long since been demolished, but the evil mythological platoon still haunts the spot.
It wasn’t just the skeletons’ grins (or grimaces) that left their mark, but the way they moved in synchronized formation, their rhythmic jerkiness contributing to their menace. Harryhausen noted in his autobiography that, in the Jason legend, “rotting corpses” assailed Jason and his comrades, but it was decided to replace them with skeletons in case the film was awarded a certificate preventing children from seeing it. (Officially, they were made up of Spartoí, sown men, whom Aeëtes forced Jason to plant.)
One of Harryhausen’s skeleton swordsman had been seen before, attacking the hero of “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad” (1957), and he must have felt the workout was successful. He took four-and-a-half months to animate the “Sinbad” survivor and his six colleagues for “Jason.”
“Each of the model skeletons was about eight to 10 inches high, and six of the seven were made for the sequence,” the animator recorded in “Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life” (2003, Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton). “The remaining one was a veteran from ‘The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,’ slightly repainted to match the new members of the family. When all the skeletons have manifested themselves to Jason and his men, they are commanded by Aeëtes to ‘Kill, kill, kill them all,’ and we hear an unearthly scream.
“What follows is a sequence of which I am very proud. I had three men fighting seven skeletons, and each skeleton had five appendages to move in each separate frame of film. This meant at least 35 animation movements, each synchronized to the actors’ movements. Some days I was producing less than one second of screen time.”
It wasn’t just the skeletons that made “Jason and the Argonauts” so frightening. When the Argonauts Hercules and Hylas rob the Cretan treasure chamber of the Gods, they disturb the giant bronze statue, Talos, its guardian, who crouches on a plinth above the vault. It’s the way he slowly swivels his head to look at these human ants that puts him in the same league of horror as the Golem, Nosferatu, and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s Monster. It was how Harryhausen moved his creations as much as the creations themselves that makes them trouble the small hours of the night.
Watch the skeleton fight from “Jason and the Argonauts”: