Sardonic Tales: “Baron von Werewolf Presents: Frankenstein Against the Phantom Planet”

A few years ago, I did a thing where I picked a movie that would make a good double-feature with one of the stories in my then-newest collection, Painted Monsters. This year, for the Countdown to Halloween, I thought it might be fun to do the same thing, but with my now-newest collection, Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales.

This is a story that has an obvious cinematic counterpart, but that movie doesn’t actually exist. This story, which was written for Ross E. Lockhart’s Eternal Frankenstein anthology, owes its origins to Willis O’Brien’s failed attempts to make a King Kong vs. Frankenstein flick.

The sketches and such for that film served as the inspiration for this one’s aesthetic, though I obviously went pretty far afield with them before all was said and done. There are monsters in here from the lost spider pit sequence in the original King Kong as well as The Black Scorpion, which I believe, without evidence, borrowed some of those same models for its cave sequences.

Obviously, just about any stop-motion film can be paired with this story and you’ll get the right general idea, and for some of the kinds of sci-fi imagery that you’ll see on the Phantom Planet itself, try Harryhausen’s First Men in the Moon. If I had to pick one film to pair with “Frankenstein Against the Phantom Planet,” though–one film that actually exists, that is–I’d probably have to go with The Son of Kong.

There’s a reason I credited O’Brien’s fictional protege from the story with having worked on this delightful and too-often-overlooked sequel that came out later the same year as its predecessor, after all.