ALMOST HUMAN
/ SHOCK WAVES
MOVIE ARTICLE

My Books and Movies!

E.C. McMullen Jr.
RUMOR

RUMOR: People are dying to know the truth

PERPETUAL
BULLET

"'Some People' ... may be the standout story in the book."
- John Grant, Infinityplus

E.C. McMullen Jr.
WILLOW BLUE

"'Willow Blue' will burrow under your skin and stay there long after you've put the book down."
- Jeffrey Reddick, Creator of
FINAL DESTINATION

IN OTHER BOOKS
E.C. McMullen Jr.'s
short story
CEDO LOOKED LIKE PEOPLE
in the anthology
FEAR THE REAPER

"This Ray Bradbury-esque is one of the most memorable and one of the more original stories I've read in a long time."
- Steve Isaak,
Goodreads

HORROR 201:
The Silver Scream

Filmmaker's Guidebook
featuring
RAY BRADBURY,
JOHN CARPENTER,
WES CRAVEN,
TOM HOLLAND,
E.C. McMULLEN Jr.,
GEORGE A. ROMERO,
and many more.

And In
CINEMA
E.C. McMullen Jr.
Head Production Designer

MINE GAMES
(Starring:
JOSEPH CROSS,
BRIANA EVIGAN,
ALEX MERAZ,
ETHAN PECK)

Dept. head
Special Effects Make-Up
(SFX MUA)

A SIERRA NEVADA
GUNFIGHT
(MICHAEL MADSEN & JOHN SAVAGE).

Production Designer

UNIVERSAL DEAD
(DOUG JONES,
D.B. SWEENEY,
GARY GRAHAM)

ALMOST HUMAN

Once they were Almost Human, just as you and I are Almost Human...!

Hey! What does this movie and Star Wars have in common? They were both released in 1977! You know what else? They both starred Peter Cushing!

1977 was Peter's year for playing bad guys and between the two movies, Peter thought that this one was going to be his hit.

Seriously?

Way serious! Peter was on the set, looking around at George Lucaseses's Death Star spaceship interior. There was a "control bank" rigged up with Christmas Tree lights and common electrical switches that looked for all the world like Christmas Tree lights and common electrical switches.

Peter made a lot of low budget movies in his day and was going to make more. But even he was concerned by a set that looked so... bereft! Most of it was simply large black drapes.

Mentioning it to George Lucas, he basically got the answer, "Hey! Don't worry aboot it, Buddy! It's all movie magic, fwend! That stuff will be outta focus and the audience won't care anyway!"

Imagine yourself in Peter Cushing's shoes. You've performed in over 100 feature films in nearly 40 years alone (to say nothing of all of your stage theater work) and this inexperienced snot-nosed whelp presumes to tell you how movies are made?

So yeah, Peter played it with sinister authoritative coldness because that's how he read his part and no matter how bad the picture may turn out to be, nobody could ever blame him for its failure.

That's why Peter's Gran Moff Tarkin is so powerful that nobody could replace him when it came time to reprise his role for sequels and why Disney tried to get away with a crappy cgi Cushing.

So only going by what he saw on the set in Production Design and the Director's ability, Cushing felt that ALMOST HUMAN (aka SHOCKWAVES in the U.S.A.), and not Star Wars was the movie that was going to kill it at the box office in 1977.

What's more, ALMOST HUMAN wasn't the first NAZI Zombie movie, but it was popular enough to begin the Mad Science NAZI subset of zombie movies.

Read our review of SHOCK WAVES.