Film / News
Giant radioactive octopus invades Bristol Aquarium
One of a spate of 1950s ‘creature features’, It Came From Beneath the Sea is best remembered for its superb special effects by the late, great animator Ray Harryhausen, who gave us that much-imitated skeleton swordfight sequence in Jason and the Argonauts. Watch the film closely, however, and you’ll note that the giant radioactive octopus menacing the people of San Francisco is rather deficient in the tentacle department.
“Yes, it was a sextopus,” the bumper-sized cephalopod’s creator told me back in 2003, when he came to Bristol for an Animated Encounters event at the Watershed. “Two less tentacles to animate took less time, and time is money. The only way we could keep going was by making these things as cheaply as possible.”
The story swiftly passed into cinematic legend. Revisit that scene in ‘Harryhausen’s Sushi Bar’ in Pixar’s Monsters, Inc and you’ll see an octopus chef with only six tentacles.
is needed now More than ever
Now Harryhausen’s sextopus is coming to the biggest screen in Bristol at the former IMAX cinema, which is part of the Bristol Aquarium. The Aquarium has been hiring out its revived venue since the first Forbidden Worlds film festival back in May, but Cephalopods After Dark is its first in-house public event to make use of the cinema. Taking place on Friday 9 September, this offers an opportunity to see the Aquarium’s newest acquisition, a Giant Pacific octopus, followed by a screening of the monster movie in the former IMAX. Tickets are £25 each (£45 for two) and can be bought here.
Read more: Next batch of films on Bristol’s biggest screen at the former IMAX cinema revealed
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