I was five when I saw this in the theatre, and it terrified me! I mean, if the skeletons are already dead, how do you stop them?
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The skeleton battle in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) stayed with me—and learning how it was made makes it even more remarkable. Ray Harryhausen brought those skeletons to life through stop-motion animation, moving the models a tiny amount between photographs. The sequence took four and a half months to animate. Some days, he produced less than one second of finished footage.
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Four and a half months to make it. About six seconds to scare me!
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But here’s my favorite part: the filmmakers wrestled with the same question I had at five. How DO you kill something that’s already dead?
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Their solution was to have Jason jump off a cliff into the sea, with the skeletons following him. Harryhausen’s explanation? “We assumed that they couldn’t swim.”
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To film the plunge, the crew actually threw seven plaster skeletons off the cliff after the stuntman jumped. They had to get it right the first time because they couldn’t retrieve them. Harryhausen later wrote that those plaster bones were still somewhere down there in the sea.
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So my five-year-old self was asking the same question as the people making the movie. Their solution was to throw the problem into the ocean!
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Do you remember these skeletons? What movie terrified you when you were little?
These Skeletons Terrified Me! Jason and the Argonauts
