In the Flesh: Jason and the Argonauts

Human mannerisms, but no human expressions. A gaze, but no eyes, only empty pits. Animator Ray Harryhausen’s great bronze statue of the titan Talos is chilling as much for what isn’t there as for what is, an alienating collection of the familiar, the discordant, and the conspicuously absent. The high, wailing groan of the statue’s bronze body in motion is instantly disconcerting, as are his stiff, unnatural movements and the metallurgic imperfections whorled across his back and chest. When Jason (Todd Armstrong, dubbed by Tim Turner) unscrews the strange plug on the back of its heel and releases a tide of boiling pinkish-red liquid, yet another layer of uncanniness manifests. What animates this monster? We’re invited not to guess or to solve some riddle, but to recoil from obviously unknowable magic which renders the monster at once more and less human. Its death throes are revolting in the extreme as, still expressionless, it clutches at its throat as though asphyxiating before crumbling and collapsing.

Where stillness and silence are integral to the fear Harryhausen inspires with the Talos sequence, raucous, unclean noise and constant motion are the key to the harpies which torment the blind oracle Phineus (Patrick Troughton). Their blue-gray coloring and chittering vocalizations immediately invoke the plumage and calls of pigeons, which gives them the feel of pests. They’re as verminous as they are monstrous, and whenever they land and perch atop a ruined column or clinging to the side of some crumbling structure, the harpies shiver with anticipation at returning to their work as Phineus’s divine punishers. It’s easy to think of flies pausing between buzzing aerial sweeps of a living room on a hot day, or of bats that have found their way in through an open window and now alternate between paralysis and maddened flapping. They’re as believably a part of the natural world as Talos is immediately, obviously not.

Then you have the skeletons, arguably Harryhausen’s most famous and iconic sequence, which effortlessly combine the strengths of both previous monsters to create an arresting and disturbing action spectacle. The beginning is all stillness, the skeletons rising up out of the earth one by one and standing in eerie silence, shields and weaponry at ease. They begin to move in eerie lockstep, weapons coming up as one, but at the moment of contact with Jason and his men, they immediately spring into recognizably human action, not mechanical but smooth and fluid, not monolithic but strategic, working in harmony, not unison. They behave like what they are, human warriors without flesh or mortality, fearless and relentless, death blows sliding harmlessly between their ribs, rising again and again after being knocked down. If Talos is the shadow of awesome divinity and the harpies a reminder of the dirtiness and chaos of the natural world, the skeletons are Jason and his crew reflected back at themselves with life’s illusions stripped away. An eerie and unsettling triumph of special effects.