May not exactly be horror, but this is easily one of the most important movies EVER. At the very least, no King Kong means no Jackson Lord of the Rings or Angry Video Game Nerd, so I think the Eighth Wonder of the World deserves a post.

Awesome.

- Partially inspired by the true story of a Komodo dragon stolen from its native environment and brought to New York, where it died shortly afterwards.

- Special effects god Willis O'Brien was hired to work on this film after his dream project, Creation, fell through. Many of the dinosaur puppets built for that movie were used here.

- Fray Way took on the part of Ann Darrow partly because she saw something in M.C. Cooper's enthusiasm, and partly because she was promised a role opposite the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.

- Kong's roar is a lion roar and tiger roar stuck together and played backwards.

- It is said that Carl Denhem is basically a fictionalised version of M.C. Cooper (right down to both of them willing to stand in the path of charging animals to get a good shot), while the more stern and serious Jack Driscoll was co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack.

- Two separate Kong's were used in the movie. One of them still survives and currently takes shelter in Bob Burn's basement.

- Because film composting (putting several layers of footage together, kind of like green screen) did not exist in 1933, the special effects team had to get creative whenever there were several different elements in a shot outside of the stop motion. Of course, you had the use of actors acting against a rear projection of the monsters and miniatures, but shots where the special effects themselves were the focus required something more clever than that. The most insane solution used was to take frames of the live action elements, like the cast, place them within the miniature set, and animate it along with the stop motion. In scenes where you had a bunch of different elements, like Kong's lair, which had smoke, water, two human actors, and Kong and a giant snake...

...things got crazy.

- Willis O' Brien leaked false information on how the special effects were achieved so as to maintain the illusion. As such, while we know the basic techniques used on the film, we will never know the specifics of what Brien did. Just as he intended.

- Many critics praised how realistic Kong's fur was and how it seemed to move with his breathing or stand up on edge when he was shocked. This was, of course, the hands of the animators leaving impressions on the rabbit fur used on the puppets.

- The scene where Kong attacks the elevated train was added in late in production to beef up his rampage in New York.

- Cooper and Schoedsack's love of wrestling came in handy when it came time to choreograph the fight with the T-Rex. They acted out the whole scene for the animators.

http://youtu.be/uYWSOzFMZjg

In the 2005 remake, the last third of the T-Rex fight is an exact recreation of this original fight.

- The film's first rerelease saw several scenes deemed too risque or violent for the masses were removed, such as the scene where Kong takes off Ann's clothes and sniffs them, or when he drops people to their doom or stomps on them.

- The planes in the climax of the movie are a callback to Cooper and Schoedsack's days as fighter pilots.

- The most famous deleted scene of all time has to be the "lost spider pit" sequence, in which the crew members who fell off the log into the chasm survived, only to be eaten alive by giant spiders and a variety of other nasty things. The scene, by all accounts, was apparently so creepy and disturbing to contemporary audiences that, according to M.C. Cooper, it broke the movie; several people left in the middle of the scene and the people who stayed wouldn't stop talking about it through the rest of the movie. Cooper took it upon himself to cut the scene out. It was promptly lost and became the holy grail of early sound cinema, with only a few images and puppets surviving.

Peter Jackson took it upon himself to not only essential remake the scene in his 2005 version, but, in an attempt to understand Willis O'Brien's work, led the creation of an authentic recreation of the scene, along with another deleted scene featuring a triceratops, stop motion and all. We may never know how accurate it is, but it's pretty damn cool.

- Ernest B. Schoedsack tried to get Willis O'Brien and his team nominated for an Oscar, but to no avail.

- Once they get off the freaking boat, the 2005 movie is actually pretty sweet. Can't say the same for the shoddy 1976 film, Lebowski Origins: The Dude, though it does contain one of my favorite bits of movie trivia ever.

This movie was a attempt on producer Dino De Laurentiis's part to make a movie that would outdo Jaws as the biggest movie ever, a goal he pursued with a pathological edge. Hoping to sit butts down in the theater, De Laurentiis came up with, like, the best idea ever: while the original had to rely on obvious stop motion, they were gonna build a giant ape robot. And the insane part is that nobody told him this was a logistically retarded idea. They actually built a giant ape robot with the intention of using it throughout the move. Can't say I wouldn't go see a movie that was advertised with the use of a giant ape robot.

Shockingly, the thing looked like utter crap. That piece of junk could only be used for the scene where Kong breaks out of the cage, and even then for only a brief few seconds.

Not sure if I understand the artistic decision to make Kong look like he's having a stroke.

This totally-worth-it enterprise crippled the effects for the rest of the movie; Kong ended up just being makeup artist Rick Backer (the guy behind the werewolf stuff in An American Werewolf in London and Michael Jackson's Thriller) in a meh-looking ape suit, and most of the dinosaurs and monsters were scrapped, leaving a single snake to fight Kong.

So yeah, boo to that movie, oodles of love to the original. Thank you for proving to the world what film-making could do back when every movie was essentially a play.

Kudos to Kong.