Though certainly terrifying to audiences, the aliens featured in the 1955 film This Island Earth weren’t as welcome as one might have thought. The film’s screenwriter, Franklin Coen, expressed trepidation about including the bulbous and veiny-headed extraterrestrials seen in the climax of the film.

“I thought the intrusion of such a beast would cheapen the whole project, which, of course, by this time was my baby,” said Coen, according to Universal Terrors by Tom Weaver, David Schecter, and Robert J. Kiss.

However, Coen’s grievances were overruled by producer William Alland, and once the writer saw the finished product, he had to admit that these aliens made formidable antagonists.

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“But Bill [Alland] loved his monsters - he had made his reputation with them - and the creature was already conceived and being built,” said Coen. “Deeply proud of it, Bill kept bringing me to the lab to show it off and try to convince me. Well, I had to admit the damn thing was intimidating, if not, within its own genre, superb. I gave in; I had no choice.”

The film’s star, Jeff Morrow, shared Coen’s dislike of the aliens, though his didn’t dissipate during production.

“They didn’t have the realism that the rest of the picture did,” said Morrow. “You could tell immediately that this was just a stuntman in a bug uniform, and that took away from the picture. If they had perhaps shown the monsters only in close-up, if they had kept the camera up around their heads, it might have had more impact, but the long shots spoiled the moment. For the small kids it was all right, but This Island Earth was in some ways a rather thoughtful story, and I felt it was just too bad that they had to have those in there.”