EDITOR’S NOTE: How to Make a Monster was on Chiller Theater on Saturday. March 13 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, December 25, 1965 at 11:20 p.m.

Directed by Herbert L. Strock and written by Herman Cohen, this is a sequel — sort of! — to both I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.

Pete Dumond (Robert H. Harris), the monster maker at American International Studios, has lost his job because monsters are out and rock and roll movies are in. To get revenge, he transforms young actors Tony Mantell (Gary Conway) into Teenage Frankenstein and Larry Drake (Gary Clarke) into the Teenage Werewolf, while becoming a caveman, all using special makeup that controls minds.

At the end of the movie, the monster museum is burnhed down. Many of Pete’s “children” were props originally created by Paul Blaisdell for The Cat Girl, It Conquered the World, Invasion of the Saucer Men and Attack of the Puppet People, all special effects that he allowed to be destroyed. The She-Creature mask was almost burned but survived the scene! Not so lucky was the cat mask, as Blaisdell had specifically asked AIP not to set it on fire. They didn’t listen and didn’t even film it being burned.

Ed Wood’s widow Kathy that this idea was stolen from him by AIP producer Sam Arkoff. In Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., she said, “Eddie condemned Arkoff, he really hated him. Eddie gave them a script for approval, and they changed the characters a little bit around. Eddie had written it for Lugosi. It was about this old horror actor who couldn’t get work any more, so he took his vengeance out on the studio.”

This has an early mention of Horrors of the Black Museum and John Ashley is a singer!

You can watch this on Tubi.