It’s not his birthday, nor is it the anniversary of his death… but I found myself thinking of Rondo Hatton today. If the name doesn’t ring any bells, maybe the face will…

Memorable, isn’t it? The casting office at Universal Studios certainly thought so when they hired Hatton to be their monster without make-up in a number of creepy features in the late 1940s.

Hatton was born on April 22, 1894, to a pair of Hagerstown, Maryland school teachers. Originally from Missouri, the Hatton family bounced around from place to place before settling in Tampa, Florida. The young Rondo K. Hatton was a normal appearing (and some have said even handsome) youth. Proficient in sports at Hillsborough High School, he worked as a sportswriter at a local newspaper until called for duty in World War I. It was while in combat in France that Hatton was (the story goes) exposed to nerve gasses that aggravated a latent tendency toward acromegly, a chronic metabolic disorder occurring in 6 out of every 100,000 adults, causing overproduction of growth hormones, leading to outsized tissues and bones. (There is some dispute among film historians as to whether the mustard gas caused Hatton’s acromegaly or even if he served overseas at all.) Hatton grew deformed gradually and was still able to function as a journalist into his late 30s. While covering filming of Hell’s Harbor (1930) for The Tampa Tribune, Hatton was spotted by film director Henry King and given a bit part. By 1936, Hatton was relocated to Hollywood, where his one-of-a-kind headshot made the rounds.

Eagle-eyed film buffs should have no problem picking Rondo Hatton out of the mise en scene of a number of classic Hollywood films, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Chad Hannah (1940), Tales of Manhattan (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and The Lodger (1944). When Universal cast Hatton as the spine-snapping “Creeper” in The Pearl of Death (1944), sixth in the studio’s popular series of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Hatton had found a Hollywood home. At Universal City, Hatton made memorable appearances in The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1945), was the Creeper again in House of Horrors (1946) and The Brute Man (1946) but any hope that Hatton would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Karloff, Lugosi or Chaney, Jr. were dashed by the sea change in Hollywood filmmaking. The Golden Age of classic movie monsters was over and Universal, having rechristened itself Universal-International, had pulled the plug on their once-thriving B-unit. The Brute Man was sold off to the Poverty Row outfit PRC (Producer’s Releasing Corporation). None of the films in which Hatton appeared in 1946 did any kind of business and all have been the subject of critical disdain. (Spider Woman star Gale Sondegaard was a vocal detractor of the film, whose legend grew more on the strength of its infinitely quotable title than its particular charms.) Perhaps it’s for the best that Hatton didn’t live to see his shot at stardom go so far afield.

Rondo Hatton died of a heart attack in Beverly Hills on February 2, 1946, at the age of 51. Through the kindness of the American Legion, Hatton’s body was shipped to Tampa for burial and there he rests to this day, in a tiny plot just feet from bustling Kennedy Boulevard. Though he lived a short time, the memory of Rondo Hatton lives through the glorification of his image on tee shirts, in movies, comic books and graphic novels (writer Josh Alan Friedman and his illustrator brother Drew told an abridged version of the Rondo Hatton Story in Warts and All) and in a line of horror, fantasy & science fiction awards…The Rondos. In 1991, I made a pilgrimage to Hatton’s grave and spent a few minutes paying silent tribute to the monster without makeup… having no inkling that twelve years later I would be a Rondo Award-nominated writer. Such is life.

The Official Rondo Classic Horror Award busts, sculpted by Kerry Gammill.