Trivia / The Creeping Terror

• Completely Different Title:
  • Iran: Reptile Monster
  • Russia: Lurking Horror
• Corpsing: Doctor Bradford is laughing like crazy as the monster attempts to eat him.
• Directed by Cast Member: Writer/director Art Nelson played Nelson under the pseudonym Vic Savage, which may explain why he decides to make out with a pretty actress (Shannon O'Neil) for no reason in front of a co-worker.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Or, Almost Dying For Your Art. The people in the monster costume suffered heat exhaustion and in some cases, a stroke.
• Money, Dear Boy: This movie's only reason for existing. Movie director Arthur Nelson (Vic Savage) was a known Con Man who funded the film by promising investors small parts in the movie. Facing several lawsuits as a result, Nelson pocketed the money and fled California.
• Troubled Production: The film was an auteur project of the mysterious "Vic Savage," whose real identity is still unknown. Alan Silliphant, brother of the famous writer Stirling, wrote the original story treatment but found Savage not receptive at all to his ideas (mostly to make a deliberately campy romp rather than a serious alien invasion film), and quit from concern for damaging his brother's career. The crew was unable to secure Lake Tahoe for filming as intended, and had to make do with the far less scenic Spahn Ranch (soon to be notorious as the home of the Charles Manson Family). Savage completely stiffed the creator of the original alien costume, so he stole it a day before filming was set to start, forcing them to plow ahead with a hastily constructed pantomime-level costume often derided as looking like a shag rug, with its several operators boiling in the California heat. For unclear reasons, almost the entire soundtrack was lost (various sources state that it was so poor as to be unusable, that the reels got knocked into a lake, and more), and no money was left to redub it, so radio news reader Larry Burrell was brought on to awkwardly narrate the whole thing, for that scenes were clearly intended to have actual dialogue. Shortly before the film's release, Savage was hit with a fraud lawsuit and vanished never to be seen again, though in 2009 his wife wrote a book about the production using aliases, claiming that he died of liver failure in 1975, at age 41.
• Working Title: The Crawling Monster.

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