Roger Dicken, VFX Artist on ‘Alien’ and ‘When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth,’ Dies at 84

Roger Dicken, the Oscar-nominated British special effects artist, sculptor and model maker known for his work on Alien and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, has died. He was 84.

Dicken died Feb. 18 at his home in North Wales, Mick Cooper, a friend of more than five decades, told The Hollywood Reporter.

On his first film, Dicken was a member of the effects team for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); later, he created and operated the dinosaur puppets seen in The Land That Time Forgot (1974).

Dicken sculpted several prehistoric creatures — plus a pair of full-sized pterodactyl feet — for the stop-motion adventure tale When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), written and directed by Val Guest for Hammer Films. He and American animator Jim Danforth shared the Oscar nomination for visual effects.

For Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Dicken constructed and controlled the terrifying chest-bursting creature that kills Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt) in the film’s most iconic scene.

“I got underneath the set with my activated hand-operated alien, and it was this, of course, that ended up appearing revoltingly through his body and pausing momentarily to twitch and breath, etc., before zipping off the table,” Dicken recalled in a 1992 interview.

“Two assistants, holding simple squeeze bubbles fixed to plastic tubes, made the small sacs in the body pulsate, etc. The monster’s exit was accomplished by pulling me along under the table, laying on a trolley with my arm holding the puppet, working it through a slot as it knocked off strategically placed utensils in the process of disappearing.”

Five people shared the visual effects Oscar for their work on the film; Dicken was not one of them.

Born on April 15, 1939, in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, Roger Maxwell Dicken said he loved the “old gorilla suits in the 1940s films. I always wanted to make one of these but only got as far as creating an overhead ape mask with fur and papier-maché with which I scared the life out of a couple of local girls returning home from a dance late at night.”

He and friends came up with a comedy/horror routine for clubs in which he played Doctor Lugani, a master of “cemeteries” who introduces such characters as The Hunchback, Dracula and The Wolf Man.

“I would do a quick change toward the end and play the Frankenstein monster, which went down very well in those days, carrying off a girl planted in the audience to finish off the show,” he recalled.

A meeting with VFX legend Ray Harryhausen inspired him to try the movies, and he landed jobs with the BBC and made models for the Thunderbirds TV show before going freelance to join the team on 2001.

Dicken then created the moth monster for The Blood Beast Terror (1968), starring Peter Cushing, and worked on Witchfinder General (1968), starring Vincent Price.

He also came up with bats for Scars of Dracula (1970) and octopuses for Warlords of the Deep (1978) and wrapped his career with White Dog (1982) and The Hunger (1983).

Survivors include his wife, Wendy.