Hope, fear and the movies.

I'm not sure exactly what triggered it, but one day late last week, I became absolutely obsessed with Ray Harryhausen. I was sitting at the office, when, quite suddenly, I was filled with an all-consuming need to see Jason and the Argonauts.

This was a new one for me. There are other people?musicians, writers, filmmakers and the like, a fairly limited bunch?I get fixated on with some regularity. When I do, I will sit down and work my way through (as much as is possible) everything that person has ever done, often in chronological order. It can take a few days, a month or, in some cases, a year or more. Then I'll be done with it for another five or six years. I know they'll come up again at some point, but at least when they do, I'll have everything I need right there. They're very cathartic, these fixations.

Harryhausen had never been part of the regular rotation before. I had seen most of his movies over the years, starting when I was very, very young, and I always admired the technical accomplishment. But they never really struck me the way they did last week. It seemed to come out of nowhere, this obsession, but I knew that couldn't be the case.

Maybe I had subconsciously noted that he'd just received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I don't remember hearing about it in June, but given the number of news wires I scan every day, there's a good chance it slipped on past without my noticing.

Or maybe I can blame television commercials. There'd been all those endless spots for the new animated Sinbad, full of well-known stars, pop-culture references and jokes that adults will appreciate more than the youngsters. Or maybe it was all those commercials for the new Hulk movie, in which Lou Ferrigno is replaced by a collection of zeros and ones. CGI effects in general have been bugging me for a long time now, and those in The Hulk seem particularly awful.

Time was, when you saw a huge crowd scene in a movie, or a guy jump on a moving train, or a car slam into a truck, roll over and burst into flames, you were seeing a filmed record of these things actually happening. There were thousands of extras present, and a stunt man really did roll that car. No more. Now you have a team of 50 or 60 animators rolling that car and bursting it into flames. Everything's so smooth and clean and sterile. People say you can't tell the difference but? Well, yes you can. Of course, the day will come when you can't, and that's part of the problem.

"If you're dealing in fantasy," Harryhausen once said, "you can't make things too real."

Granted, he wasn't blowing up cars (though he did slam a flying saucer into the Washington Monument). Mostly he was filling classically themed fantasy films with memorable stop-motion monsters, most of them of the "giant" variety.

Harryhausen's monsters, even when their movements were a little jerky, were always absolutely real. And it went far beyond the fact that they were three-dimensional models created by Harryhausen. They had believable, often sympathetic personalities. Even the giant walking statue in Jason and the Argonauts had emotion, and you believed it.

Compared with what we've got today, realizing that all those creatures were built, lit, animated and filmed one frame at a time by a single man working alone in his studio?that it was real, painstaking human effort to get those monsters to come to life?it's something I greatly admire.

It's telling, I think, that people rarely remember the directors who were behind the films that contained Harryhausen's effects. To most of us, they're just "Harryhausen pictures"?and that's all you need to know. From The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms to Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, to the Sinbad pictures to Clash of the Titans. Rarely (except for that last one, and that Raquel Welch picture) were any big stars involved, and rarely was the dialogue all that memorable. But once you've seen them, you always remember.

Between 1949's Mighty Joe Young to Clash of the Titans in 1981, Harryhausen only worked on 16 or 17 movies, which made my fixation much easier to deal with. I had a couple of them around the apartment already, so I stopped by the video bootleggers to fill in some of the gaps.

Granted, not all these films are masterpieces. Few of them are. First Men in the Moon's a real snooze, and the Residents, I realized, were able to condense Earth vs. the Flying Saucers from 90 minutes to 90 seconds without losing a thing. They all had their charms, though. And monsters?lots and lots of monsters. Dinosaurs, dragons, aliens, cyclopses, skeletons, medusas, saber-toothed tigers, walking statues, Krakons, little people, two-headed birds and dogs, hydrae, six-legged octopi?every five or ten minutes, there was another one.

Along with watching the pictures one after another, I did some biographical research (these fixations of mine can get a bit out of hand sometimes.) The more I read, the more it seemed inevitable that I would get around to being connected to Harryhausen some day.

The one story Harryhausen slips into every interview concerns going to see King Kong with his aunt when he was a young boy. He left the theater, he says, a different person. He went home, and shortly thereafter, started making his own stop-motion dinosaur pictures.

Likewise, not only did my dad ensure that King Kong (one of his favorites) had a profound influence on my early development, I even went on to make a few stop-motion pictures myself. Three, to be exact, with my parents' wind-up 8mm camera. They weren't very good, I had no idea what I was doing, and so, as a result, everything in the animated sequences just goes whooshing by on the screen.

I don't know why I stopped after those three, but it's probably for the best.

If King Kong was one of my dad's favorite films, his all-time favorite was The Three Worlds of Gulliver?another Harryhausen film. Although I saw it in bits and pieces on the television while growing up, I never saw the whole thing until three years ago, when I finally found a copy for my dad's birthday. He made me sit downstairs with him and watch it.

And though the connection here is a tangential one, I even narrated a recent stop-motion film based on Poe's "Annabel Lee", which was directed by George Higham. Although he more readily cites Jan Svankmajer as an artistic influence (and, like Svankmajer, his film was much darker and more disturbing than Harryhausen's), he worked in much the same way Harryhausen did?designing, building and filming everything by himself.

All these things add up. It only makes sense that, yeah, I would swing around to The Valley of the Gwanji one of these days, and recognize it as a criminally neglected masterpiece. And now, after about a week, I've about had enough of Harryhausen. I've seen about all that I can see, and I think I've got him purged from my system. For a while, at least.

Jesus, but sometimes I think my life is a complete waste.