Dean Parkin -- also sometimes credited as Duncan Parkin -- occupies an odd, unique niche in American horror cinema. A grip-turned-stuntman, Parkin earned his first screen credit in 1955 by playing the title-role in Bert I. Gordon's The Cyclops. This was not an easy shoot for the then-25 year-old Parkin, but it was a time when movie jobs were difficult to come by and advancement out of total anonymity even rarer, and it probably looked promising.
Parkin portrayed the title creature, a one-eyed, 25-foot-tall giant who captures a party of explorers in a cave. His makeup, created by Jack Young, was especially hideous, even for a horror movie: one eye was covered by a scarred flap of flesh, while the other seemed to bulge outward; with process photography making him look five times normal size, the effect was memorable. His entrance scene, appearing suddenly from behind a huge rock, still startles viewers 50 years later, and his portrayal of the creature did bring out some pathos to balance his monstrous presence. Parkin, however, was not happy with his experience working on The Cyclops. In an interview in the 1990s with Paul Parla and Charles P. Mitchell, he revealed that the handler of the boa constrictor in one scene, in which the cyclops battles with a giant snake, lost control of the reptile and the actor was nearly killed. There were also some lighter moments; according to an interview with makeup designer Young, he and Parkin evidently did have fun putting the cyclops makeup on the actor and then driving around Los Angeles in a convertible with the top down, scaring onlookers (especially women) with Parkin's horrific appearance. Whatever his problems at the time of the shoot, in 1955, he did come back for more work with Gordon. When Glenn Langan refused to do the sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man, Parkin was cast in Langan's former role, and Young was prevailed upon to design even more horrifying makeup along similar lines, for the resulting film War of the Colossal Beast. And Parkin's entrance in that film was even more striking than his first scene in The Cyclops had been, and he managed to get one word of actual dialogue in that picture, plus a memorable death scene. Parkin never had another screen credit, apart from serving as a stagehand on Gordon's 1957 monster movie The Beginning of the End. He apparently felt that his two performances and the films they were a part of had been wasted. He has been notably reclusive across the decades, only allowing one interview in the 1990s.
