37 Views of Percy Helton

Percy Helton was a short, chubby, balding, hunchbacked actor with a raspy voice and an air of sinister decay. I have referred to him as the “orangotoad” and the “sex goblin” based on his work in Wicked Woman (1953) but really, there is no shortage of evocative descriptors for such a strange and unsettling specimen of humanity. Often “inexplicably cast as human beings,” as my friend Randy Cook put it, Helton truly excelled when playing creepy types who got you wondering, like the sleazy coroner in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), who you just know gets up to inappropriate convivialities with his deceased clientele the moment the camera looks away.

Here are some things you can call Percy next time he pops up. There are exactly thirty-seven of them: count ‘em and see!

The fanged nerf ball

Cushion with dentures

Putty homunculus

Cherub with radiation sickness

Aged embryo

Jiminy Rictus

Stray fragment of Orly Cathedral

A sandwich made from a bap and a length of tongue

A buttock with stab-wounds

Paul Williams’ wicked grandfather

The skin balloon

A chubby skull

Lipless chimp

Flayed opossum

Man-gerbil telepod mishap

Uncle Unctious

Bulbous insinuator

A sack of rats in jelly

The hamphibian

Creepy dweeb foetus

Skulking pupa

Puffy scarabus

The incarnate gloat

Rasping jackanapes

Crapulent whiner

The puppet nobody wanted to put their hand in

The dollop

Old wormy-hump

The crouching fumbler

The clingy dribbler

The nameless guzzler

The grubbly nuzzler

Squidgy hummock

Throaty fleshapoid

The seedy wheedler

The soiled bulge

Toilet plop embodiment

The greasy dumpling

The clammy pudding

Prematurely shelled crustacean

A dying child’s unfinished drawing of Charles Coburn

by David Cairns