Slowly posing the “Alligator” model. While watching “Clash of the Titans” (1981) last night for the first time in decades I noticed the obvious resemblance. Medusa’s glorious performance under the temple on the “Island of the dead” left me sleepless as a kid.  The torchlight, the acid bath, the hissing, smoking arrows. I stood gawking at Harryhausen’s stop-motion puppet a few years back in the London Film Museum: the Medusa scene was playing on loop on a big screen in a dark room. People tend to look back with rose-tinted glasses, but there’s something to the blending of techniques that lends a scene like that an undeniably eerie verisimilitude.