showed up on the first day of shooting and looked at the script, Crabtree claimed it was not the film he had been hired to direct, as he did not do "monster" films. After a heated argument with the producers, Crabtree left the set and did not show up for several days. In the interim, Thompson himself directed the film. Fiend Without a Face was made entirely in England. Its Canadian setting was chosen because it would appeal to both American and British Commonwealth movie audiences, while still being easy to replicate using the English shooting locations. U. S. Air Force stock aviation footage was also used to establish the military base setting and to pad out the film's meager running time. The producers used primarily expatriate American and Canadian actors working in the United Kingdom, plus a few British actors dubbed by Americans. The film's visible brain creatures were created using stop-motion animation, an unusual practice for such a low-budget science fiction thriller of this era. The director of these effects sequences was Florenz Von Nordoff, while the actual stop-motion was done in Munich by Nordhoff's partner, German special effects artist K. L. Ruppel. Peter Neilson headed up the British practical effects crew. During July 1958, Fiend Without a Face first opened in the United States at the Rialto Theatre in New York City's Theater District. The film's producers placed an outdoor, front-of-the-house exhibit near the sidewalk that showcased a "living and breathing Fiend" in a steel-barred glass display case. It periodically moved its spinal cord tail, startling onlookers, and also made menacing sounds with the help of a concealed electrical device. The crowds that gathered to watch the caged Fiend grew so large that NYC police finally ordered the display case removed because it was creating a public disturbance. Five months later, Fiend Without a Face created a public uproar after its British premiere at the Ritz Theatre in Leicester Square in London's West End. The British Board of Film Censors had demanded a number of cuts before its release and finally granted the film an "X" certificate, but newspaper critics were still aghast at its horrifying special effects. Questions were actually raised in Parliament as to why British censors had allowed Fiend Without a Face to be released, notably: "What is the British film industry thinking by trying to beat Hollywood at its own game of overdosing