Val Lewton (May 7, 1904 – March 14, 1951) was an American film producer and screenwriter, best known for a string of low-budget horror films he produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940s.

Lewton was born Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon (Russian: Владимир Иванович Левентон, Ukrainian: Володимир Іванович Левентон) in Yalta, Imperial Russia (now in Ukraine), in 1904. He was of Jewish descent, the son of moneylender Max Hofschneider and Nina Leventon, a pharmacist's daughter. The family converted to Christianity. He was nephew of actress Alla Nazimova.

His mother left his father and moved to Berlin, taking her children with her. In 1909, they emigrated to the United States, where his name was changed to Val Lewton. He was raised in suburban Port Chester, New York.

He studied journalism at Columbia University and authored eighteen works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Lewton once lost his job as a reporter for the Darien-Stamford Review after it was discovered that a story he wrote about a truckload of kosher chickens dying in a New York heat wave was a total fabrication.

Robert Earl Wise (September 10, 1914 – September 14, 2005) was an American film director, producer and editor. He twice won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture, for West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). He was also nominated for Best Film Editing for Citizen Kane (1941) and Best Picture for The Sand Pebbles (1966).

Among his other films are The Body Snatcher; Born to Kill; The Set-Up; The Day the Earth Stood Still; Destination Gobi; Run Silent, Run Deep; I Want to Live!; The Haunting; The Andromeda Strain; The Hindenburg; and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Wise was the president of the Directors Guild of America from 1971 to 1975 and later became the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Often contrasted with 'auteur' directors such as Stanley Kubrick who tended to bring a distinctive directorial "look" to a particular genre, Wise is famously viewed to have allowed his (sometimes studio assigned) story to dictate style. Later critics such as Martin Scorsese expanded that characterization, insisting that despite Wise's notorious workaday concentration on stylistic perfection within the confines of genre and budget, his choice of subject matter and approach still functioned to identify Wise as an artist and not merely an artisan. Through whatever means, Wise's approach brought him critical success as a director in many different traditional film genres: horror, noir, western, war, science fiction, musical and drama, with many repeat successes within each genre. Wise's tendency towards professionalism led to a degree of preparedness which, though nominally motivated by studio budget constraints, nevertheless advanced the moviemaking art, with many Academy Award-winning films the result. Robert Wise received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1998.

William Henry Pratt (23 November 1887 – 2 February 1969), better known by his stage name Boris Karloff, was an English actor.

Karloff is best remembered for his roles in horror films and his portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939). His popularity following Frankenstein was such that for a brief time he was billed simply as "Karloff" or "Karloff the Uncanny." His best-known non-horror role is as the Grinch, as well as the narrator, in the animated television special of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966).

Karloff was born at 36 Forest Hill Road, Honor Oak, London, England, where a blue plaque can now be seen. His parents were Edward John Pratt, Jr. and Eliza Sarah Millard. His paternal grandparents were Edward John Pratt, an Anglo-Indian,^{[citation needed]} and Eliza Julia (Edwards) Pratt, a sister of Anna Leonowens (whose tales about life in the royal court of Siam [now Thailand] were the basis of the musical The King and I). The two sisters were also of Anglo-Indian heritage.

Lawrence Tierney (March 15, 1919 – February 26, 2002) was an American actor, known for his many screen portrayals of mobsters and hardened criminals, which mirrored his own frequent brushes with the law.

Commenting on the DVD release of a Tierney film in 2005, a New York Times critic observed, "The hulking Tierney was not so much an actor as a frightening force of nature."

Tierney was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Mary and Lawrence Tierney, an Irish-American policeman. Tierney was a star athlete at Boys High School in Brooklyn, where he won awards for track and field and was a member of Omega Gamma Delta fraternity. He earned an athletic scholarship to Manhattan College, but quit after two years to work as a laborer on the New York Aqueduct. He traveled around the country, bouncing from job to job, and worked as catalogue model for Sears Roebuck & Co. An acting coach suggested that he try the stage, and Tierney joined the Black Friars theatre group and later the American-Irish Theatre. He was spotted there by an RKO talent scout and given a film contract in 1943.

Rondo Hatton (April 22, 1894 – February 2, 1946) was an American actor who had a brief, but prolific career playing thuggish bit parts in many Hollywood B-movies. He was known for his brutish facial features which were the result of acromegaly, a disorder of the pituitary gland.

Hatton was born Rondo K. Hatton in Hagerstown, Maryland to Stewart Price and Emily Zarring Hatton, a pair of Missouri-born teachers. The Hatton family moved several times during Rondo's youth, to Hickory, North Carolina, and to Charles Town, West Virginia, and at last to Tampa, Florida, where family members owned a business. Following his father's death, Hatton, his mother, and his younger brother Stewart moved in with his maternal grandmother in Tampa. There he obtained work as a sportswriter for the local newspaper. He worked as a journalist until after World War I when the symptoms of acromegaly developed.

Acromegaly distorted the shape of Hatton's head, face, and extremities in a gradual but consistent process. Hatton, who reportedly had been voted the handsomest boy in his class at Hillsborough High School, eventually became severely disfigured by the disease. Because the symptoms developed in adulthood (as is common with the disorder), the disfigurement was incorrectly attributed later by film studio publicity departments to his exposure to a German mustard gas attack during service in World War I. Whether Hatton actually served in combat is unclear, though it has been reported that he served on the Mexican border and in France.