IT CAME FROM HOLLYWOOD.

The DVD of "Jurassic Park III" comes with an F/X voice-over, in which the special-effects creators talk about their work. If you listen during the first gory sequence in the film, when the Spinosaurus jumps out of the jungle and, shockingly, devours a man in one bite, you will hear Stan Winston's voice--a gentle, sweet-sounding voice--exclaiming with delight, "I love it when dinos eat people!" He sounds almost moved. Dinosaurs provide Winston with an opportunity to evoke the ancient, hardwired horror of being eaten alive, as well as with a chance to display the disgusting remains of humans after the beasts have finished with them. For a creature-maker, it doesn't get much better than that.

Now fifty-seven, Winston has, during thirty-five years in the movie business, almost single-handedly elevated the craft of creature-making from the somewhat comical man-in-a-rubber-suit monsters of the nineteen-fifties and sixties to animatronics--electronically animated, part-robot, part-puppet creatures that have terrified millions of moviegoers. He won his first Oscar for James Cameron's 1986 film "Aliens," of which the most spectacular creature was the Alien Queen--a fourteen-foot-high, crustacean-necked monster with a shiny cockroach carapace, yellow acid for blood, and two jaws full of mucus-smeared, razor-sharp teeth. (Before becoming a creature-maker, Winston studied to be a dentist.) He won his second and third Oscars for Cameron's second "Terminator" movie (1991), for makeup and visual effects, and his fourth for Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" (1993), for which Winston created, among other effects, robotic velociraptors and a forty-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex, with hydraulically driven limbs and radio-controlled dilating eyes. His dinosaurs got better with each sequel, even if the movies didn't.

Winston's success has coincided with the rise of computer graphics, or CG--a technology that allows F/X artists to make monsters entirely out of pixels, greatly expanding the range of possibilities. Yet CG monsters rarely seem as scary as Winston's mechanical monsters, in large part because they aren't filmed in live-action sequences with the actors but are added to the film during postproduction. "When you come to the set," Steven Spielberg told me, "and there's a thirty-six-foot-high creature there, waiting to perform with the actors, it's inspiring--to all of us. If you make creatures only on the computer, it takes the fun out of it."

Nothing about Stan Winston seems monstrous. White-haired and bearded, he is slight of build, and has a soothing way of talking about creating pain and fear which probably would have served him well as a dentist. Directors like to work with him, Cameron says, because "Stan has never lost the love of putting on a show; he'll get all excited, saying, 'This is going to scare the crap out of people,' and he infects you with his enthusiasm." When I asked Winston about this one day--how can a guy who has scared so many people be so likable?--he said, "I hope I'm likable as a human being, but I do love to scare people. People like being scared. I'll tell you something, it's the people who don't go to scary movies who have nightmares. What I do is I allow them to get their fears out in the movie theatre so they don't have to be scared at home. "

Stan Winston Studio--a full-service special-effects shop, of which Winston is both the owner and the head artist--is a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot industrial space in the San Fernando Valley. In addition to making creatures for movies and television (these include appealing characters, like the duck in the Aflac insurance commercial, with its Chaplinesque walk, and the grumpy old frogs created for a series of Budweiser commercials), Winston produces a line of monster toys, and is in the process of creating a new Horror Channel, featuring twenty-four-hour horror on cable. Winston and his wife of thirty-four years, Karen, live in Malibu, and he has his choice of a Hummer, two Harleys, a Ferrari, or a turbo-charged Porsche to make the drive to work.

The large workspace on the ground floor is full of the smells of creature-making--silicon, urethane, latex, glue. Scattered on worktables are arms and legs, some human, some animal. People are drawing, painting, sculpting, engineering, ...