Makeup Effects Archive: Van Helsing (2004)

By the time he directed Van Helsing, Stephen Sommers already had three VFX-heavy creature features under his belt; Deep Rising, The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. At first Sommers was reluctant to make yet another blockbuster, as he said to Fangoria;

'After my previous movies, my impetus was to write something very small, two people talking on the beach. I didn't want to do any more special effects, no action. I thought, 'I'm driving myself to an early grave, these movies are way too hard, I don't want to do this anymore'.'

However, Sommers' love for the Universal horror films compelled him; 'I had so much fun with the Mummy movies and I was watching Frankenstein one night, and I just started thinking, 'Wouldn't it be cool if I could do...?' It wasn't planned. The studio didn't come to me.

They didn't ask me to do this, because I believe in their heads [it had been done]. Francis Ford Coppola made a really good, fantastic Dracula, and (Kenneth Branagh) made a Frankenstein. So I thought, 'I'm not going to make a Dracula movie, I'm not going to make a Frankenstein movie, and I did my Mummy'

But I have this affinity. I love these sorts of movies. And then I just started thinking about it; 'Well, maybe all three of them could be in a movie together.'

Out of the film's creatures, only Igor and Frankenstein's Monster would be realized as fully practical. The makeup effects were supplied by Greg Cannom's Captive Audience Productions, with Cannom himself applying the prosthetics on set.

A prosthetic appliance was made for Kevin J. O'Connor to wear as Igor, giving him a skull-like look. The makeup was complemented with a ratty wig and false teeth.

More complicated was Captive Audience's take on Frankenstein's Monster, played by Shuler Hensley. Sommers wanted a totally new design that still evoked Universal's original Monster; 'Frankenstein is such an icon. He had to have a flat head, he had to have bolts on his neck, and he had to have Doc Martens on his feet. Other than that, we were willing to play with him..'

One consideration that the Monster still had to be recognizable as Hensley. Cannom stated; 'Stephen really wanted (the Monster) to look lke Shuler, as Shuler has such a great face. He didn't want something scary, he wanted a real humanity to the character.

What I did was take Shuler and built him out. Thickened his face out but did my best to sculpt it so that it looks like Shuler, but bigger. We put this metal piece in his head, the whole top's glass, and then spit his head open more so that there's big cracks coming down.'

Cannom stated about the Monster's metallic parts, 'I wanted something like the Nautilus (from 20'000 Leagues Under the Sea) where it's old iron, but with a really beautiful design to it'.

Captive Audience's Keith Vanderlaan confirmed; 'Our design philosophy was to use only what would have been available at the time Frankenstein’s monster was being constructed. Since there wasn’t the technology for skin grafts at that time, Frankenstein would have had to assemble his creature with rivets and brass fittings.'

Captive Audience's Monster makeup was very elaborate, consisting of several head, arm and hand appliances, a chest appliance, and then the leg extensions to increase his height. Cannom said, 'When (Shuler) walks on set, there's about 7 or 8 people following him. It takes two of us to apply his face makeup, three or four people to get him into the suit! And then there's the hands, the mechanics, the contact lenses, the teeth!'

Hensley factored the leg extensions and heavy prosthetics into his physical performance; 'I'd say the whole costume and body suit is close to 70 to 75 extra pounds. So moving in it, and living in that, I've tried to work out for endurance and increasing my cardio workout.

(...) Honestly its the perfect scenario for a man made up of seven men to be putting on artificial limbs. You have to walk differently; its a matter of staying on balance.'

Captive Audience also handled the facial prosthetics of Dracula's brides in their harpy forms. Otherwise the bodies were digital creations courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic.

Keith Vanderlaan said; 'The vampire bride makeup was very subtle, made up of contact lenses, teeth and a few facial appliances. We didn’t want to go over the top with a real vampire makeup. These brides were supposed to be beautiful, sexy and enticing, despite their monstrous look.'

Sommers had already worked with Industrial Light & Magic on The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, and just like on those pictures, ILM would contribute almost all the miniatures, matte paintings and creature effects in Van Helsing.

The first digital monster, Mr Hyde, was scanned from maquettes sculpted by Carlos Huante. Huante sculpted a full body maquette, and a head bust maquette. When it came to Hyde's design, Christian Alzmann explained;

'We knew this would be hard to do because it is always hard to create a CG human. But we figured that the more disfigured he was, the more we moved the design away from the look of a normal man, the more leeway we would have in the CG.'

The 'pygmy' vampire gargoyles were also digital creations scanned from maquettes. Alzmann stated, 'We had an idea, from the characters in Mummy Returns, what Stephen meant when he said the word ‘pygmy'. We knew he wanted something very nervous and jittery and small.”

One of the tricks to the design was making the bats repulsive enough that you wouldn’t feel sorry for them when they blew up. They couldn’t be too cute.'

The true form of Dracula, the 'Hellbeast', was also a digital creation scanned on sculptures by Carlos Huante. Once again, a head bust maquette and a full-body maquette were sculpted.

Last for ILM's creatures were the trio of werewolves; the grey-furred 'Old Man' werewolf (so named for a deleted scene where it transformed back into, well, an old man), the wild and bestial Velkan werewolf, and the Gabriel Van Helsing werewolf. ILM's artists, Huante among them, created nearly 1000 pieces of artwork to brainstorm the werewolf designs.

Alzmann explained, 'We explored every idea we could think of for a werewolf,” Alzmann said. “We designed werewolves that were four-legged and looked like huge bulls. We designed werewolves that looked more like men. We showed Stephen Sommers the whole gamut of pencil drawings, and he leaned towards really big, two-legged designs. Once we got the general idea, it was a matter of producing more illustrations until he said, ‘That’s our guy.’ '

Danny Wagner handled the sculpting on the werewolves. A 'standard' werewolf body maquette was made, with three head bust maquettes for the Old Man, Velkan and Van Helsing werewolves. Each werewolf bust had a unique shape to the ears, muzzle and skull structure.

Alzmann explained 'The original art we produced showed three very different-looking wolves but we had to simplify them later so we could use the same basic geometry for all three. We had to make the bodies similar, to keep the costs down — but we could dress those bodies differently, with different coloring and fur styles and heads.'

The Van Helsing werewolf head sculpt.

The Prince Velkan werewolf head sculpt.

The 'Old Man' werewolf head sculpt.

The werewolf body maquette.

The werewolves would be finalized in their digital incarnations with unique fur texturing following from their designs in the concept artwork. The Old Man werewolf had a more wolf-like appearance, while the Prince Velkan werewolf had a savage, 'wild' appearance.

According to Alzmann, Sommers wished for the Van Helsing werewolf to really stand out; 'Stephen wanted him to be this shiny, black, beautiful, sexy wolf. ‘Rock star’ was the term he threw out quite often. So we designed him with a mane of very long, flowing black hair.'

Real wolves influenced the designs of the werewolves, according to Alzmann, 'We love to look at nature. It always has to come back and be real. Even though it is very a much a fantasy creature, a werewolf, it still has to be grounded. So we had a cast of a real wolf skull, and checking how do the teeth bite, how do they overlap, and really getting into that anatomy.

We had real wolves coming (to the studio, from a local wolf rescue) which was fantastic. Beautiful animals! We (digitally) composited their real fur on top of the creature we were building, for a guide to not just the length but the properties of the hair'.

When it came to animating the werewolves in motion, other animals were also used as reference according to animation director Daniel Jeanette, 'The werewolves are neither human nor animals but Stephen Sommers wanted to retain a little of both. So we devised a hybrid type of walk and run, with the werewolves running on twos most of the time, and on fours when needed. We drew our inspiration from the movements of bears and gorillas — powerful, big animals that can be both bipedal and quadrupedal.'