'It was a reunion of sorts for Laurel Entertaiment and KNB EFX Group. We had worked with Laurel, separately and together, on Day of the Dead, TV's Tales from the Darkside, Monsters, and (gulp) Creepshow 2, but now we had the oppurtunity to do some pretty original stuff for their newest feature, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie'.
The film's first segment, an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Lot 249', was about an undead mummy rampaging around a university campus. KNB's main job on the segment was the fabrication of the mummy suit. Howard Berger explained the design approach;
'In our first meeting with John Harrison we decided we'd do something different for this kind of creature. My biggest problem with mummies has always been that you could just push them over. Take a baseball bat and whack 'em to pieces. I mean, they're just dust, basically. So we said, 'Let's do a real big mummy, a Bernie Wrightson-type of creature - big rib cage, real powerful-looking.' Also in the script, the description's pretty vague. All it says is that he's tall and thin, and that's kind of hokey. John Harrison didn't like that, either. So we went with these dark pits for eyes, which we thought would be scarier because there was just blackness there. You're not sure what's motivating this creature.'Mike Deak wore the mummy suit, as well as the gargoyle suit in the 'Lover's Vow' segment', due to his tall and thin frame. Deak had previously worked for John Carl Buechler's MMI effects company, and wore monster suits in Arena and Cellar Dwellar.
Deak thus had enough experience in 'acting' while inside a rubber monster suit, and discussed his approach for how to act on Darkside; 'If they tell me to turn a certain way I know that if I don't do it exactly right, it's going to be completely stupid. You'd see a wrinkle in the suit on my wrist, for instance. I always have a practical knowledge of what they need me to do.'
Deak also felt that acting inside the Darkside suits was preferable compared to some of his earlier MMI work, 'I'm not hot inside here. I'm comfortable. I feel good. I'm just losing it, that's all. I wore this half-robot/half-animal suit in (Arena) and there was all this fighting I had to do. I got real brain-fried on that one. Must have lost a lot of brain cells.'The mummy's death, where it's chopped to pieces with an electric knife was achieved with the construction of a polyurethane foam dummy (identical in design to the 'hero' mummy suit), with the head and other body parts hollowed out.
The hollow sections were then filled with 'mummy innards' consisting of dirt and living insects! Berger said 'We used things like bugs, dirt, dust. We used crickets, live ones, especially in the head, so all this stuff would come out when the dummy got cut open. It worked great'.
A prosthetic appliance with a grotesquely stretched mouth (and attached to a fake cat body) was made for when the cat goes in, while the shot of it going out was achived with a hollow dummy head. Mark Tavares sculpted both the mouth appliance and dummy head.
The film's third and final segment, 'Lover's Vow', would feature the most makeup effects. Not only did it feature multiple gargoyles, but also had a transformation sequence where Rae Dawn Chong sheds her skin to reveal the monster inside.
The first shots of the transformation involved the gargoyle's hands bursting out of Chong's own. This was achieved via the construction of hollow fiberglass arms with foam latex appliances (designed to resemble Chong's own hands) on the back of the hands. The spring-loaded gargoyle arms would push out and tear open the foam hands on camera.
A wig was placed over the gargoyle skin appliance, with a brow and cheek appliance glued down to Chong's face - the face and wig would be pulled off as the air bladders inflated, making it appear as if Chong was ripping her skin off.
(The renowned Dick Smith was credited as a 'makeup effects consultant', presumable thanks to his experience with air bladders, which KNB used plenty of for the gargoyle transformation.)
Robert Kurtzman, Bruce Fuller and Mark Tavares did several sketches to get an idea as to what the gargoyle's final form should look like. It took a week to sculpt the head out of WED clay, which was then taken to the mold department.
Bruce and Wayne Toth worked on the gargoyle suit's torso and limbs, sculpted over a body cast of Mike Deak who was to wear the suit. The legs were sculpted to appear triple-jointed, and thus give them a 'bird-like' appearance though in reality Deak's legs went straight down. Mark Garbarino and Steve Frakes molded the body in fiberglass.
The gargoyle suit had a fibreglass underskull with radio-controlled mechanics. The foam latex skin of the suit was glued to the skull so that the skin moved with the mechanical movement to mimic facial expressions. The mechanics inside the skull were engineered by Mark Rappaport and Mecki Heussen.
The head was designed to appear that it had a long neck, avoiding the 'man in a suit' appearance. Deak would see out from the mouth, with an air line run through the neck between takes allowing him to breathe.
The suit's wings, which weighed 20 pounds, were attached to a harness adapted from a mountain climbing rig. The suit was made of foam latex that was backed with spandex to make it tougher. The suit's paintjob was designed and applied by Bob and Ed Yang.
Burnett himself casted the foam latex puppet and sculpted the wings, as well as the paintjob. The armature was made by Ted Rae, with Ernest Farino doing the animating.
Sources:
- Fangoria #92
- Gorezone #16
- Michael Burnett's Instagram page.
