Xtro (1982)

EDIT 27/09/2024: I recently interviewed Francis Coates about his work on Xtro, as well as touching on his work on other genre productions as a sculptor and modelmaker. You can read it here!

EDIT 26/08/2025: I would like to thank Francis Coates once again for being so kind, and sending me several never before seen behind-the-scenes photos of the Xtro monsters being sculpted and filmed.

'To do the most disgusting things that we could possibly get away with' was director Harry Bromley-Davenport's imperative for Xtro. To this end Davenport hired newer actors from theatre and television rather than star actors, to let the budget mainly go to effects.

Francis Coates, a sculptor who had worked for the BBC and White Horse Toy Company, was credited under 'Creature Effects'. Assisting Coates was Richard Gregory, who ran the freelance effects company Imagineering, and credited under 'special effects operator'.

Robin Grantham was credited as 'makeup supervisor', with John Webber credited as 'additional special makeup effects makeup'. It can be assumed that Grantham and Webber handled Philip Sayer's and Simon Nash's transformators towards the end of the film.

Tom Harris, who was credited under 'mechanical effects', was responsible for the pyrotechnics, the radio controlled toy tank, etc. I've seen Harris get miscredited for quite a few of Xtro's effects, but generally Harris had very little to do with the creature effects or makeups!

Coates and Grantham both worked from designs by Christopher Hobbs, credited under 'visual consultant'. Hobbs, a production designer, had also visualized (on paper) the gruesome effects sequences in Ken Russell's The Devils and Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves.

Family man Sam Philips, abducted by a UFO, returns to Earth as a scuttling alien. It was Francis Coates who decided the alien should walk on all fours, as he was tired of all the monsters he'd made on Doctor Who that were performers walking upright in masks.

Preliminary sculpt of the monster suit by Francis Coates 

 

Inside the monster suit was mime artist Tim Dry, of the music duo Tik & Tok. Dry and his counterpart Sean Crawford were chosen for their skill in body movements, with Dry playing the monster and Crawford playing a giant Action Man.

Crawford got the better end of the deal as all he was required to do was wear a large static mask (fabricated by Coates & Gregory) and army fatigues, and walk around a set.

Meanwhile Dry was subjected to a life casting of his body in the crab walking position (a photo of which can be found on Coates' website) for the foam rubber suit to be sculpted around, and then for the actual filming had to crabwalk in a damp forest at night while wearing the suit!

According to Coates, there was not enough money to fabricate a puppet body for any close-up shots. To get around this, the empty suit was propped up like a mannequin, with special props operated from behind the empty suit.

This method was used for the shot where the creature flicks its tongue to kill a man in the forest, as well as the shots of it extending its phallic chest tentacle to impregnate Susie Silvey's otherwise unnamed 'woman in cottage'.

The suit positioned to film the impregnation scene. 

 

The suit positioned to film the forest killing scene. 

 

Coates and Gregory also handled the film's infamous birthing scenes, sculpting a pair of legs and a foam latex belly. The effect was achieved via Susie Silvey sitting in an alcove underneath the set's floor, so that her real body's lower half was obscured.

For when Philip Sayer is rebirthed, a fake umbilical cord prop was also made, for him to bite apart. The 'umbilical cord' was actually wet spaghetti, while the blood was tomato soup! Not many behind the scenes images of this sequence!

More advanced latex prosthetics were made for Simon Nash's and Maryam D'Abo's alien infections. According to Coates, this was Richard Gregory's work, and he explained how the effect was achieved;

'We (made) a body with very thin latex channels inside them, pretty much invisible. (...) we made these ball bearings ('eggs') and pushed these ball bearings along these so-called veins to make them stand up. (...) The third stage, we just used a suction pump so that the tubes just disappeared from her body, but the 'eggs' stayed'.

(Richard Gregory also handled the brief throat slashing effect for when an unlucky cleaner is killed, realized as a prosthetic appliance and fake blood pump.)

The infection appliance on D'Abo 

 

Coates and Gregory also handled D'Abo's full transformation into an egg-laying mutant; an ovipositor-like piece was sculpted to achieve a cocoon-like effect.

D'Abo herself had to sit on a bicycle seat (obscured by part of the set, to achieve the illusion that she was stuck on the wall) for several hours!

Coates and Gregory also made the alien bodypart props. These included the scuttling monster's tongue and phallic tentacle and a set of eggs.

(I could easily imagine that the 'eggs' were water balloons or even condoms, but how did they achieve the 'beating' effect when Bernice Stegers holds one in the reshot ending?)

The tentacle prop was reused for the film's reshot ending, with plastic bubbles attached to the bottom of the prop,to make it seem like a beating organ.

The tentacle prop reused in the film's reshot ending... 

 

...attached to some plastic bags attached to an air tube! 

 

Stegers holding the beating 'egg' prop. 

 

While Coates and Gregory handled the film's creature effects and transformations, the 'standard' makeup effects work went to Robin Grantham and John Webber.

Grantham and Webber were tasked with giving Simon Nash a decayed visage; it seems that a latex face mask was made for Nash to wear.

Coates and Gregory were tasked with handling the alien father's final form; a bipedal, skeletal being realized as a puppet. Coates first made a clay sculpture on which the puppet was sculpted from.

I am actually still unsure as to if there were multiple puppets (doubtful, given the film's low budget) or, more likely, the puppet underwent alterations during the course of filming. The puppet had movable arms, head and jaws, which could be operated by a puppeteer.

For the close-up shot panning across the alien's body, showing its innards beating like a heart, I imagine the puppet had an air bladder appliance placed around it's empty torso.

Coates and Gregory also handled the man-sized Action Man, realized as a static mask worn by Sean Crawford.

Sources:

• 'Xtro Xposed' interview with Harry Bromley-Davenport
  
• Fangoria issues #19 and #24
  
• Famous Monsters of Filmland issue #191
  
• Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Magazine, December 1982
  
• Francis Coates' official website: http://www.scopedesign-uk.com/
  

Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992)

The sequel to Waxwork again had its special effects supervised by Bob Keen's Image Animation. Among Keen's team was Paul Jones and Stephen Norrington. Keen's duties alternated between the various pastiche monsters and the copious gore effects.

Keen recounted about why he took the sequels gig so soon after having worked on Clive Barker's Nightbreed; 'The attraction of doing a Waxwork film is the range of things you get to do as an effects person. You get everything from aliens to Godzilla to Jekyll and Hyde. Usually, you never get all that in one movie.'

In another interview, Keen said how he was eager to return to Waxwork thanks to the experience gained since the first film. 'It's been four years since the last one, so the audience is more sophisticated as a group. This movie is strong on the monster elements. Nearly every sequence has at least one, so it's another parade of creatures like Nightbreed.'

Much like the first Waxwork, Waxwork II was a love letter to horror cinema and Gothic literature, with its first 'segment' being a pastiche of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Bob Keen was delighted at the chance for his team to pay tribute to the classic monsters they loved, while doing something new at the same time. Keen said to Fangoria;

'I love doing classic creatures like Frankenstein. When you're a kid trying to get into makeup effects, all you ever want to do is Frankenstein and werewolves. The nice thing about the Waxwork movies is that I have the chance to reinvent them. (...) The fact is that I don't want to do the wonderful Universal classics because one, they're copyrighted and two, there's no fun in just duplicating someone else's work.'

Waxwork II's second segment, a homage to 1963's The Haunting, also featured the film's most gruesome scene where Bruce Campbell has his chest torn open. There was other grisly gags as Keen explained. 'His chest is peeled back for the entire sequence and hawks are pecking out the flesh - it's very impressive. Then there's this other guy who gets his jaw knocked off by a falling beam and has to spend the rest of the scene with it hanging there. Oh, and Baron Frankenstein gets his head squeezed so much, his eyes, teeth and brain pop out.'

Hickox explained how even the gored torso scene, like most of Waxwork II's gore, was intended to be a little jokey. 'It's kind of asking, 'What can you do to the human body and still keep somebody standing there?'. It's very Monty Pythonesque, and it's certainly the most graphic scene, but it doesn't play that way because it's shot in black and white.'

The gored ribcage appliance on Bruce Campbell.

The crushing dummy head and brain prop.

The film's third segment was a parody of the Alien filmss, with a monster heavily inspired by H.R. Giger's iconic xenomorph. However, one element of the parody monster - the worm-like creature operating it - was actually inspired by Doctor Who's Daleks according to Hickox.

'(The Daleks) had this protective shell that was mean & inside were actually these small slime monsters. So imagine that inside this alien shell is a kind of weaselly little slug controlling it all.'

It wouldn't be an Alien homage (or even a Dalek homage) without a scene of a small slimy creature getting up close and personal, which Waxwork II's homage naturally included!

A bulging mouth prosthetic and dummy alien were applied on Billy Kane as the unlucky crewman, while the infant creature was realized as a puppet with animatronic mechanisms.

The last of Waxwork II's main segments is a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe's writings, set in a medieval castle. This segment's monster was the panther woman, whose transformation was achieved first with air bladder prosthetics, and then a detailed face appliance.

Keen was very pleased with the panther woman's final stage - a mechanized head on a performer - in particular! 'She's absolutely incredible. We have this five-stage transformation and end up with this beautiful mechanical head. It's very sexy.'

Towards the film's finale is a quick sequence with several short vignettes parodying even more horror films; most notable among them being a Godzilla parody.

Keen was fairly happy with the work he did on both Waxwork films. 'The most frustrating part of this job is when you work on something for months and it never gets seen. The nice thing about Waxwork is that you get to see everything.'

Sources:

• Fangoria #108 'Waxwork II: Time for Terror'
  
• Fangoria Horror Spectacular #5 ''Another Stab at Classic Creatures'