Friday, 21 March 2025

The X-Files (1993) - Season 3

Continued from The X-Files - Season 2

The success of the previous season now allowed Lindala to hire more assistants, as his workload was increasing yet again. By this point, Lindala had moved into a new workship to handle the show's assorted makeup effects, and no longer using his basement!

Lindala had at least seven assistants at this point of the series, with one of them being Mike Fields who sculpted preliminary maquettes, masks and dummy props.

Much of Lindala's work was again on gore effects, such as shriveled husks in '2shy' and 'Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose', mutilated corpses in 'The List', an oil-spewing dummy head in 'Apocrypha' and bug-infested prop arms in 'War of the Coprophages'.

The episode 'Nisei' required a dummy Grey corpse to be made for assorted scenes.

For the episode '731', Lindala's team first had to create several burn makeup appliances for the extras playing disfigured prisoners. The most elaborate one was worn by Colin Cunningham as Escalante, due to his character having several speaking scenes.
'731' and 'Nisei' also required makeups for the extras playing human-alien hybrids. As the alien extras would only be seen at a distance or wearing hazmat suits, the hybrids were realized as pull-over latex masks, with some gored chest appliances.

The mask molds for the Grey aliens in the later 'Jose Chung's From Outer Space' episode, as well as the previous season's 'Duane Barry', were reused to create some disposable masks. These tattier masks were given a paintjob to resemble a human skin-tone.

'Jose Chung's from Outer Space' was a heavy episode in terms of the makeup effects. Several Grey masks were sculpted, and blended with the performer's painted torsos. The look was completed with finger extensions and painted spandex leggings.
(The Grey mask moulds were reused for background extras in '731', as well as parody Grey masks in the Millennium episode 'Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me' a few years later.)
Also in 'Jose Chung's From Outer Space' was the ogre-like Lord Kinbote. According to visual effects designer Mat Beck, 'He was kind of a homage to these stopmotion Ray Harryhausen monsters. We didn't have time to do a real stopmotion puppet so we put a guy in a suit.'.
Prelimary maquette of Lord Kinbote.

Inside the Kinbote suit was stunt coordinator Tony Morelli, was was asked by Lindala to wear the suit thanks to his tall size. The suit was hard for Morelli to wear, being heavy, hot and hard to breathe in, and yet Morelli had to spend ten hours inside it!

The Kinbote suit's head had servo mechanisms to control the eye, which could blink on camera. To make the suit taller, the legs were stilts, with Morelli's actual feet being inside the suit's knees. Walking with the stilts attached meant Morelli more or less walked on tip-toes.

It was Mat Beck who achieved the effect of Kinbote's movement, which resembled stopmotion animation via camera trickery; 'By varying the camera speed and playing with the shutter, we were able to make it look like it was a badly-done puppet.'

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Continued in The X-Files - Season 4

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