From Beyond (1986)

Stuart Gordon's From Beyond came about thanks to the success of Re-Animator, his darkly comic adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's short story, 'Herbert West - Reanimator'. Gordon, along with his fellow Re-Animator collaborators Dennis Paoli and Brian Yuzna, admired Lovecraft's writings and was eager to adapt more of his stories to the screen.

However, From Beyond - one of Lovecraft's less memorable works - was chosen thanks to Charles Band, owner of Empire Pictures, the company that distributed Re-Animator, rejecting Gordon's pitch for a 'Dagon' adaptation. Gordon recalled;

'Re-Animator had come out and was a success, and so I was offered a three-picture deal. One of the things that Brian Yuzna and I had been talking about was how we were very much influenced by Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe movies, and the idea of doing a series of Lovecraft films was something that was in the backs of our minds. (...)

So the idea of doing another (Lovecraft) movie was really tantalizing to us, but what I wanted to do next was actually 'Dagon', and it was a script that Dennis Paoli and I developed, to do with Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton.

We got pretty far along with it, and then showed it to Charles Band who was (...) producing the follow-up films. He said, 'People turning into fish? I don't think so, this is ridiculous! Why don't you do a different Lovecraft story instead?'

I don't know how From Beyond came about, it was not my suggestion. It might have been Brian Yuzna who suggested that to Charlie. And the next thing I knew, that was the project.'

Much like on Re-Animator, Stuart Gordon worked in tandem with Dennis Paoli and Brian Yuzna when developing the story. One problem was that the original text did not have much in the way of a story to adapt, leading Gordon to take some creative liberties.

(...) 'With From Beyond, the original story is only about seven pages long, it's a tiny story. We kind of ended up running out of story pretty early on, it ended up being the pre-title sequence! And then it was like, well now what? What happens next?

We added ideas from some of Lovecraft's other stories, to fill it out. The idea of these creatures eating, that's in the original story. (...) But we got the idea, what are these creatures?

We borrowed a creature Lovecraft had developed for 'At the Mountains of Madness', a thing called the Shoggoth, which is a shapeshifting creature. In 'Madness' it says that they accidentally achieved intelligence, which I think is a real interesting phrase. And that sparked the idea that maybe it was by eating intelligent beings. "You are what you eat"!'

From Beyond heavy effects workload was split between three effects shops; John Naulin's M.T.S.D., John Carl Buechler's Makeup & Mechanical Industries (MMI Inc), and Mark Shostrom Studio. The physical and photographic effects were handled by Doublin Effects.

Buechler's MMI crew counted Mitch De Vane and Gino Crognale as modelers, Ralph Miller for animatronics, and John Vulich, Tom Floutz, Gabe Bartalos, Joe Dolinich and Bruce Barlow as fabricators. Naulin's much smaller crew counted John Criswell, Greg Johnson and Shayna Naulin as its team. Buechler and Naulin had both worked on Re-Animator, as had visual effects supervisor Anthony Doublin who co-ordinated work between the three makeup teams.

Shostrom's team included David Kindlon for animatronics, and Robert Kurtzman, John Blake Dutro, Aaron Sims, Greg Nicotero, Steve Patino and Gregor Punchatz as technicians.

Unlike Buechler, Naulin and Doublin, Shostrom could not travel to Rome, where the film was being shot, as he had to start work on Evil Dead 2 after completing design work on From Beyond. Shostrom sent Kurtzman and Kindlon to supervise the Rome shoot in his place.

John Naulin said about the film, 'From Beyond had most of the same original crew and people involved in it. Whereas everything that we had to completely do in a day for a nickel on Re-Animator, now we had two days and a dime! (...) The list of effects was just astounding. As I recall, there was 86 scenes with effects in it. A lot of stuff that was way more detailed than (the effects of) Re-Animator, so it was very ambitious for the budget.

Whereas I worked for 8 ½ weeks on Re-Animator, I worked 32 weeks on From Beyond. I was basically head of makeup effects for the entire film, even though there was several people that worked on it. (...) I was on set for the entire process.'

The first creatures seen in the film - the alien eels and jellyfish - were handled by Naulin and Doublin. Naulin constructed the eel and jellyfish puppets in three sizes - full size, half size and quarter size - depending on the type of effects shot.

Naulin explained about the full-size eel puppet, 'It’s got a radio controlled mouth, it breathes, and it could move in three directions. It’s full of subtleties you never saw. It is completely transparent, so you see the veins. Its skeleton was handmade out of plastic rib sections that were linked together by a cable down the center, and it’s got cable pulls on either side that are disguised as part of the veining; so it can move left, right and down.

There is a rubber vein structure and rubber air bladders on the inside, and it is covered with a translucent prophylactic skin. It is a completely constructed piece, and when it’s backlit in the film, you can see all the way through.'

In a later interview, Naulin said how the eel puppet's translucency was achieved, 'As a matter of fact, it was covered on the outside with overlayed versions of condoms. Basically, it had condoms that had been slit open and turned into flat panels, and they were just glued over, over, and over, because you could see the heart beating on the inside and everything like that. And (cinematographer) Mac Ahlberg back-lit it, so you could see through it, and with the slime on, it looked really good! (...) From the outside it looks like a sex toy, but that also works as the way Stuart's mind works. It's a living, breathing, biting sex toy, and it worked great.'

Anthony Doublin remembered how he achieved the 'floating' eel shots. 'Stuart wanted to try to do as much practical as possible, because of his stage background. I had thought about doing the eels stopmotion, and I actually built a test eel with a bit of an armature in it so I could, you know, just give it a try. And it was just too laborious to get that nice, smooth tail movement.'

'(...) I pretty much figured that we're gonna have to do it in an aquarium, to get that kind of floaty look. I'm kind of a student of film history, and how other people do things, so only five years earlier, Poltergeist had come out, and there was that one creature, a ghost that blocks the doorway and it's real floaty, well that was done in an aquarium.'

Doublin explained the floating effects in another interview. 'Instead of shooting through the aquarium, which would’ve goofed up the whole shot since the camera would have detected the water, we went back to the ’30’s Topper-type effects, using a beam-splitter mirror to actually reflect the jellyfish and eels from the aquarium off to either side at a right angle to the camera.

It worked basically like a front-projection system, so we were able to create these effects on the set. We also came up with a way of lowering a matte into the aquarium so we could make it appear as if these creatures had moved behind a static item like the Resonator or a desk.

Once we got that to work, Stuart began to feel more comfortable about going with optical effects. We realized that each new set-up required a new set of mattes, and we’d have to bring the aquarium in, get the mirror aligned and set up the camera before we could do the shot.

We did about 14 shots like that, but it was determined when we got to Italy that we’d wait and see what was needed when we got back to the States, and that we’d be better off to do it with rotoscoping.'

Naulin's team was in charge of realizing the giant eel that attempts to eat Jeffrey Combs' scientist in the basement. At least two versions of this monster were made; a miniature puppet, and a full-size puppet. The full-size eel, partially operated by John Criswell, was 24 feet long!

The full-size eel prop was heavy, thanks to both its size and it being filmed in water, and so had to be held on wires for various shots, such as when it attacks Combs. The wires were difficult to hide thanks to the stark cinematography.

Naulin said about the sequence, 'You don’t really see it pull him out of the water. You see him flailing about, nine feet in the air, and, at that point, it’s a stuntman in a full harness that Doublin and the stunt coordinator rigged up. It was all done full size. There is only one quick shot where it appears as a miniature.'

The full-size basement eel puppet.

The miniature basement eel puppet.

Naulin's next task was to design and apply the prosthetics worn on Jeffrey Combs, to represent his character's mutation. Naulin explained, 'The design was inspired by something that Stuart and I had talked about, which was that Crawford is a total innocent, things keep happening to him that he doesn’t ask for, and he has to reach a certain point before the hero can be brought out in him. What this makeup does is take him back to an infant stage.

I’ve got to say something for Jeffrey: he was incredible with regard to the makeup. First of all, it required full head and shoulder casting, which he’s never had done before and which was an ordeal for him. Then, as I recall, he went into this makeup in some form 23 times.

One way or another, the poor guy was wearing bald-caps and eyebrow blocking appliances, foam latex cheek pieces, not to mention all the wounds and bandages and pineal gland pieces — it just got to be more and more!'

The most complicated part of the prosthetic was the pineal gland that bursts out from Combs' forehead, which had to move on-camera, while attached to Combs! Naulin also explained how the pineal gland effects were achieved.

'They wanted to be able to shoot Jeffrey with and without the pineal, without having to redo his entire makeup each time, which was almost an impossibility since the pineal operates underneath the makeup. We not only had to be able to do that effect, we also had to be able to take it off, shorten the pineal, put it back in or put in air-bladder versions of the pineal — it all had to be like a Tinkertoy set that was interchangeable on set!

We solved this problem by having a junction box machined and attached to a band flexible on the inside but rigid on the outside, and that band was velcroed over Jeffrey’s bald-cap before the final foam forehead piece went on. From the back of the band, we ran cables to a joystick control so that the off-camera operator could make the pineal move at his discretion.

The whole pineal apparatus could then be removed from the front using Allen wrenches, and the little metal piece had a fitting in it so we could insert the air bladders. There was an air line that went over the top of his head, emerged from the appliances and hooked up to an air pump so we could make his forehead bulge as if the pineal were trying to push out!'

Additionally, a dummy head in Jeffrey Combs' likeness was made for shots where it would not have been possible to use the prosthetics. The pineal gland effects proved to stick in the MPAA's craw, for the most awkward reasons as Naulin recounted.

'I had to go to the MPAA and prove that there really was a pineal gland, and that I had sculpted it from what they really look like and the only fiction here was that it grew from a stalk. Because they saw a phallic looking thing coming out the forehead, and went 'X rating'!'

Naulin's team also handled the demise of Ken Foree's role, where he is eaten alive by a swarm of insects. Foree has to be attached to the fake torso from a hole cut underneath the set's fake floor. Naulin and other crewmembers operated the fake body's arms.

Doublin, per his role as visual effects supervisor, handled the 'insect storm' effects via some very old-fashioned methods. 'Those were styrofoam beads. (...) We had to paint them gray, because styrofoam only comes in white.

We had to set up a room with this big screen box, and we had a couple of Italian laborers that would rake them and spray them. (...) Brian Yuzna comes in, looks at them doing it, and goes "What's next? You guy's gonna paint faces on all of them?".'

Other grisly effects supplied by Naulin included the 'twisted' head stumps, a half-chewed prop brain, and assorted gouged out eye prosthetics. Yuzna wrly said about Gordon's penchant for grue, 'I told Stuart, let's try to make a movie without any red in it. But every chance he gets, he's right in there, splashing it around.'

The two main forms of the mutated scientist Pretorius, handled by Mark Shostrom, followed Gordon's brief to create a diseased looking monster. Gordon explained to Fangoria, 'I realized (Lovecraft) was a hypochondriac, and how repressive, how Victorian he was. He lived with maiden aunts, was married very briefly, was very sickly and died young.

All these things swimming around in the air, in the Beyond, that we can't see but can kill us, I think, are germs. That sounds kind of wimpy at first, yet when you think about people's fears about AIDS, which is absolutely terrifying, that these things can twist your body up into a monstrosity, it's very frightening.

That was one of the images (Shostrom) developed for Pretorius, like a carcinoma carried to the ultimate degree, these living cancerous lumps all over his body. Like the Shoggoth, that can change shape, I find something that can regrow cells, without any regard for symmetry or beauty, horrifying.'

Pretorius' second guise, a loping putty-like mockery of the human form, was the main workload for Shostrom's team. Shostrom recalled how hard it was to settle on the Pretorius monster's look.

'Stuart had a lot of colour illustrations of these really crazy, wild creatures. He was very enthusiastic about them, but they weren't something we could even think of doing on the budget we had. They were wild comic book artworks, just out there. I tried to lock down on the mutated final look of Pretorius, and I went through a lot of sketches and sculptures.

Gordon couldn't really nail it, I think he'd seen too many designs before I met him, there was so many choices. I was getting desperate because we had to start construction!

Finally, in a flurry of activity one night, I sculpted a little maquette of the pretzel-like Pretorius creature. I called Stuart up, he came over, looked at it and went 'I'll take it'! Phew! Thank god!'

For shots of the Pretorius monster talking, Shostrom devised a prosthetic appliance for actor Ted Sorel, that could be attached to the animatronic Pretorius puppet. Sorel would be shot in extreme close-up, to not give away that he was just sitting in front of the prop.

The Pretorius puppet presented many difficulties for Shostrom; the sculpting alone required over 1000 pounds of clay! Shostrom described how challenging it was to make castings from the complicated sculpture.

'The really tough part was trying to figure out how to foam the skin up. The skin only had to be about an inch thick, but we had this totally convoluted surface that had to be filled up. I talked to some people who worked at Stan Winston’s shop on Invaders From Mars, and I found out that they’d invented this technology of making things out of polyurethane foam that sets in about three minutes. Their advantage was that those large Martian drone suits were basically round, while our creature was like foaming up some odd tree stump!

Shannon Shea had devised this thing called the ‘octoinjection’ system, which took a day to set up and required several people to run the jiffy mixers full of foam. We needed other people to blow compressed air into the molds as we were injecting the foam, which was setting up as we were doing this! It really got pretty wild, and it’s toxic as hell. Afterwards, we had to step on the suit for quite awhile to squeeze out all of the cyanide fumes. Once we got the technology sorted out, then Dave Kindlon spent the next three-and-a-half months devising all of the mechanical parts. It really became a heckuva project for Dave.'

Shostrom also described how the mechanisms of the suit, 'I designed it with the idea of getting away from the man-in-a-suit concept. In this case, we had a person lying on his stomach on a fulcrum — which is kind of like a see-saw — and the creature was designed around that.

The operator’s left arm had an arm-extension in order to manipulate the monster’s big left arm. His head was tucked inside the monster’s shoulders and his right arm operated the head and neck of the creature. The platform the operator was on allowed the creature to move up and down and forward and back. The advantage to working that way is that you can see underneath the entire creature even though its weight is supported by the platform.

The idea is that you can see right behind it, you can see underneath it, so it looks like it’s supporting its own weight when, in fact, it’s all mechanical. It’s a combination of almost every trick in the book!'

The Pretorius puppet had three different heads, each slightly different in appearance. David Kindlon designed the mechanics inside each head in a different fashion also, to give the appearance that Pretorius was continously changing.

The Pretorius puppet's heads.

The remainder of From Beyond's effects were handled by John Carl Buechler's MMI. Buechler's MMI team handled the other stages of Pretorius' transformations. The first stage, where Pretorius tears his face off and the flayed muscle starts to unravel and writhe, was a combination of prosthetics and animatronics. Buechler explained;

'We did something to create that effect that I don’t think anyone has ever done before. We combined a mechanism directly inside a prosthetic, so it was very simple to apply. It had a cable-controlled series of units that caused the muscles of the face to retract on themselves.

Early sculpts of the flayed Pretorius prosthetic.

The whole idea was that the muscles had to appear to be unlacing themselves from the skull, so for the next step in the transformation, we cut away to the actors and then back to Pretorius, who was now an animatronic figure which started to elongate and stretch as the muscles continued to unlace and then flail madly about.

After we cut to Ken Foree’s reaction, we pull back and reveal a side shot of Pretorius with the muscles appearing almost like tentacles. We used compressed air to make the tentacles appear to move wildly about. It’s all very simple, but you get the feeling that the muscles have come apart.'

The animatronic flayed Pretorius head.

Another animatronic head was used for the shots of the head splitting apart, again fabricated by the MMI crew.

The next stages, where Pretorius head is gone and a tentacle-like hand erupts out of the bloody stump, was also achieved by MMI as a pair of dummy torsos. The torso out of which the tentacle leaps out of had a deeper gash.

I would imagine that the tentacle-like arms that erupt from Pretorius' torso was also a creation of the MMI crew, due to it being used with one of the dummy torsos.

Did the MMI crew also fabricate the skull-faced tentacles that pop out from the remains of the Pretorius monster, or was that Naulin's or Shostrom's teams?

The MMI team also made the mechanized 'midway' form of Pretorius as he transforms from Shostrom's 'Mr. Bubble' (as the crew nicknamed him) prosthetic, to the Buechler's own Pretorius creature.

A smaller version of Buechler's 'brain shrimp' was made to be pushed out from an empty casting of the Pretorius prosthetic.

Buechler's own Pretorius monster was realized via puppetry. 'I did a sort of transition from this wonderful tendril creature to some shrimp-headed brain-thing. It was very strange looking, and it was a combination of a miniature and a full-scale creature. The full-sized monster had an eighteen-foot wingspan, bat wings and shrimp-type scales covering its back..

We cut to Crawford as he says, ‘Oh, my goodness!’ and then there’s this wonderful bluescreen shot of the miniature flying down toward Crawford from the top of the staircase, using its huge wing claws to bat him down. The full-sized version then grabs him, ‘chows down’ on his head, and then twists it off. Any time you see the two of them together, it’s the full-scale model, but for any of the intercut scenes between Crawford’s point of view and the creature, we used the miniature. The miniature contained a fully articulated cable-controlled mechanism that is capable of simulating flight, all the pincers worked, the brain pulsated and the jaw moved.'

The full-size MMI Pretorius monster.

The miniature MMI Pretorius monster.

Stuart Gordon was very pleased with all the effects work. 'In the movies, I don't feel you can just have something that's unseen. You must give the audience something. What we did was sit down and come up with some of the weirdest ideas we could, then turn them over to the effects wizards to build. And they've come up with weirder things than we imagined.'

Gordon stated in another interview, 'There are enough special effects in this movie for six films. Obviously, that makes it harder from my points of view. But the effects people are terrific. Each group has essentially done enough for one movie.

The other great thing is that they're all working together. What happens is all these monsters are constantly transforming from one thing to another, and often somebody's job overlaps into another's area. They've all been good about sharing designs. What I'm really impressed with is that they've managed to get an overall look - everyone is on the same wavelength here.'

The assorted effects artists had a mutual respect for Stuart Gordon, with Robert Kurtzman noting how Gordon was considerate of the problems of shooting effects. 'On most movies, the director will shoot the masters first, getting the other actors to stomp over the guy in makeup. Then, at the day's end, they want to do close-ups when the makeup is falling apart. They expect miracles, but won't listen to reason. Stuart understands these problems.'

John Carl Buechler echoed these sentiments. 'I think you can attribute that to the camaraderie Stuart brings to a production. Nobody’s the star, everybody works for the good of the project and I think that in itself is what makes his pictures outstanding.

He makes the technician and the artist feel at ease, he works with the talents each person has and he coordinates everybody. That experience and that attitude helped us to work together. We had to on a picture like this: it had a short shooting schedule and some of the most ambitious effects ever in a motion picture.'

Sources:

• American Cinematographer Vol. 68 'Dreadful Demons for From Beyond'
• Fangoria #56 'Men, Monsters & Madness: On the Set of From Beyond'
• Fangoria #59 'The Man Who Collected Lovecraft'
• 'Multiple Dimensions: The Creatures of From Beyond' featurette
• 'Monsters & Slime: The FX of From Beyond' featurette