In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Michael De Luca, scriptwriter of In the Mouth of Madness, had originally submitted the script to John Carpenter in 1988. While Carpenter was impressed with the script, he passed on it at the time, but De Luca would submit the script to him again in the 1990s. Carpenter stated what appealed to him about the script, and why he had initially rejected it in Cinefantastique;

'(De Luca) asked me to direct just after I’d finished They Live (in 1988) and I didn’t want to follow that with something similar. Then it came back to me in 1992. New Line said, ‘Let’s make an upscale horror film together. Let’s take the genre and shake it up a bit. Horror has gotten so stale of late, what with carbon copies of carbon copies. We’re not seeing anything new or any of the shock tactics redesigned.'

'For years I’ve tried to figure out how to translate a Lovecraft story to the screen. He always described ‘Unspeakable Horror That Comes At You’ in his works. How do you show that? In The Mouth of Madness contained Lovecraft’s brand of heartless cynicism and was the closest anyone has come to successfully weaving Cthulhu Mythos elements into an original story.'

Carpenter was adamant that his film would still have practical effects, and digital technology would be used at a minumum. 'Frankly, rubber monsters are still the scariest. Sam (Neill) told me he felt the reason why Jurassic Park was frightening wasn’t because of the computer graphics, it was the puppet close-ups right on the set which proved to be the best.'

KNB EFX's association with the film grew out from their work on Carpenter's earlier Body Bags, as Greg Nicotero remembered, 'While we were shooting Body Bags, In Mouth of Madness was just starting to get the green light at New Line, so we kind of segued from Body Bags right to Mouth of Madness.'

Carpenter remembered how the the 'look' of the creature effects, as well as the budget, proved to be a headache. 'We had under seven million to spend on the picture. It was tough. The monsters had to be outrageous Lovecraftian demons, but in H.P. Lovecraft's novels, they are always so horrible that they are beyond description, that they are too terrifying to see.

So how do you visualize something like that? Well, very, very quickly. They also had to be slightly cartoonish since Sam Neill spends most of the movie ridiculing horror only to discover it's all too real.'

The KNB team on Mouth of Madness included Gino Crognale, Shannon Shea, David W. Smith, Shannon Shea, Evan Campbell, Mike Trcic and Mark Tavares, among many more. Alongside the special makeup effects, KNB also contributed to some of the film's art direction as well, such as the paintings used as covers for the Sutter Cane novels.

According to Nicotero, 'The first thing that we really got into was the designs of all the book covers because we had an artist that worked at our studio named Shannon Shea … [I think he] did two or three of the covers.'

The first of the film's many eerie images is when a crazed reader of the Sutter Cane novels goes on a rampage, with a close-up shot revealing his eyes to be inhuman. Nicotero explained the design process behind the contacts.

'I remember immediately getting into John about the contact lenses, because I really wanted to sell that when you looked at these people, something didn't look quite right. We came up with this idea that the cornea and pupil were dividing like cellular mitosis. Instead of one pupil and cornea, it was splitting into two as if there was another entity or being inside there.'

Much of the film's horror sequences occur in the hometown of fictional horror author Sutter Cane; the first of these uncanny images being a young boy aged into an old man. This was realized as a single piece prosthetic facial appliance and wig.

Several different appliances were required for shots of the mutated townspeople, with Nicotero remembering how taxing these sequences were to shoot. 'These were probably the longest days, because there was only three or four of us up there doing make-up. There was me, Gino Crognale, Jeff Edwards and one or two local (Canadian) make-up artists. (...) A lot of (the prosthetics were sculpted by a guy called Evan Campbell.

We were shooting an hour outside of Toronto. We would go to work at 4 in the afternoon, and do makeups all night long, and then we drive back to Toronto in the morning. It was about a week of that, and it was just completely exhausting. We had an assembly line of people just churning makeups! That, to me, was one of the biggest challenges'.

Another grotesque facial appliance was made for the nightmare sequence of a mutant cop, sculpted and painted by Evan Campbell.

A head appliance, sculpted in a likeness of actress Julie Carmen, was made for the shot of her character walking backwards after having been changed by Cane's influence.

Sutter Cane himself is revealed to not be human, with the shock twist achieved via a puppet made in actor Jurgen Prochnow's likeness. Nicotero explained, 'Sutter Cane's reveal was always intended to be one shot where we pull back from Jurgen and see his back. And on his back we see this kind of Total Recall Kuato merged and growing out. That was also a full-size puppet with radio-controlled eyes, jaw movement, arms and a kind of phallic tentacle that was spinning around. I think it's only in one shot of the movie, but it's a pretty elaborate puppet.'

The mutated Mrs Pickman was initially realized as a miniature puppet. Nicotero said the 'first' Mrs Pickman, 'We actually built a hanging miniature with a fully articulate puppet sculpted by Mike Trcic and mechanized by Jeff Edwards and Doug Wogh. (...) When you operated the arms, elbows or torso, all these movements would be translated onto the miniature puppet. You would raise your arm and the puppet would match what you did.'

The 'second' Mrs Pickman was portrayed by actress Frances Bay in prosthetics, and was a last minute addition according to Nicotero. 'We never intended to do any full-size pieces (for Pickman) and then when we got back to Los Angeles after shooting, John said 'I think I want to rewrite something, I want Francis to have some dialogue (as a monster). So we created a little prosthetic torso section for her, and we went to KNB, rebuilt the set in the corner of the shop and brought her in and shot a couple of additional lines of dialogue with her.

One thing that was not apparent in the cut so far, was that her husband was laying at her feet, wrapped up in tentacles. So we created a couple of full-size tentacles and had somebody on the ground wrapped up in them, to tell that part of the story.'

The sequence where Sam Neill is chased by a horde of monsters, was the heaviest part of KNB's workload according to Nicotero. 'That was probably the biggest gag that we handled in the entire film. It was literally this massive, 22 foot wide, steel-welded frame that allowed for 14 puppeteers to get inside and move these various Lovecraftian creatures. There was lots of tentacles, and lots of claws and teeth. It was kind of like a massive parade float.

While we were shooting the other gags, (the Wall of Monsters) was being built in multiple pieces in Los Angeles and then we shipped it up to Toronto. A lot of the 'wall' was sculpted pieces incorporated into this massive framework. It was like a collage of different monsters, and you were able to get inside it and make the heads move'.

Nicotero said in another interview, 'The idea was we wanted it to look like a tidal wave of things were just sort of spilling over top of each other as it was advancing. We love the idea that as it’s moving forward, there’s gnashing teeth and there’s tentacles, so after we had our initial sketch, we had to go in and break down each piece.

Coming off the front was a welded cradle where the performer could lay on his stomach, and the head of the monster that was in the front was operated with cables, but the performer would lay into it. He was puppeteering the arms and legs of it. So you had this sort of lead monster as if that creature was sort of pulling all the other stuff with it.'

KNB fabricated three creature suits to flank the massive prop during the shot. The first suit, a crab-like monster, leg extensions to achieve a more unnatural gait. The 'shell' had piston mechanisms controlling the two arms sticking out, swaying them on camera.

The second of the suits, inspired by the fish people of 'The Shadow over Innsmouth', had arm extensions connected to cables; every time the performer walked, the tentacles writhe around.

The last of the suits, as Nicotero fondly remembered, was nicknamed 'the Meatball Dog. 'Our third guy came out of a really wacky sketch that John Bisson, who was our lead designer had done, and Carpenter kinda loved it. I think we called it 'Meatball Dog', because it was just a giant meatball with teeth and feet. It was the strangest thing! And John loved it, we went to set and he was like 'This is my favorite thing!', he talked about it all the time.'

The Carpenter's loved 'Meatball Dog'so much that they kept it after production wrapped, according to Sandy Carpenter. 'We still have the center monster, Meatball, the Cyclops, he still exists. He’s the only one that made it. The rest got donated to the Boy Scouts of America’s Halloween Special something-or-other.'

Carpenter was impressed with the work KNB did on Mouth of Madness leading to KNB contributed the special makeup effects for all of Carpenter's following films; Village of the Damned, Vampires, Ghosts of Mars and The Ward. Nicotero looked back on the experience;

'I think it was a pretty all-encompassing job in terms of the variety of work. We had miniatures, we had full-size puppets, we had prosthetic makeups. There was a little bit of everything, and I think that was what was exciting about it. The fact that we were involved from the beginning, to help shape the visuals of the project. And it was our first big gig with John Carpenter, we've done every one of his movies since, I've developed a really good friendship with him.'

Sources:

• The Oral History of 'In the Mouth of Madness'
• Cinefantastique Vol. 26 No. 2
• 'Greg Nicotero's Things in the Basement' featurette
• John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness (Gilles Boulenger, 2001)