Wild Country (2005)

Craig Strachan, director of Wild Country, had always intended for his film to rely on practical effects. 'CGI has taken the movie industry up a blind alley. (...) Animatronics are far more important to me, because An American Werewolf in London got it exactly right and created the best cinematic werewolf in history'.

Bob Keen, already a veteran of Hellraiser, Nightbreed and Dog Soldiers by that point, showed interest in the project despite its low budget. The film's producer Ros Borland recalled;

'The design of the werewolf was something that we knew was going to be the centrepiece of this film. Bob Keen of Image FX came to see us two and a half years ago. We knew that we had to have something really frightening, and he had done the werewolves for Dog Soldiers, so we knew he could do the job. But we were on a very limited budget, much less than (Dog Soldiers), and we had high demands for this beast!'

Originally, Keen's fee was too high for the Wild Country production team to afford. According to Borland, 'When I told that to Bob, his reaction was, 'You know what? I love the script, so I'll do it for what you can afford'. Bob thought our little movie was well worth investing his company's time in, and did us a massive favor.'

Strachan was adamant that the werewolves should be four-legged, a design element that Keen eagerly went along with; 'I found Craig's story fascinating because it seemed so real. While Dog Soldiers was a fantasy, Wild Country is rooted in the everyday. We had done the standing-up wolf really well for Dog Soldiers, and I didn't want to go that route again.

Nor did that concept work in context, because it had to be a moorland creature. So I designed a mix of the Beast of Bodmin and a humpbacked hyena-like animal, because it utters a sinister chuckle as it closes in on its prey'.

Dave Bonneywell, also a veteran of Image FX's Dog Soldiers team, acted as supervisor on the makeup effects. Peter Hawkins handled the animatronics (and would also wear the werewolf suit). Bonneywell explained in detail on how the suits were made.

'Once we decided this was the path we were going to go down, that determined its size, because it's a big old beast. As it was sculpted and designed, we kept the prehistoric look to it but I wanted to make it look meaner and nastier, so we looked at hyenas to give it big powerful front shoulders and a sloping head. (...)

We kept the human aspects in the sculpt, so it's a cross between a wolf, a hyena and a man. If you look at the original sculpt it has very man-like hands and feet, it's limbs are very human-like. I mean, obviously this is to accommodate the fact that it is a man in a suit, but also hopefully to suggest that this was once a human being.

The werewolf suit sculptures.

I sculpted the thing in full size, from head to foot, in WED clay. That was then moulded, its body from the head back is urethane foam which is then all chopped up by (Image FX's) fabrication team and turned into quite a complex suit.

The head is made of foam latex, which is a lot softer and more malleable than urethane, allowing the mechanics to stretch the foam when it snarls and blinks and opens its jaws.'

The foam rubber werewolf heads being painted.

The werewolf head's underskull.

Bonneywell explained how the heads were mechanized. 'We made a decision to use some radio-control and some cable-control for the creature. I was determined to get a big mouth movement on this thing, rather than the tiny mouth movement such creature suits usually get. I wanted this thing to be able to bite someone's head off!

So the jaw mechanism is cable controlled. The rest of the mechanisms - its blink, its frown, its sneer - are all on (radio-controlled) servos. The problem with the cable is we always need someone within 10 to 15 feet of the thing. That brings its own problems, but I think in the end you get a better look.

On set we have four of us, including Pete in the suit. One man operates the servo controls in the face. One man operates the (cable-controlled) jaw. And I'm usually running around screaming directions'.

The female werewolf head.

The male werewolf head.

At least two full body suits were created, to represent the male werewolf (named the 'Shadow Beast'), and the female werewolf. Bonneywell explained how they differentiated the suits.

'During the fabrication process, we made the male body bigger and much heavier in the shoulders, to make him appear even bigger. The biggest difference between the two (suits) is the colouration. The female has browns and lighter colours. The male, a more aggressive creature, is big and black, and has much bolder markings on his face, and he's got a kinda cool scar on his lip.'

Keen also explained, 'The main creature is a combination of two techniques; a large puppet manipulated by four guys on set, and a sophisticated suit with both arm and leg extensions. Pete Hawkins is the man in the suit, and he watched a lot of animal documentaries to get the stalking behavior right. There's a lot more for him to do than attack - there are many moments where the Shadow Beast sits and waits'.

The black-furred male werewolf suit.

Hawkins said about the experience, 'It's like wearing a big, tight furry coat really. It gets really hot when the head's on. When we did a test, Dave, the supervisor, had to keep swiping the sweat out my eyes. cos I couldn't see fromsweating so much!'

Bonneywell elaborated on the torments of wearing a werewolf suit on location during gloomy Scottish weather, 'It's incredibly difficult. He's on stilts, both on his arms and on his legs, so he's basically performing a permanent pushup whenever he's in the suit!

That combined with the terrain and weather, and the five kilo head he's got on, it's incredibly difficult. Problem is with things like this, once we get him suited up, people tend to forget that it's a man in a suit. Everyone's oohing and aahing at how lovely it looks, and forget there's a human being inside screaming in agony!'

The brown-furred female werewolf suit.

The film's twist ending required a werewolf cub puppet to be made. The puppet had mechanisms that could allow the head to twitch, and the tail to wag! Bonneywell explained,

'We tried to make a cute little baby Shadow Beast! He has markings similar to the female, but it could go either way. He could get darker if he turns out to be a fella!'

Image FX also handled the film's other makeup effects. Most of it went to the gore - which included a severed head and a bitten corpse body - but the Image team also had to fabricate a human baby puppet for safety reasons.

Keen explained, 'We had two puppet babies constructed, one with waving arms for the action scenes. (...) We couldn't put a 9-day-old baby out on the moors.'

The most grisly gag on Image FX's to-do list was the shot of the Shadow Beast bursting out of a cow's body in a shower of fake blood and sculpted fake organs. Keen explained;

'I designed an animatronic cow carcass from photos Ros sent, and we molded it with a sprung rib cage with mysteriously undulates as the teens get closer. Suddenly, the werewolf bursts out in a blood shower - it has been eating the cow from the inside - and bits a farmer in half.

We had to change the movements a bit when the Shadow Beast was made bigger than we had planned. The crew will have to wear protective clothing when we film that sequence!'

Bonneywell stated during the shoot, 'The infamous exploding cow gag, we'll achieve by placing a large funnel inside the dead cow (prop). The funnel is connected to an air mortar, which is loaded with fake blood and various nasty bits and pieces, and hopefully blow out on camera.'

The dead cow prop - before being eviscerated!

Craig Strachan was pleased with Image FX's work. 'I think the effects of the film have a sort of retro, mid-80s feel to them. From before CGI took off, and you still were using puppetry and animatronics. I'm quite pleased about that! (...) When (the Shadow Beast)'s massive in the frame with its heads and shoulders looming, I think it holds its own with the best.'

Sources:

• Wild Country: Making Of DVD featurette
  
• Fangoria #279 'Scream For the Wild Country' by Alan Jones.
  

Hellraiser (1987) - Part 4: The Engineer and Dragon

Continued from the Part 3 article on Hellraiser which focused on the Cenobites

The main monster of Hellraiser, the fleshy 'Engineer', was actually a last-minute addition according to Bob Keen, 'The Engineer was one of those 'Well I'd really like this?' moments from Clive, when we were already committed to a budget!'.

However, Keen also was enthusiastic about tackling the Engineer, in a discussion with Fangoria, 'What's nice about the Engineer is (...) we had the opportunity to come up with something different, not something that has to walk around on two legs. (The Engineer) took a long time to work out; we wanted to give him some sense of logic in his anatomy.

We made two versions, one fully articulate and one static dummy version. Additionally, it was necessary to have special arm, tail and eye sections for close-ups. I had worked on Return of the Jedi's Jabba the Hutt so the Engineer was more of a process than a problem.'

The articulated Engineer puppet had mechanisms inside to control the eyes, assorted facial expressions and jaws, and required six people to operate. Keen's history of work for Nick Maley proved useful by his own admission, 'I learned from the experience we had on Lifeforce, which had several puppets, that if you get more than 10 people on anything, you lose time and energy, so we devised a multifunction set of controls that one person could operate. I prefer to keep things simple and use four or five smaller sections if possible.'

The Engineer sculpt.

The Engineer was sculpted by Julian Callow and Paul Catling, and operated by John Cormican. Cormican said, 'I'll never forget Paul Catling and William Petty life-casting my backside for the seat that went inside the Engineer (...) We made this amazing creature in the end with all the restrictions of how you could do things in these days. '

'All I had was this creature that I would slip inside and my arms would be in his feet, my head in his tail, and my feet would work his head movements. He was radio-controlled to do his eye movements.'

Several errors were left in the final cut of the Engineer's scenes, namely the trolley pushing the puppet being visible in some shots, as well as a crewmember poking his head out from behind! The Engineer puppets were reused in the sequel Hellbound: Hellraiser II in a deleted scene.

Even more of a last-second addition was the skeletal dragon that briefly appears at the film's end. Keen recalled, ' That was a last minute effect. I remember Clive going 'Wouldn't it be awesome if this bony dragon rised out of the flames', and I remember thinking, 'Yeah, but we're shooting! How are we going to do that!' '.

The task of realizing the dragon fell to Cliff Wallace, 'I remember Bob Keen giving me 30 quid and saying 'Go and buy an interesting looking skull'. So I went to a place called 'Get Stuffed' in Islington, went and bought the weirdest skull I could find, which was the skull of a South American tapir, which cost me £35, and I got told off cos I'd spent another £5!

And then I bought three ibex horns, and I stuck the horns in (the skull's eye sockets), and the rest of it was just two plastic skeletons stuck together to have a really long neck.

It was basically a couple of skeletons stuck together, with some dental dam for wings, and a couple of rods out the back with three or four of us wiggling it to give it some semblance of life. Not very well, really!'

Keen stated, 'It was put together remarkably quickly, in four days, and then thrown into a fire for 10 minutes! (...) The way it's edited, it's works. But it's not something you want to do every single day of the week, an effect that quick!'

The hard work of Bob Keen's team paid off; Hellraiser became a classic of the horror genre, with Geoff Portass's makeup (together with Jane Wildgoose's costuming) for Pinhead remaining a design icon to this day.

Clive Barker praised Keen, 'His work is excellent. Bob is very consistent in his work. He designs material with human and technical fallibillity in mind; if they don't work the first time, you can repeat them.'

The success of Hellraiser, and of course its makeup effects, put Bob Keen's Image Animation on the map; Image would later contribute makeup effects to several cult classics, such as Barker's own Nightbreed, Lair of the White Worm and Dog Soldiers.

True to Keen's intention to foster new blood in Britain's makeup effects industry, Image Animation launched the careers of several prolific British makeup artists who work in the business to this day, on various international productions.

Keen said about the Hellraiser experience, 'This is how I hope to carry on in the future. On this picture more than any other I've worked on, everyone knew what they were aiming for. Also I had the best team I ever put together, which obviously was a plus.'

Sources:

• Fangoria #66, 'Putting the Hell in Hellraiser' by Philip Nutman
  
• Leviathan: The Story of Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (2015 documentary)
  

Hellraiser (1987) - Part 3: The Cenobites

Continued from the Part 2 article on Hellraiser which focused on Frank and his victims.

When it came to realizing the Cenobites, Hellraiser's supernatural arbiters of pleasure and pain, Clive Barker stated, 'We've gone out of our way, Bob Keen's team and myself, to design monsters that are not going to resemble anything that has been seen before.'

Bob Keen explained in Fangoria, 'In a way, the Cenobites were the hardest effect to achieve, because they went through so many stages of design. You can create creatures very easily by being elaborate, but we wanted to come up with something simpler, more logical. It's all tied to the pain/pleasure principle, though you're never quite sure why they've done this to themselves. That was why put in the most time and effort designing them.'

'Being an artist, Clive did some initial designs, and we discussed the concept. This was a great help, since he could clearly show me what he was after. At one point we had everyone on the team drawing, so we ended up with around 200 designs. Then Clive went through them, selecting the elements he wanted'.

Keen also explained how even the costumes, which were designed by Jane Wildgoose in collaboration with Barker, were workshopped alongside the makeups, 'There was a conscious effort to steer away from the Mad Max look, that leather punk style. Clive had this image that calls to mind the Spanish Inquisition, and the end result was a reflection of the two; the long coats of the Inquisition, and the leather bondage thing, though much more extreme'.

John Cormican also remembered, 'At first it was the drawings and designs, and doing all this research into material that was shocking and horrific at the time. People weren't pierced in these days, so looking at all these different pictures of piercings was quite shocking.'

While the process of designing the Cenobites was a collaborative one, Cliff Wallace recalled that Barker heavily influenced the design of the Cenobite's leader;

'Keen used to take a group of us to Clive's flat (..) a couple of times a month, and we'd try to come up with ideas for Cenobites. The only ones that Clive had really realized was the one that became known as Pinhead.'

While Pinhead was inspired by Clive Barker's artwork, the realization of his makeup, sported by Doug Bradley, fell to Geoff Portass. Portass explained, 'I'd seen one drawing of Pinhead, and that's all I knew. A man with some scars and spikes sticking out of his head.'

'One of the main stipulations when I was designing Pinhead is that Clive said that he wanted (...) to see Doug through the character. So consquently the makeup is barely 2-3 millimetres thick at the best, as he wanted to keep Doug's face in there'.

Bradley recalled the first time he underwent the makeup application, 'It took about six hours to put the whole thing on. It's a strange experience the first time you go through it. I think I was kind of zoned out and having a mystic experience by the end of it. Not at all inappropiate for playing a part like Pinhead!'

According to Keen, 'The lead Cenobite, the guy with the pins all over his head, had six appliances on his face and four on his body.' These body appliances were designed to be visible through the holes of the leather Cenobite costumes.

Portass explained how Pinhead's makeup was made, 'Pinhead is so called because they were originally pins! When we designed it, I took Clive's original drawing, which had spikes sticking out, more tribal. I changed that to pins (...) and Clive liked the pins, it was very subtle, very thin.

'We got to the point where shooting was going to start, and they took some test photographs (...) and you couldn't see the pins! (...) So we said, we got to go bigger, and we turned them into nails. We found some brass rod (...) from architectural model supplies, so we cut each length rod, and then cut off the tops of lots of brass nails, and superglued them on top of the rods. All we then had to was snip the tiny little pinheads off the pins, and simply insert the rods over the top of the pins. (...) But he was never called Nailhead, he just remained as Pinhead'.

While Bradley would return to the role for several of the sequels, playing Pinhead was originally an uncomfortable experience, 'I've always said that wearing the makeup for me was fine if you were working. It's the killing time that's the issue. Everybody knows that in makeup or out of makeup, the average day on a film set is 10% working and 90% waiting.

'And that's hard enough at the best of times, but you're carrying that makeup around all day, and in the first two movies the costume was not easy to take off, so the costume tended to stay on as well. You just wanted to be able to lift that off and be yourself for a while!'

The first Cenobite under Pinhead's command is the otherwise unnamed 'female Cenobite', whose makeup was designed by Cormican, 'I did a drawing of the female Cenobite in its early stages, which had a spike to its cheek. Clive made some suggestions about bringing down the spike, and opening up the wound in a vagina-like manner!'

The female Cenobite was played by Grace Kirby, who also required a long session in the makeup chair, as Keen stated, 'The female had about eight appliances, requiring approximately three hours to put on'.

Cormican's sculpt for the Female Cenobite appliance.

Between the lengthy makeup application and the heavy leather costume she had to wear, Kirby did not enjoy the Female Cenobite role, and thus did not return for Hellbound: Hellraiser II. Keen remembered her sullen mood on the set;

'I remember the first time the makeup went on, it really upset her to look into the mirror and see the face she'd seen looking back all her life be so different. And I think the other thing that got to her was just how intimidated everybody else was.

It wasn't the makeup effects crew, they knew who she is, and treated her the same, but other people in the crew. It was a hard process for her, but it's quite normal. Female actresses often find, when you turn them into hideous monsters, this is not what they're used to'.

The other two Cenobites were the bluntly nicknamed 'Butterball' and 'Chatterer', both of which were masks and chest appliances. The Chatterer was intended to be hunched over like a chimpanzee - hence the chattering - and in early tests the masks had pointed teeth.

Nicholas Vince, who played Chatterer, recalled why the design was changed, 'In the original makeup he had short pointed teeth, as if they had been filed down. And they were made, but Clive thought that they made him too inhuman, you needed to see that he *was* a human.'

While the Chatterer and Butterball appliances were simpler to achieve, they were worse for the performers to wear as Keen wrly said;

'The Chatterer, whom we nicknamed, 'Poor Bastard', because he can't speak, see or hear, was much easier to sculpt. That was basically an over-the-head appliance, as was the last Cenobite, the one with the shades.'

Vince remembered how exhausting the role was, 'He's probably my best friend and worst nightmare, because I owe so much to having played this part, but the actual physical experience of being put in sensory deprivation was fairly tough!'

The 'Butterball' Cenobite, much like Chatterer, was realized as a full face appliance and a torso appliance to show through the costume. The Butterball and Chatterer appliances were reused in Hellbound: Hellraiser II.

Simon Bamford, who wore the Butterball mask and costume, recalled it as being just as claustrophobic to wear as the Chatterer costume was for Nicholas Vince, with the added embarrassment that it disrupted filming,

'The first time we were led onto the set, the crew didn't know that Nick and I were blind (in the masks). I could only just hear, 'We need you to go over here' and I was going, muffled 'I can't hear!'. Next thing we knew it was 'Action!' and we were like, 'What?''

Sources:

• Fangoria #66, 'Putting the Hell in Hellraiser' by Philip Nutman
  
• Leviathan: The Story of Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (2015 documentary)
  

Read more on Hellraiser's special effects in the 'Part 4' article, covering the Engineer and Dragon.