The Miniature Effects of Species (1995)

(This article is a spin-off from the main article covering the makeup and creature effects of Species, so please read that one if you want to read up on how they realized Sil!)

Even before he worked on Species, trains had been a recurring image in much of H.R. Giger's artwork, much of it for unrealized projects. Giger recalled in Species Design; "My fascination with trains dates back to my childhood and I always hoped for the oppurtunity to use these ideas in a film. Years ago, I had worked on my train concepts for three-quarters of a year with Ridley Scott on a project called 'The Train', then subsequently I worked out a tunneling concept beneath Switzerland in order to manage all of the nation's transportaton needs."

Giger mentioned the failed Ridley Scott project to Cinefantastique when discussing the Ghost Train. "That was entirely my idea. The script had nothing about the train or a 'Ghost Train' nightmare. Years ago, I worked on several train concepts with Ridley Scott. When I saw in the script of Species that the little Sil escapes on the train and has strange nightmares, I had the idea I could work my Ghost Train into her dreams. They had not planned money for it in the budget, but they promised to consider it. I was so fascinated that I started with train ideas right away. (Frank) Mancuso said, 'Be careful', but I told him I will do this train anyway."

Giger immediately got to work on the Ghost Train model, as he was worried that constructing it too late in the schedule would mean it would never be filmed. Giger's very first model of the Ghost Train was was just some anatomy skulls mounted on model train motors!

The very first (and scrapped) Ghost Train.

Giger knew his first model was not convincing, and so made a new model. He explained to Cinefantastique, "The first version of the train, which we made out of normal skulls, was not so good. Then Cony de Fries visited me and saw in the garden one of my older sculptures, a biomechanoid head without eyes, one I made about twenty years ago. He suggested that we use this head but with bigger teeth. I could see this could work much better."

In the same interview, Giger elaborated, "Cony and I started on the locomotive skull together, and it was completed by Andy Schedler of Atelier Formart, who built with me the other cars. The wheels and motors were made by Ball und Sohn, Modellbau, of Stein am Rhein, the finest model train manufacturer in the world. They make trains in all sizes."

The revised Ghost Train model.

In Species Design, Giger went into how taxing it was to visit so many freelance modelmakers. "The Ghost Train made stops at a number of Swiss workshops because none of us working on it were professional model train builders, so every piece had to be made two or three times. But from this I learned a lot about how things can go wrong.

If the train became a problem for a particular shop, it was quickly trucked off to another. These length round trips to all my craftsmen made it very expensive. But Cony and Andy often contributed very good suggestions and that is something I would not have gotten the benefit of if I had given it to professional fabricators.

Initially the train was at Andy Schedler's atelier, then at Zollinger, then De Fries, and then back to Schedler. The next top was at the K. Wolfensberger shop and this was followed by a stay at Stahl und Traum, where we built a train station I designed and later, fully detailed with assistance of Tania Tkatchuk. Two more cars were added at this time."

Giger himself sank roughly $80'000 into constructing the Ghost Train model and its surrounding diorama. In addition to the model train's own motors, it also was fitted with mechanized mouthes, tongues and hoses that all functioned to give the idea that the Ghost Train was a monster; in short it was a creature effect as much as a model shot.

In the original draft of the Ghost Train, the train was fitted with massive vacuums that hoovered up hapless passengers, all of which were lookalikes to the young Sil's human guise, and these passengers were then mulched in the jaw's of the train's 'face'.

The nightmare sequence was to end with Sil sucked into the train's vacuums and devoured just before waking up; a personification of the young Sil's latent fear of sexually aggressive men, as in Giger's words the train was a 'genetic memory' of her home planet.

All the while, Giger had been sending Frank Mancuso and the Species production team videotape footage of their progress every few weeks. Frank Mancuso eventually approved the sequence and had all of the miniatures shipped for filming in Los Angeles.

The Ghost Train's LA filming was overseen by Richard Edlund's Boss Film Studios, who were handled the rest of Species' visual effects. Richard Edlund in particular was very impressed with the Ghost Train model!

As with much of his ideas for Species, Giger was about to be very disappointed. It was decided that the Ghost Train sequence, as Giger had originally planned it, was too elaborate and expensive for the studio. As Giger explained in Species Design;

"MGM, which found itself in the midst of post-production, had to curtail expenses and was only offering me half of my costs on making the train. They were also balking at using the kind of expensive effects I had hoped to see utilized for the best realization of the sequence. I was therefore forced to grant consent to a simplified version of my idea, in order that at least the train might be included in the film and that all of my work and costs would not go for naught.

A designer who insists on determining how his creation should appear in a film is quite a nuisance on an American film, crewed by specialists in an almost military hierarchy. The train station, which had taken considerable effort to construct, was left entirely out of the shot. The vacuum arms were amputated to eliminate the expensive composite effects the dream would have required."

This new sequence was very brief, and just showed the Ghost Train roaring towards Sil, with her waking up just before it hit her. Gone was the queasy imagery of flesh-eating vehicles or sexual subtext, which was pretty ironic for a film ostensibly about base instincts!

As disappointed as he was with how little screentime it had in the final picture, Giger was still proud of having made the Ghost Train, and all in Switzerland.

"I'm very happy with the train we did. If there was more time, we could have also made the vacuum cleaners function perfectly. I thought Boss Films could fix it easy in L.A. With only the help of the companies here in Zurich, a terrific Ghost Train was built, proving that we can make not only cuckoo clocks in Switzerland. It cost me a lot of my own money, but many of the rights still belong to me after the film."

Sources:

• Cinefantastique Vol. 27 #7 (March 1996)
• Species Design (H.R. Giger, 1995)

Species II (1998)

The box office success of the original Species meant that a sequel was a given. Producer Frank Mancuso decided to avoid obvious CGI effects this time around, having seen the disparaging reactions towards the first film's digital Sil effects.

Mancuso hired much of the same artists who handled the first film's creature effects, namely H.R. Giger and Steve Johnson's XFX Inc. Mancuso was eager to work with Johnson again, as he said in Cinefantastique:

'I find him to be very easy to work with, very clear, and he knows Giger. Steve is very production savvy that effects don’t work in a vacuum, they have to work on the set. They have to work efficiently on a set. We’re not going to spend all the time and money that we spend and be ready and then have these things break down when they get here. He really is very hands on and makes sure everything is all right.'

Johnson himself confirmed Mancuso's move to keep away from obvious digital effects, 'The movie has about three times the effects of the first one. If there was a general mandate on this film it was to shy away from any computer generated characters. I was brought in to pretty much design all the effects sequences in the film.'

In the first Species, Mancuso had went to Giger first, and then hired XFX to realize his designs. This time however, Mancuso went to Johnson first, with Giger playing second fiddle. Giger voiced his misgivings in Cinefantastique:

'Steve Johnson, without question, is one of the best in fabricating articulated and animatronic creatures, but, I think, his work in this case would have been better served if he could have waited until I finished my designs rather than trying to get into my head and guessing at what he thought I would like to do.

In the end, I was in the position of having to work on Steve's designs, not, strictly, on my own original ones. This is not what I do best, to make someone else's designs look ‘Gigeresque,’ or try to improve upon them. My ideal way of working is always the same. I start with a blank canvas. In the case of a film, I really have to start from the very beginning and develop the character in my own way, based upon the needs of the script.'

The Eve sculpture and mould.

Later still in the same issue of Cinefantastique, Giger confirmed his presence on the project would be, much like on the original film, a long-distance one.

'I have good reason to hope that I was not brought into the project only because of the strong marketing value of my name, but because of the sincere desire on the part of Frank Mancuso and [director] Peter Medak to see that a certain continuity of design is maintained from the first film to this one. (...)

I must remain, for the most part, in Switzerland, to be home and work on my other projects, and can not be on hand in Los Angeles for the amount of time it would take to personalty supervise the laborious design and fabrication process.

When necessity or an invitation requires it, I am available for a quick cross-Atlantic visit and I did spend several days in California with Medak, Mancuso and Steve Johnson and the animatronics people at XFX.'

The Eve arm being sculpted.

One reason for Johnson getting to work first, with Giger following his lead, was due to the heavy workload XFX had - and that XFX had only ten weeks to get everything ready before the cameras started rolling! Johnson explained in Cinefantastique:

'On the first film Giger was brought onto the film before I was. In this case I was on the film for about two months before Giger was. Considering the short lead time, I had to get started, so I'd done reams of designs and started the preliminary work before he started giving us designs. It was a much more collaborative working relationship this time because we kind of had to go in the direction that I had already started, based on our time restraints.

Just as we did on the first (Species) a lot of faxes and phone calls went back and forth. At one point Giger did come out for about a week to basically iron out the look of the final Patrick creature. He worked it into something that he was pleased with.'

Early tests of the Eve suit.

While there would be no repeat of the 'frog-like ugliness' Boss Film had done on the first film, more subtle digital effects were supplied by Digital Magic to slightly enhance the practical effects. Digital Magic's Ralph Maier stated in Cinefantastique:

'The difference on this show was that all of the creature effects were done practical which hasn’t been done a lot lately. Here, CG was being used pretty much as a helper. Someone will repair different areas of the practical creature. There’s a puppeteer inside the creature, and many times there are shots where his arms and legs are outside of the creature and they have to be removed or replaced in some way. We would get together and decide how CGI would track new areas to replace the performer in those shots.

So there is a lot of integration. It was important to get the two worlds to work well together. Steve was very open to that and was instrumental in helping us figure those elements out.'

Monica Staggs in the Eve suit between takes.

The sequel's new female alien, Eve, would be realized the same way as Sil was on the original film, via puppetry and a creature suit. The design would be similar to the original Sil, but with some modifications. Johnson explained about the suit;

'We extended her arms slightly. We actually extended her head. The character’s head is thrown up and forward so she’s got a much longer neck. Wc can see through the face and see the bones under the face. The most interesting thing we did was build the suit in a way where it really looked like the puppet.'

The Eve suit's mask on display in the Barbican Centre, London, in 2017.

'Instead of going with standard foam rubber we used silicon for the suit so it would be translucent and then we used vacuum-form shells in key areas so you could really get a great degree of transluccncy. We hired a very, very thin actress, Monica Staggs, in order to build out the torso so it wouldn't look too big

'Then we’d get the translucency of a six-inch deep empty cavity that we could shoot light through. So we have a series of silicon and translucent vacuum formed shells that make the actress in the suit look like the puppet. We extended her head, we extended her arms and then, most interestingly, we extended her legs.

We brought in a prosthetician who makes prosthetic legs for people who lost a leg. We had him make stilts for the actress with pointed toes and wc cast her feet with the legs pointing down and then extended her legs 10-11 inches and built feet below that. She was able to walk on these without any type of flying harness and what it did was give her a very inhuman shape. A very supermodel, sexy kind of look.'

Promotional photo of the Eve suit.

The Eve puppets were required mainly for the dream sequences where Eve fantasizes about mating with Patrick, the infected astronaut. A male 'alien' Patrick puppet was made for these shots as well. Johnson was disappointed with how the puppets were shot, however.

'We went to all that this trouble and expense to do something pretty groundbreaking at that point. Had we not done The Abyss, we wouldn't have been able to (...) make the character, as Giger designed it, completely transparent, so you could see its understructure. But the director of photography (...) never backlit the character, which is how you prove it right? If you shoot something translucent, and its lit from the front, you're not really gonna see it!'

The dream sequence puppets were filmed underwater, fitted with mechanized 'hair', that could be operated to write and slither like vines. Giger however took umbrage to how the tentacles were made, referring to them as 'bananas'.

Along with the tentacles, specialized body part props were made to show the two humans transforming. These props were hollow and filled up with a tube of flesh-coloured liquid on camera. When the footage was reversed, it looked like flesh was melting away.

A hollow limb prop with fluid tubes attached.

Giger had envisioned Patrick's alien form as the same as Sil & Eve, but male. Johnson however, had other ideas for the film's main monster. Johnson stated in Cinefantastique:

'From the beginning I disagreed with (Giger) and Frank Mancuso agreed with me as well as Peter Medak. We felt that we had a chance here in the finale to blow the audience away with a creature that’s never been seen before. Something really, really amazing. So in order to satisfy both what we felt was necessary for the script and Giger, we did two versions (of Patrick). The human version and then the fighting version.

The way we justified that is that during the love-making transformation scene both Eve and Patrick are human versions of Giger characters. (...) We then worked with Giger to design something Gigeresque [for the fighting Patrick) that would be much more terrifying and much bigger and much more of a climactic image.'

The Patrick monster maquette.

In a later interview, Johnson was more blunt as to how and why he influenced the Patrick monster's design.

'Giger was brought on again to design, and he refused to start designing until he had signed the contract, which makes sense. But I was already a part of the project and crossing off the days like a prisoner in jail until the shooting day, and I'm getting no designs!

So I'm like, 'Fuck this! I'm the guy who's gonna have his dick on the chopping block come the first day of shooting, not Giger! He's gonna be in the Swiss Alps playing with his train sets! So we started experimenting and doing mock-ups for the Patrick monster.'

The Patrick suit's head tentacles.

At the time of the film's release, Johnson said 'What we end up with is something completely inhuman in shape, enormous in size and translucent and I think it’s really going to screw with the audience because they’re not going to know how it’s operated.'

Later on, he revealed how the monster was done. 'We had leg extensions that gave the monster backwards-bent legs (...) the performer inside the suit, his arms came into the torso, which is longer than a full human shape. So his arms out into the torso, and they grab rods that control the creature's fake legs in the front. The head was hydraulic and cable-controlled. '

The Patrick monster's animatronic head.

The Patrick monster head-splitting puppet.

The Patrick monster two-headed puppet.

Johnson also explained how the Patrick monster was able to move on camera, as greenscreen was not an option thanks to Mancuso's resolution to avoid obvious digital effects.

'We had to take the guy's weight via an overhead gantry, as this creature had to move. We set up a rig out of frame above, that had a system of pulleys that went straight to a flying harness through a hole in the suit. It was like a huge (marionette) puppet with the guy inside doing some of the stuff. It was very time consuming!'

Compared to the first film, Species II ramped up the gore and body horror, which added to XFX's workload. One very complicated effect was the woman who dies from one of Patrick's alien spawn violently bursting out her belly. Johnson explained the effect;

'It was the old half-body through the wall trick. The actress is (behind the set's fake wall) with a prosthetic belly and pair of fake legs. From behind the fake wall, we have to get all our cables, levers and people. I think the baby was a hand puppet? It took so many operators! The one bad thing about practical effects is the nerves before the director yells 'action!', all I can do is cross my fingers and hope the damn thing works.'

The mutant baby puppet.

A similar effect was used for the death of the female astronaut, with a large tentacle puppet. A grisly prop was made for the appendage suffocating her husband's face.

Another complicated body horror effect was the shot of tentacles sprouting out of Patrick's body as he's having sex. This was achieved as an animatronic dummy with puppet tentacles, as Johnson explained:

'Making love to a live actress, you can compare the two in the shot. That’s a pretty tall order if you think about it. I was nervous about it all the way up to the point where the cameras rolled. But when the first shot was done Peter (Medak) and I were watching it on the video monitor, our jaws were both hanging open and I thought ‘Wow.’ We had a full hollow body to put our mechanics in for the erupting tentacles, but it made it very difficult because of the absolute realism required. I'm real pleased the way it turned out, though.'

In a later interview, Johnson revealed more about the Patrick sex dummy and, ahem, a little bit of method acting on the actress' part. 'We made a full body, silicon, nude body duplicate of Patrick, that was mechanized to fuck, and also mechanized to have these tentacles grow out of it. And it was naked, every hair was put in individually, the head was mechanized too. A lot of it was kinetic reaction, but a lot of it was mechanical.

How we got the thrusting? We had a real girl on the bed with her legs spread. We put the puppet on top of her, in the right position, but in order to get the full body to thrust, we had a huge rod coming between the girls legs and through the bed. And we had a guy under the bed (puppeteering) it with a fulcrum. And the girl dug it because it was like a hundred thousand dildo shaped like a man, as that rod was doing what a real cock was supposed to do!'

Another mechanized body prop was required for the shot of one of Patrick's 'sons' lifting itself up to the ceiling and cocooning himself. Johnson explained,

'We made a steel armature that was jointed exactly like a human skeleton, and then we cast a solid silicon body, from a mould and sculpture of the boy. Solid silicon, very expensive, but what you get, with the jointed steel armature and weight of the silicon, but you get a (prop) boy that weighs the same as a human!

The kid dummy's upside down, and we put 14-foot tentacles coming out of his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. We just janked them through its head, and reversed the footage. And we mechanized his head to look up'.

The close-up shot of a tentacle sneaking out of the boy's nose was achieved with a large face sculpture, which was blended in digitally with the child actor. Similar effects utulizing dummy heads and puppet tentacles were used for the shot of tentacles coming out of Patrick's mouth.

Another elaborately nasty effect supplied by XFX was the dissected corpse dummy, fitted with a collapsible head out of which a fanged tentacle puppet would burst out of.

Several other gore gags were supplied by the XFX crew, such as an exploding dummy head, a severed head dummy for the aftermath, and a gored gut prosthetic. The latter effect also needed Christopher Allen Nelson to have alien prosthetics over his arm.

The final of XFX's effects were the pulsating cocoons that Patrick's deadly spawn are incubuting inside of. It was Bill Bryan who came up with the effect, according to transformation effects supervisor Joel Harlow.

'Bill Bryan had come up with this way to pull and stretch these plastic garbage bags into interesting shapes. So when you inflated them, whether with air or water, they would go from almost nothing to these giant things'.

Bill Bryan himself explained the effect, 'The plastic bag will do a sort of pulley routine, it's very lively looking, very much a living creature. We found that by yanking on the plastic you can make texture on it!.'

Johnson also discussed how arduous it was to get the cocoon sets working on the set. 'In this film we have 40 chrysalis working at the same time over three levels of a barn. Basically what we had to do to get these chrysalis operating was to work day and night shifts for a week and bring that set to life. Every inch of the set is living. It's a pretty amazing sight.

When I watched the dailies I got as excited as a tittle kid. It's not something we sculpted, molded and then mechanized. We fabricated them out of heat manipulated plastic and we operate them with positive and negative air flow for a more organic look. '

They all had to be ready to die when sprayed with the substance that kills them. Once they die we have a vacuum that sucks them down as well as tentacles that shoot out that are motivated once again by air so tentacles start flailing as they start to shrivel up.'

Despite the sequel's poor reception, Johnson was happy with the picture and his team's work on it. 'I was really happy with our effects, and I never, ever say that! Maybe I was happy with the oppurtunity to be able to go so far and try things that most people wouldn't try? Maybe the movie isn't good, and I'm just delusional cos of my effects but the whole experience was really good for me. It was really fun for the whole crew!'

'My team, some of the best guys in the business who I'd worked for years, so we had developed almost a mental telepathy. Leonard Macdonald, Joel Harlow, Eric Fiedler, Chris Nelson...people who've gone on to win Oscars and Emmys, and open their own studios! It was an all star team!'

Giger however, did not share the same positive attitude and denounced the sequel at once. Already burned from the first Species, Giger's behavior during production was sour, with Johnson remembering how Giger vented out his contempt for Frank Mancuso.

'If Mancuso made (Giger) angry about something, he would draw incredibly detailed pictures of Sil buttfucking (Mancuso) so hard, exploding with blood and vomit out of his mouth. It was clearly Frank Mancuso Jr. being fucked by Sil, and he would write these terrible things with it! This was not one time, he would do this over, and over, and over! It was pretty funny!'

Sources:

• Cinefantastique Vol. 30 #1 (May 1998)
• 'Creature Creations: The Effects of Species II' featurette