The X-Files (1993) - Season 1 & 2

When The X-Files was commissioned, series creator Chris Carter had originally planned for filming to be done in his home city of Los Angeles. Most television productions at the time were filmed in LA, something Carter was already familiar with due to his earlier work for Disney.

What cut this short was Carter's insistence on realism; he had wished for an alien abduction premise set in the Pacific Northwest (also the setting of Twin Peaks, which Carter named as an inspiration), and nowhere in California was able to pass as the region.

Carter opted to move all filming to Vancouver, due to a combination of British Columbia's landscape, and saving on the budget. This raised a problem in that, at the time, Vancouver did not have any established makeup effects studios the same way that Los Angeles did.

Instead, The X-Files makeup effects were handled by Toby Lindala, who had been brought on the show by makeup artist Fern Levin, and had no real industry experience prior. In the series first season, Lindala worked entirely alone, with his 'studio' being his basement! Lindala's duties on the season were relatively simple, such as a nosebleed gag in the pilot episode.

One of Lindala's easier tasks was the alien fetus in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', realized as a sculpture. Lindala read medical books on fetal anatomy for inspiration.

The shots of worms writhing under their hosts skin in the episode 'Ice' was perhaps Lindala's most complex job at that point, as he explained in Cinefantastique; 'I wanted to keep it really subtle so you could see the shadow of something moving under the skin. We made casts of the backs of the actors’ necks, and reproduced that would match into all the wrinkles and folds in their necks. Underneath that we made this channel, a kind of S-curve on the one side and an arc on the other, which housed a cable. On the S-curve we had two monofilaments coming off a row of beads which we drilled holes into. We rigged it up so you could puppeteer these beads under the skin and make them inch along, so they would spread out. By pulling the other cable you could make them contract. It worked quite effectively.'

For the sequence of an infected dog - much harder to do a makeup appliance job on - Lindala utilized the same technique but instead with a hair-punched gelatin appliance stretched over a jug, and the resulting effect was shot in close-up

Another simple gag for Lindala was the mutant salamander hand in 'Young at Heart'.

Even with these simple makeup jobs, Lindala ran into problems; the nosebleed gag in 'Pilot' would fail causing fake blood would gush from the actress' hair instead, and the 'Ice' appliance often kept tearing. Lindala feared that this first major gig would also be his last.

Lindala no doubt was more anxious when working on the werewolf-themed 'Shapes', an episode that was made because, as director David Nutter said, 'We need a monster show, the masses want a monster show.' So that was a monster show for the (first) season.'

Lindala was able to realize the 'manitou' transformation via simple means; actor Ty Miller's forehead and cheekbones were built up with makeup to imply his skull structure was changing, with fake teeth and contact lenses completing the look.

To give the transformation a grisly touch, Lindala made a a gelatin hand puppet, that was built so that the 'skin' would rip. with the hair-punched appliance underneath showing through the tears, inspired by the motif of werewolves having their wolf-skin under their human-skin.

Lindala's 'Shapes' transformation puppet, with the actor of course out of shot!

There was still not enough money nor time to fabricate a proper werewolf suit. To solve this, Carter hired bits and pieces from Greg Cannom back in LA. Cannom provided Lindala with a suit Cannom's team had fabricated for 1987's Werewolf series, and a mask Cannom had made for the barn sequence in The Howling.

To polish up the mask and suit for its X-Files guise, Cannom also sent over Steve Prouty (now owner of Fusion FX), who assisted Lindala in redressing the Howling mask with a new hairdo.

The Werewolf suit and Howling mask supplied by Greg Cannom in 'Shapes'

The Howling mask being redressed by Prouty and Lindala for 'Shapes'

The first season's success led to Lindala having three more assistants, even if still using his basement as his workshop! His first intensive assignment of the new season was 'The Host', where his team was tasked with realizing the worm-like 'Flukeman'.

The Flukeman suit was built in just ten days, under 'insane hours' as Lindala described it; Darin Morgan, who wore the suit, recalled that it actually took 12 hours to fully apply the prosthetics and put on the suit. Lindala explained how the Flukeman costume was fabricated;

'We made a suit that came down to the elbows and the knees, to allow it a little bit more of that baggy sort of worm-like look. His feet cast actually (came out) in a straight-out position, but it's a neat look when you see him crawling around, and he's got these sort of slipper sort of look to his feet. And a facial prosthetic, contact lenses and teeth that came out of the prosthetic as well as the distended lips.'

As usual for rubber monster suits, wearing it was not a pleasant experience, and the water filming sequences added more to Lindala's workload as Morgan recalled;

'Each day that I wore the suit, I would have to be in water, and the water would destroy the whole thing. And so Toby had to rebuild everything from scratch each day, so it was just an ordeal. And I wore two pairs of contact lenses, one on top of the other. One of them was for the color, the other to create a kind of milky film over that. The contacts were the only things that didn't hurt. I barely knew they were in there. And the good thing too was that they were prescription. I could actually see in them.

The rest of the stuff was actually quite painful. The mask and the rubber smelled of sulphur and the whole thing was unpleasant. I had no air through the nose, so I didn't eat, because you had to eat and breathe at the same time. It was just impossible. Reading the script, I thought, I was going to do more things, and then once I was in the suit, I couldn't really act in it. I just tried to survive. You could barely move like that. Being underwater was actually pleasant, because it cooled everything down. It was very hot in there as well.'

Lindala and his small team were proud of the Flukeman suit (especially as it became one of the series most iconic monsters), but after filming Lindala still had one question about Darin Morgan's performance; 'How does he go to the restroom?'

In a 'Behind the Truth' featurette, Morgan revealed the disgusting truth; 'The thing was incredibly heavy. I couldn't talk. There was no hole for me to urinate. Sex was completely out of the question. I decided to relieve myself when in the water (filming with David Duchovny) cos I figured Duchovny would never find out. He's never gonna watch these things!''.

The Grey aliens in 'Duane Barry' also proved troublesome for Lindala, as the performers were children. To save fuss, only one child actor had their head cast as Lindala recalled, 'Try to cast the full head of an eight-year-old! She wasn‘t too impressed until we got her out of it.'

Adam Behr made the Grey masks' eyes, by heat-forming lexan over a pool ball to give it a round shape, and tinted with inks for the glossy black colour. The 'bodies' were onesies and gloves provided by the wardrobe department, and painted over by Lindala's team.

Lindala also made finger extensions for the gloves, a tedious task for him; 'That was a bit of a chore because working on these tiny little fingers and getting the molds was such a long process. We glued them on to the end of the gloves and just extended the forefingers'.

Filming was also awkward, as the children had to act next to Steve Railsback giving an intense performance as an alien abductee. One boy especially did not enjoy it as Lindala recalled; 'We put him in front of the bed, and Railsback is screaming bloody murder, and the camera comes back and the little guy just pulls his mask off and goes, ‘Where's my mom?“'. Poor kid!

In comparison, the Donnie Pfaster demon in 'Irresistible' was more standard, being a set of appliances worn on Nick Chinlund's face, neck, shoulders and hands. The rest of Chinlund's body was painted a reddish hue to complete the demonic look.

The Donnie demon appliances being sculpted

Much of Lindala's work on the second season (and onwards!) of The X-Files was on more grisly makeups such as the popping boils in 'F. Emasculata' (with the popping realized via air bladders), assorted disfigured corpses, or the advanced aging makeups in 'Død Kalm'.

Lindala's sculpts of David Duchovny's aged makeup appliances in 'Død Kalm'

Lindala also made a strikingly gruesome facial appliance for Kevin Conway in the episode 'Fresh Bones', as a hallucination that is only glimpsed briefly in the episode itself.

Perhaps one of the most effects-heavy episodes of the second season was 'Humbug', a humorous episode set in a carnival's freakshow. One of Lindala's makeups was the disfigured face of the freakshow museum's curator, a half-face and hand appliance on Alex Diakun.

Director Kim Manners was impressed with Lindala's handiwork; 'This was just one scene, and l didn't want to do too intricate a makeup job. l was hoping that if we didn't see it that clearly, it wouldn't have to be that detailed. But as it turns out, Toby did a very detailed job, so we did end up showing a little bit more of it than I originally thought we would'.

A more elaborate makeup was the 'Alligator Man', which was actor John Payne in a foam rubber suit and facial appliance to appear scaly and cracked. Another makeup appliance was the bulging tumor on Vincent Schiavelli's abdomen as conjoined twin Lanny

The episode's 'monster' was Lanny's conjoined twin Leonard, capable of splitting off from his body. Only briefly glimpsed in the episode, Leonard was realized as a puppet.

Note; I would REALLY like to know if there's any behind the scenes images of the Leonard puppet and various makeups in 'Humbug', as well as the demon makeup in 'Irresistible'.

Sources:

• Cinefantastique Vol 26 No. 6 / Vol 27 No. 1 (October 1995)
  
• 'F/X EFFECTS LINDALA'S SPECIALTY', Vancouver Sun, October 1997
  
• The Truth is Out There : The Official Guide to the X Files (Brian Lowry, 1998)
  
• Assorted 'Behind the Truth' featurettes.
  

Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) - Part 3: 'It's A Good Life'

Continued from the Part 2 article on Twilight Zone: The Movie which focused on Craig Reardon's work on the prologue and 'Nightmare at 20'000 Feet' segment.

The Twilight Zone movie's other effects-heavy segment was Joe Dante's retelling of the episode 'It's A Good Life', itself based on Jerome Bixby's short story. Joe Dante opted to update the premise for the 1980s, with Dante's love for cartoons shaping its story.

Realizing the special makeup effects of 'It's A Good Life' was Rob Bottin, who had previously worked with Dante on The Howling; one of Bottin's more simple taskes was the mouthless makeup appliance worn by Cherie Currie as one of Anthony's victims.

Dante and Bottin decided to run with the idea of cartoons coming to life thanks to Anthony's powers, with these 'flesh and blood' cartoons being more grotesque than their two-dimensional counterparts. About the influences, Dante stated;

'Before Rob designed the creatures I ran Tex Avery’s cartoon The Cat Who Hated People for him, which has a lot of eyes popping and jaws dropping. So that was definitely an influence. Also, Rob has a fixation on the work of an artist for Kar Kulture buffs, Big Daddy Roth. Roth used to draw these bizarre characters with huge heads driving tiny cars, and during the mid-Sixties, they were everywhere. So, as a result of Rob’s cravings for these things, there’s a lot of Roth’s influence in the designs for our Twilight Zone creatures'.

The first of the living cartoons is a giant, fleshy rabbit that pops out of a hat. Bottin recalled about the inspiration; 'The rabbit coming out of the hat was my favorite. That was inspired by Rocky and Bullwinkle. Bullwinkle was always saying, ‘And now, I’ll pull a rabbit from this hat,’ and instead he’d pull out a lion or something — ‘Oops, wrong hat.’ So that’s where it came from. Nothing new in Hollywood. When we talked about the rabbit, Joe said he wanted something creepy — not disgusting like the stuff in The Thing, but not funny like a cartoon. The idea was to come up with a sinister, sneaky, evil-looking rabbit. I did three or four sketches, and finally came up with the one we used. Originally, I wanted to put hair on it — in patches, like some giant diseased rabbit — but time ran out.'

A collapsible rabbit puppet was made for the shot where bursts out of the hat. Bottin detailed the technique; 'I had this air cannon device that Doug Beswick built for me on The Howling. You put your compressed air into the cannon, which has a quick-release valve and solenoid to let the air out — and you can figure out that a certain amount of air will fill up a certain amount of space, so you can get a quick inflation without worrying about it popping. 

The inflatable rabbit puppet. 

 

The shooting of the inflatable rabbit puppet did not go perfectly, resulting in a rather amusing incident as Bottin remembered in Cinefex;

As a test, we took our rabbit balloon and shoved it down inside this hat and pushed the button. The rabbit popped up, inflated perfectly, and then tipped over and fell down — which was discouraging because we were getting close to filming. I figured the balloon must be too heavy, so I had the guys pour up another one that was lighter, and then Dave Kelsey had the idea of using helium to keep it upright. So we filled the new rabbit with helium, and it worked. It stayed up and it floated and we put little weights on the arms to balance it out. It was great. So here we are with this giant rabbit floating in our doorway — like something from the Macy’s parade — and I decided we had to have a picture of it. 

Dave said he’d hold it while I went to get my camera, but I told him it wasn’t necessary because the thing was just floating there — which was true. The trouble was, the little fishing weights that we used to stabilize it were fastened on with duct tape, which unfortunately didn’t stick very well to the rubber. I got back with my camera and the rabbit was gone. I started looking around, and then Dave Kelsey points up in the sky and there it was, drifting away over Van Nuys. Some kid probably has it in his room now. What made it especially bad was that we didn’t have time to make another one, so we had to use the original balloon with the cannon and a few wires on fishing poles to make everything stand up right. We also shot some smoke up through the hat when the rabbit came up. It wasn’t the greatest effect. In fact, it was pretty embarrassing — especially since I’d told Joe and everybody how great it was going to be. For a quick cut, though, it seemed to work okay.'

The rest of the rabbit's shots were achieved with an articulated puppet as Bottin explained; 'The hat was floating with suspension bars and cables and we had a spring steel rod going up through the rabbit. The rod was rather long, so we could stand below the camera and shake it to make everything vibrate. The arms were real rubbery, so they wobbled a lot. The head movements were controlled with cables and a couple of rods coming out the back and into the set. The jaw opened and closed, and it had a snarl mechanism around the lips which required about twenty cables to operate. I wanted to put a tongue on it that would come out and lick Kevin McCarthy’s face, but we didn’t have time. The ears were just marionetted from above. During one take, we had a wire break unexpectedly, and one of the ears flopped over. Joe thought it looked pretty good, so he cut it into the picture.'

The second of the living cartoons, the gremlin that comes out of the TV, required several puppets for its different toony shapes, as Bottin explained,

'We did five creatures, all of which were supposed to be variations of the same character, but that didn’t really seem to come off as a concept. In real cartoons, the characters go through extreme changes. If they get hit on the toe with a hammer, their jaw drops open and their ears stand up like trumpets — they totally change shape, and then they return to their original form. So what I did was come up with one basic character, which had small ears and a big snozzle, and then just took it to its extremes. The problem was that we didn’t have enough time or money to do the in-betweens. If we’d been able to show them going from one form to the next, it would have been much more clear.

The first form of the cartoon gremlin, which spins out of the TV in a manner similar to the Tasmanian Devil out of Looney Tunes, was achieved as a fairly static puppet, though the 'whirlwind' effect was *not* added in post-production as Bottin detailed;

'Everyone thinks it’s an optical but it wasn’t. I’d seen displays for Michelin tires where they have two tires fastened together at an angle — and when they’re rotated, it creates an interesting effect. I thought something like that would be perfect for us. The creature inside was basically a fiberglass dummy, with a few movable rubber parts so it could do things like hang its tongue out and wiggle its ears. Then we took some hula hoops, altered them to various sizes, and mounted them around the figure, with larger ones on the top and smaller ones at the bottom. Bob Worthington was in charge of that project. He did the head that comes off in The Thing — the part where it slides onto the floor and crawls away.'

The dummy was attached to a cart under the set, that had a slit cut through the floor to move the prop across the set; the hoops were coated in Scotchlite tape, and the sequence was photographed through a beam-spitter, with the yellow-light front-projected on the spinning hoops.

Bottin stated; There was an electronic break that could stop the figure very quickly and it had a timer on it so we could tell exactly when it would be facing the camera. When Joe said, ‘Stop,’ Bob would punch the button, and it stopped perfectly every time. Then they’d pull a ring off and start it up again. The way the rings were mounted, they wobbled back and forth, which meant that we didn’t even have to go back and composite to get a double image.”

The effect was enhanced with special prop furniture, also made in Bottin's shop, that could be pulled apart to split as the spinning puppet passed through them. John Hora recalled about the shoot;

“We shot that at about one frame per second. The figure took something like ten minutes to work its way across the floor and through the sofa, and lots of times it would only make it about two-thirds of the distance and then bind up. So we’d have to go back and start all over again. We ended up spending all of one day, just getting three takes on that thing.”

The gremlin than has a shot where, cartoon Big Bad Wolf style, it huffs and puffs gusts of air with a cartoonish expression. This was according to Bottin, a more articulated puppet;

'...after the first one spins out and screeches to a halt (...) we went to the next one which puffs out its cheeks and blows a stream of CO2 across the room to get a cartoon whistle look. You could see the lips extend out about a foot, and we had bladders in the cheeks and ears that rotated. But it was a quick shot, and the way it was framed, you couldn’t really see that we also had it rigged so that when it was inhaling, the shoulders reared back and the chest expanded as it took a breath.'

Back shot showing the gremlin puppet's paintjob - notice the green spots 

 

Bottin described how the third form of the gremlin, again a puppet, was realized; 'The next version had cable-operated lips for expressions, and its jaw could drop way down. It also had smooth-on eyes that expanded — nothing very sophisticated — just guys standing off-stage blowing them up. The ears rolled around and the head totally rotated. So did the body. Then we put prosthetic arms on one of our guys and had him down on the floor doing things with his hands.'

The next - and in the finished film, final - form of the gremlin was realized as a more elaborate puppet as Bottin explained;

'Next came the version we called Tex, because it looked the most like something Tex Avery would come up with. Archie Gillet engineered it. Unfortunately, you didn’t get to see much of that one either, but the legs spun around cartoon-style, shooting out smoke like tires burning rubber. The shoulders rotated, and its hands turned and stretched. The eyes extended out about five feet on springs, and smoke shot out of its nose and ears. The jaw hung open, scratching against the floor, and the tongue unrolled like a party favor. We had a lot of fun with that one.'

However, the intended final form of the gremlin never actually made it to the final film, and was intended to be its most threatening; as Bottin recalled;

'Our final character was the most elaborate and expensive one of the bunch but it really didn’t work in the context of the film. The idea was to have it crouched on the ground like some great fleshy tarantula with a Jimmy Durante nose, bobbing and weaving and snarling about — kind of like the Tasmanian Devil when he stops whirling around and starts growling and making hideous faces. The thing was down on all fours, and had hand hands and feet hands. Those were done by having guys underneath the set with their hands stuck up through the floor into prosthetics that blended off into their arms.'

'There were also people underneath working all kinds of facial mechanisms, and other guys down there with cables moving the whole body around. When we set it up on the stane everybody was pretty excited about it. But when we saw it on film, it was just a little too weird. For one thing, it wasn’t smooth. We didn’t really have time to rehearse it and coordinate everybody’s action, and so it was just sort of randomly twitching. But the main thing, I think, is that it was just too bizarre. Somehow it started looking almost human — when it was supposed to be looking like a cartoon. Joe showed me a rough cut of the movie with that in it, but I had a feeling as we watched it that he’d end up cutting it out.'

Dante gave his reasons for removing the gremlin's final form; 'That last creature was really the scariest monster in the segment. But it also happened that it was the most impossible one to cut away to without getting the impression that it was something that had wandered in from another movie. I tried to work it in, but it just didn’t fit. We had to cut it.'

Shooting all these elaborate effects was no mean feat as Dante recalled; 'It took a long time to shoot those creatures — which was frustrating. On the one hand, you’re pulling your hair; but on the other, you realize that you hired Rob to make it good — and if it takes time to make it good, okay. You have to be critical of what you’re doing, and you have to insist on reshooting your effects if they don’t come out right. Today’s audience sophistication in terms of special effects really demands that.'

Bottin's own feelings on the segment were nonchalant; 'There was a lot of work on Twilight Zone but no great technical achievements. Most of the basic techniques we’d already developed, and we used pretty much the same process on all the characters. But I’m proud of what we did in the amount of time we had. In two-and-a-half months, we built five mechanical puppets, and did the rabbit out of the hat and the girl with no mouth. And it was fun. I’ll probably never get a chance to do that sort of thing again.'

Sources: 

• Cinefex #14 'Shadows and Substance' by Don Shay and Paul Sammon