Monsters On Screen: Full Eclipse (1993)

Alterian Creature Crew (now Alterian Studios) handled the makeup effects for Anthony Hickox' lycanthrope police thriller. The project was supervised by Tony Gardner, who had worked with Hickox on his earlier genre mashup, the vampire western Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat.

Most of Alterian's duties went to fabricating the bodysuits worn by 'the Pack', as well as the first and second stages of each werewolf's transformation. The second stage makeups, which consisted of brow and claw appliances, took four hours to apply on each performer.

The 'stage three' makeup was more complicated, as Gardner explained; 'Bruce Payne is the only person who enters stage three. That's a big appliance makeup which goes from his collabone over his head and covers him entirely, which big fake ears and hair and stuff like that. It's a much larger cranium and you see a lot more skull structure.'

The third-stage makeup was designed and applied by David W. Smith, and made it on the cover of Fangoria #129. Incidentally, Payne also portrayed the vampire Harker in Howling VI.

The final werewolf form of Garou was constructed by Alterian, with animatronics installed in the head. The suit proved to be troublesome to film, according to Hickox;

'Well, my favourite werewolf that I’ve done is the Waxwork one. For some reason I just love that one by Bob Keen. I love Bob. And I love Tony Gardner, but the thing with the end werewolf is that it was done very late so we couldn’t really work and refine it. It’s like a first draft of what it was meant to be, and it kind of just always pissed me off that we didn’t get into it earlier.'

'It’s not really the design, it’s the fact it’s so unmovable. It’s kind of like wearing a suit of armour. Like, the guy inside couldn’t even move the wolf! I kinda wanted a World War Z version of a werewolf; a fast moving one, that’s why he’s climbing all over the crate at the end. CGI would have been great in those days! Emotionally, yeah, it does what you want it to do, but it was all put together in the cutting, and it was tough to cut. It was just a guy in a suit, and that suit was really fucking heavy!