'Originally John, Steven and I were going to do one episode each — with our own crews, which is something that hasn’t been done too often. John wanted to do one of his own stories, but Steven’s first thought was to remake ‘It’s a Good Life,’ about the little kid with truly awful powers. That’s the segment I ultimately inherited. A bit later, George Miller was visiting from Australia, and he happened to be sitting in on a meeting one day with John, Steven, myself, Richard Matheson and some reporters from 20-20.
And Steven was saying: ‘The Twilight Zone movie should be great! It’ll be just like the old days, with every director doing exactly what he wants. And hey — there’s George! George, why don’t you do one?’ So George got to do one. You had to be there — literally. He ended up doing ‘Nightmare at 20,000 feet’ — mainly because Steven claimed that, as a kid, when William Shatner opened his plane window in the original episode and saw this creature staring back, it was the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen. He kept going around saying, ‘We’ve got to get this on the screen.’ But, actually, he didn’t want to do that episode himself, either. So George did it.'Craig Reardon supplied the makeup effects for the prologue segment directed by Landis, where Dan Aykroyd plays a jolly hitchhiker who turns out to be a bloodthirsty ghoul. Reardon had previously worked under Spielberg for Poltergeist and ET, as well as under Rick Baker on films such as An American Werewolf in London. Reardon described how he got the job;
'John was working on the prologue. A little short thing that he'd always wanted to do. John originally wanted Dan Aykroyd as the driver and Rick Baker to actually play the guy that turned into this thing. Of course, Rick wanted to do it, but Warner Brothers, who had Rick at work on Greystoke in England, wasn't ready to sacrifice Baker's services on such an important project, even for a few days. So Rick recommended me - not for the acting, of course, but for the makeup - and John rethought the casting; he put Albert Brooks behind the wheel and made Aykroyd the passenger.'So the first thing I had to come up with was, what would Aykroyd become? At one point, Landis said that he could get the keys to Rick Baker's studio from his dad, who was house-sitting for him, and get one of the Nazi werewolf heads from American Werewolf. I wasn't sure that would play very well, and much preferred the idea of doing something that would specifically fit to Danny. I had a notion to recycle the design for the ghost head that was to come out of the closet in Poltergeist. I brought a picture of it in to show to John, and he became very enthused about the idea; then, perhaps a week later, the picture appeared in a magazine.'
Reardon discussed how he did the Akyroyd ghoul makeup, the design of which took many cues from Lon Chaney's makeups in classic horror films as well as his unused Poltergeist head;
'We did a typical life cast of him, except that I pulled his nose up into more of a Phantom of the Opera-type configuration, held it there, and then took the life mask so that that look could be incorporated into the final product. Then I took the life cast and sculpted directly over his features in plastilene, putting a lot of heavy wrinkles on him to get kind of a dried apple look. From there, it was a simple matter to make a foam mask.I decided on a mask, by the way, because my feelings were that neither John nor Dan would be crazy about my spending a couple of hours getting him into a more elaborate disguise. There was no particular subtext or discussion of the history of that creature. I just had this nasty apparition I hadn’t been able to use in Poltergeist, and I took that as a departure point. We even used the same kind of bluish face. I told John we could change the skin color if he wanted, but he said, ‘No, go ahead and make it blue.’
In putting it on, we pulled Danny’s lower eyelids down by affixing the skin under his eyes to itself, so that his eyes would droop open horrifically and show the outer orbits — rather like Lon Chaney did, using two wire monocles, for London After Midnight. Also in the London After Midnight vein, we had a set of sharp, pointed teeth for him to wear. For those, we began by taking a cast of Danny’s teeth —just as an orthodontist would — with a little dental tray filled with an alginate material that gels in about four minutes.
With that, you have the equivalent of a rubber mold from which you can cast replica teeth. The character teeth are then sculpted in clay right over the replicas, and another mold is made of that, from which the finished denture can be cast in hard dental acrylic plastic. We also had some long fingernails for him. The whole idea was very broad — almost silly, in a way. My feeling was that the creature should look frightening — but then again, it wouldn’t be too bad if the whole thing were also a bit tongue-in-cheek. John felt the same.'
Unfortunately, Spielberg replaced this prospective script with the schmaltzy (and devoid of makeup effects!) 'Kick the Can' segment, which he made after John Landis's callous lack of regard for on-set safety resulted in a helicopter accident that got Vic Morrow and two children brutally killed when shooting the 'Time Out' segment.
Reardon assumed his work for Twilight Zone was done, but then was asked to work on George Miller's segment, an update of Richard Matheson's 'Nightmare at 20'000 Feet'. Matheson had never been impressed with the television version of his gremlin, calling it a 'teddy bear' compared to the creature in his short story. Miller and Reardon opted to follow Matheson's description of the creature as Reardon recalled;'I was in Nashville bashing up Richard Thomas’ face for a TV movie about Hank Williams Jr., when I had a call forwarded to me from Dennis Jones, the Twilight Zone production manager, saying he wanted me to come talk about the George Miller ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’ episode. I couldn’t have been more delighted, because that was always one of my favorites from the original series, and I knew that this meant they wanted me to work on the gremlin'.
'I came back, and went in to meet George Miller and from the start, I loved the man; he was enthusiastic, friendly, full of ideas and yet open to all kinds of input. He had already developed a few firm notions of what a gremlin should look like, and had been in aided in this, to a very great extent, by Ed Verreaux, an artist who has done a great deal of storyboard work with Spielberg on Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, and ET.'
'Ed is a very good artist, and a very fast one; I believe he worked with other directors on Twilight Zone but I believe that his input was the greatest on the Nightmare at 20'000 Feet episode. He and Jim Bissel, the art director for the episode, had all kinds of great ideas at our initial meeting with Miller. Off the cuff, I really couldn't think of any way to improve on their plans, so I found myself mostly sitting back and listening.'
'(Virreaux and Bissel) were thinking of a form-follows-function approach to the design of the creature, which led them to think in terms of a light-boned creature with different, more bird-like musculature. Ed came up with the idea of a quill structure at the top, that would erect into a wing-like shape, which turned out to be a technical nightmare when they decided that they wanted it, though I like the idea no less for that.'
'Ed also suggested suction cups on his feet and hands, to make the impossible idea of this thing clinging to the wing of an airliner in flight a shade more plausible. George was very enthusiastic about all of it, and he had brought in a book from David Attenborough's Life on Earth series that included a picture of a red-headed monkey that he'd fallen in love with. With a little revamping by Ed, a certain amount of the design was adapted from that source as well.
Mike McCracken and I then set about sculpting the creature - which was entirely sculpted, and not built up, for delivery in three weeks. I did the hands and feet and the head; the head had a series of internal constructions that enabled the thing to roll its eyes and blink and smile and snarl. Mike McCracken did a beautiful job on the body, giving a very subtle, sort of lizard-pebble texture to the body. Largely as a result of the torture that the suit took from the wind and rain during filming, a good deal of what was put into the suit simply doesn't read.'
What I decided for the creature was to do an entire body suit, sculpted from head to foot — not something put together in pieces. That way, we could really control the look of the thing. I further decided to make the entire costume out of foam rubber. I had been involved with movies where that had been done — most notably Altered States, where Dick Smith was in charge — so I knew it was possible. There are pitfalls to foam rubber, however. For one thing, it shrinks. But there are disadvantages and advantages to every material. The good thing about sponge rubber is that it takes an excellent impression. It completely reproduces everything you put into your original sculptures, and it is also extremely flexible. Some of the plastic foams and other things that don’t shrink as much don’t have the advantage of being as flexible and able to move as sponge rubber. So, even with its inherent disadvantages, I decided to use it.”
I ended up having to alter the original suction cup concept. When I first rendered typical suction cup shapes on the hands, the effect looked pretty corny — like something on a bathmat. So what I made instead were big fleshy-looking pads on the fingers and on the palm of the hand, similar to the foot of a crustacean. Everyone liked that approach. Unfortunately, there was never really an opportunity to see that in the finished film. Then we came to the creature’s tail which Mike McCracken sculpted and cast in foam rubber — a nice seven-foot-long tail with a spade-shaped flattened end on it. I think that was rationalized on the basis that it would be used something like a rudder for steering through the skies, and then as another suction device to anchor the creature to the wing upon alighting
What I knew had been done in the past — and, for example, what Dick Smith did on Altered States — would be to break the molds up into separate pieces for the torso, legs, arms and so forth. Then the pieces would be put together later into a single suit. What I tried to do, though, was keep everything but the hands, feet and tail in one piece — so we were dealing with an immense piece. These were then placed in a drying booth, at about two hundred degrees, to cure the foam latex — which is standard. Makeup artists use this approach all the time for noses and faces. We were just using it for a much larger project.
Larry Cedar, an actor and dancer, wore the suit during filming, and his lithe tall frame helped give the suit more of a presence. Rubber has a tendency to shrink, so instead of doing a lifecast of Cedar, the cast was done of a mannequin that was larger than Cedar in order to keep Cedar's silhouette. The suit had cable-controlled mechanisms inside the head allowing the gremlin's face to emote.The sequence required heavy use of wind, rain and stuntwork, all of which took its toll on the makeup effects, as Reardon recounted; 'For all the exterior work on the prop wing, the very talented effects man Mike Wood was always there, providing the big lightning flashes, and oceans of water and wind. That was also almost my downfall, because the costume had been finished so quickly, and had to be brought onto the set so 'green' insofar as the paintjob and finish were concerned. '
'Originally the plan was to keep the costume away from the water; but it looks marvelous wet, and George realized that. So, it took a horrendous beating from the elements, particularly the water, and every evening I'd be taking something home that, if someone asked me. 'Did you do that.' I'd have said, 'Who? Me? Absolutely not! Poor Larry Cedar, meanwhile, was made miserable by the fact that the suit absorbed water - so he was wearing a cold, wet sponge all over his body! He proved to be a real trooper, and I don't think he would have been quite so patient if he hadn't realized himself what a good movie this was going to be.'
'George wanted very large eyes. In fact, he was always miming what he wanted to me, opening his eyes as wide as he could get them and saying, ‘This is what I want to see.’ George also wanted the gremlin to be able to pull its lips back from its teeth, so you could see quite a bit of gum-line. He made a big point about that. In addition, he wanted it to be able to grin quite broadly, as well as blink and roll its eyes. So I saw to it that our gremlin could do all that. Unfortunately, though, with fast cutting and all the atmosphere blowing by, you really don’t see much of the thing’s small repetoire of expressions. You do see a little bit of the smile blooming at the end, but the blinks and eye rolls are pretty much lost.'.
At first, Larry Cedar was able to see out of the mask through the creature’s transparent eyes — rather inadequately, I must admit — but as soon as he began to breathe, his breath would condense on the backs of the plastic eyeballs, and pretty soon he was blind. So for long shots, we installed a special pin that would allow the eye apparatus to lift right out of the mask. From a distance, it was impossible to tell that the eyes weren’t there, and Larry could then look out through the open holes. For closer shots, of course, the eyes were put back in.” As a final detail, Reardon installed tiny red grain-of-wheat bulbs into the inner temples of the creature’s head, near the occipital ridges. In the dark, they gave a slight glowing quality to the eyes. The subtle detail was obscured, however, in the maelstrom of storm effects employed during principal photography.'
'Ed Verreaux was the one who came up with the idea of quills coming up from the top of the creature’s head and falling all the way down its back like an Indian headdress. I’m not really sure what the rationale was, except that they seemed to be an interesting alternative to hair. It certainly looked marvelous when the wind started to blow; and from a practical point of view, they proved to be quite useful. For one thing, they helped us conceal the zipper down the back, which is the usual bane of any monster costume. Also, we were able to take our actuating cables out the back of the head and lead them down through the forest of quills, which was good camouflage. In terms of construction, though, the quills were really tough to figure out'.
'The idea was that they had to look like great sheaves of wheat blowing and rattling together like porcupine quills. I came up with a lot of possible solutions — including using shafts of feathers — before I finally hit upon the idea of using eighth-inch nylon airhose, which was available from a local supplier. I ordered rolls and rolls of that stuff, and cut it into three-foot lengths, which then had to be hung out in the heat booth to loosen up some of the tight curl acquired from being in a roll.
An amusing footnote to the whole quill business is that I actually drafted my mother in to apply them — a hard job, which she not only figured out how to do, but also arduously completed herself. She’d start by taking an ice pick and sticking it into the costume. Then she’d put a couple drops of cyano acrylate — otherwise known as Super Jet adhesive — on the end of one of the pieces of tubing. Then she’d jam it into the hole that the icepick had made, pull the pick out, and — presto — the quill would stay there. I’d had nightmares trying to figure out how to keep these things stuck to the costume, because the foam in some places was only a quarter-inch thick — but those quills held on famously. We only lost maybe a third of them through molting.'
But once George saw a test, and he saw the thing dripping wet, he said, ‘Well, we’ve got to do it.’ From that point on, it was firehoses and Ritter fans just soaking this suit every time you saw it. And, of course, the costume immediately took on water, just like a bath sponge. In fact, it was absolutely saturated with cold water the entire time Larry Cedar had to work in it. At any rate, the skin color originally had some rather beautiful undertones of blue and pink, and there was also some superficial detailing, including a network of little veins and things. But once the gremlin began taking a bath in that incessant rain, the paint began to go south on me. Certain colors began to leach through. Blues that had been used for some of the shadowing would suddenly come up through the paint film almost like dye.'
'It was awful — absolutely ghastly what was happening to that suit. But George kept his calm completely, and said not to be concerned about it. Fortunately, the scenes where the gremlin finally grapples with John were scheduled first, so the costume would look its best, and by the time the suit was starting to look really leprous, George had finished all but one of the closeups.” Even in its deteriorated state, the costume proved perfectly adequate for the remaining long shots.
The missing closeup, however, was a critical one — a jarring cut to the creature staring in through the window as Valentine draws back the shield. “That was supposed to be our very first shot,” said Reardon, “but I couldn’t get the suit ready in time. As it turned out, it became the last shot we did with the costume. I was very lucky that the gremlin was still in good enough shape to tolerate a closeup like that. Fortunately, George was a great K-Y lubricant fan, and he smeared great globby handfuls of it on the mask for any of the closeups — which relieved any minor chafing that may have been on the mask'.
Cedar in the suit was was suspended from an overhead wire rig. Jim Spencer gave the more practical and safety reasons; 'He was tethered because that wing moved rather violently, especially when he was on the engine pod throwing things in there with the explosions and whatnot. Even then, with all the water and oil, it was pretty slippery up there. So we had mattresses below, all covered in black, just in case he fell.'
Reardon's makeup duties for Miller's episode were still not over, as one shot would require actor John Lithgow's eyes to literally pop out of his skull, evoking a similar effect at the finale of Miller's earlier Mad Max. Reardon recalled how the effect was achieved;'George uses things in an interesting, fragmented way, knowing that the human brain has the capacity to absorb things in a very short amount of time. When John Lithgow first sees the creature at the window, George wanted his eyes to bulge out of his head. And I said, ‘What exactly do you mean, George?’ He replied: ‘I want his eyes to pop right out of his head — I’ll only use about six frames of it. Can you do that for me?’ Apparently, he’d done something similar in Mad Max — for a shot of a guy who’s about to impact violently with a vehicle. So we tried it. There wasn’t time to do it properly using a false head, so instead I built an appliance that went over John’s eyes, with rubber eyelids and eyeballs, and false eyebrows. Actually, it was pretty unconvincing, if scrutinized, because it had to be made from his face to cover his face, unavoidably building it out so that it looked like he had Down’s Syndrome. But it was good enough for six frames'.
'Then we shot about fourteen different takes, pumping the eyes up like balloons, using tubes that ran back and over his ears and through his tousled hair to a couple of large enema syringes. It was hilarious, really. And George didn’t just want them to come out half an inch — they had to come out two and three inches! On several takes, the eyes got as big as baseballs! People were dying of laughter on the set, and pretty soon it was all John could do to keep a straight face as he was screaming in terror. But George’s intention was to just take a snippet of that, and cut it briefly in between the quick shots of the creature in the window, which is what he did — although when I first saw the film, even I couldn’t tell for sure.'
Despite the hectic schedule, Reardon's recollections of Miller on the set were positive; ''When we were sculpting the creature, he came by one Saturday and sat with me for three or four hours, taking a great interest in what I was doing. He even, with a great show of consideration, asked whether I'd mind if he could pinch the clay a bit, and make a few changes. I didn't mind at all, and his changes were often quite helpful.'
'In the week before the gremlin 'came up to bat', when he was shooting all the interiors, he used to make the time to visit me at my shop each evening, around 9 or 10 at night, smoking his pipe with a friendly hello; once, when I was working with my folks, he brought a quart of ice cream. And no matter what the problems were, or how near the deadline might be, he never showed anything less than complete confidence in me. That kind of interest and concern is really very rare, and greatly appreciated.'
The gremlin's scenes end with it flying away into the clouds; this was achieved as a stopmotion animated sequence, with the miniature gremlin constructed and animated by David W. Allen and Dennis Gordon. Allen explained;'The puppet was about six inches tall, constructed of the standard foam rubber material over an armature built for me back in the early 70s by Jon Berg. We worked from a number of photos of the full-size suit, with Dennis basically blocking the puppet in and I finishing it. Actually, it was a pretty good match. It even had about three hundred little silver-painted wires that Dennis pushed into it for quills, as well as small flying squirrel-type wings under each arm.'
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 duties was realizing the mouthless makeup appliance worn by Cherie Currie as one of Anthony's victims.
'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.
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.'
'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.”
'...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.'
'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.'
'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.'
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:
- Fangoria #30 'Reardon at 20'000 Feet' by The Midnight Writer (October 1983)
- Cinefantastique Volume 14 No #1 (1983)
- Cinefex #14 'Shadows and Substance' by Don Shay and Paul Sammon
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