Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) - Part 1: Dan Aykroyd's Prologue

Steven Spielberg and John Landis decided that the cinematic adaptation they were producing of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone would be an anthology, with different directors handling each 'episode'. Joe Dante recalled about Spielberg's intention;

'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's unused head for Poltergeist 

 

That magazine was none other than Fangoria issue #21, which misreported the unused Poltergeist head as being reused for Aykroyd. About the similarity, Reardon wryly stated, 'They very often say that artists steal from themselves unconsciously. At least on this occassion, I stole from myself and was fully aware that I was doing it.'

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.’

Dan Aykroyd having the ghoul makeup applied. 

 

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.'

Aykroyd as the prologue's ghoul. 

 

Reardon was also originally scheduled to handle the special makeup effects for the original conception of Steven Spielberg's segment, which would have also been a monster-fest; 'The next thing I was called in for was an interview with Steven. At the time, we was contemplating an entirely different script for his episode than the one he eventually shot. It was a marvelous, original horror tale by Matheson. Since it could still be cropping up in some other form - and I hope it does - I can't really talk about the plot. But it is really a marvelous script, with a sustained level of fright that really mounts at the end. It would have been a great deal of work for me, on all kinds of things.'

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.

Sources: 

• Fangoria #30 'Reardon at 20'000 Feet' by The Midnight Writer (October 1983)
• Cinefex #14 'Shadows and Substance' by Don Shay and Paul Sammon

Read more on the rest of The Twilight Zone movie's special effects on the 'Part 2' article, covering Reardon's work on George Miller's 'Nightmare at 20'000 Feet' segment.