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Misery Loves Company: Creating the Ghosts
In conjuring the film’s eponymous poltergeists, Beck and his production team strived to create ghouls that would take terror to a new level, beyond any cinematic fright experienced by William Castle fans or today’s sophisticated audiences. “These are the great white sharks of ghosts,” Beck asserts. “They’re extremely vicious and aggressive, and so when contained, as they are in the house, they behave as any kind of wild beast would – they become very agitated and angry. Once they’re released, they unleash that anger upon anyone standing in their way. These ghosts aren’t just going to hover around looking kind of scary. They’re in attack mode 100% of the time. ”
Portrayed by actors wearing complex makeup and prosthetics, the ghosts range from unsettlingly menacing to outright horrifying – each eliciting a distinctive persona, proscribed by his or her individual “death history. ”
While the ghosts’ death histories are not described in the film, these background stories detailing the life and demise of each tortured spirit provided visual guidelines for Beck and his team, who then enlisted award-winning Prosthetics Effects artists like Howard Berger to turn their concepts into hauntingly realistic creatures of death.
“When I read the script, I figured the movie would rely on a lot of blue screen shots of computer-generated ghosts floating around,” Berger recalls. “But Steve didn’t want that – he wanted the ghosts to have a solid, physical presence, which would be more threatening than mere translucent computer-created images and raise the level of anxiety in the audience.
“What really intrigued me was that Steve didn’t look at the ghosts like, ‘Okay, that’s weird guy number one, and this is weird guy number two,’” Berger continues. “He had a detailed story behind every one of them. He gave us a series of conceptual drawings, and we based our design work on those concepts. We made sculptures and 3-dimensional busts of various designs until we agreed on a final look for each ghost. ”
The First Born Son (MIKHAEL SPEIDEL) is the ghost of a little boy who looks relatively normal – except for the arrow spiked through the middle of his forehead.
Backstory: Little Billy Michaels loved to dress up like his heroes, the cowboys on TV. The seven year-old never listened to his mother, and his father dubbed him “Billy the Brat. ” But his parents never disciplined him, and little Billy always just did what he wanted. And now Billy’s sorry that he never listened to his mom, who suggested that he not play Cowboys and Indians with a real bow and arrow – and that he not shoot the arrow straight up into the air the way that his buddy Danny did.
Wrapped in cellophane, The Torso (DANIEL WESLEY) trundles through the basement accompanied by his decapitated head. The actor, a double amputee, wore a black hood during filming so that the digital effects team could later “remove” his head from his body.
Backstory: Jimmy “The Gambler” Gambino never learned his lesson. A constant scammer and gambler, he always had a knack for landing on his feet. Larry “Three-Times” always warned Jimmy not to get in over his head, his head, his head. But The Gambler didn’t listen and he lost his shirt in a big poker game with a made guy. He would have bet his wife and kids if he had any, but since he didn’t, The Gambler ran off – welching on the bet. The mob caught up with Jimmy and made an example of him. Actually, several small examples, wrapped in cellophane.
In her heyday, The Bound Woman (LAURA MENNEL) was a pretty cheerleader who was strangled on a prom date gone bad. A compound fracture appliance was used to simulate her broken neck, and contact lenses give her eyes a suitably hemorrhaged appearance.
Backstory: The envy of every girl in school, Susan LeGrow was the prom queen and a cheerleader. She won an academic scholarship to state college but decided to stay in town and marry Chet, her high school sweetheart. But the after-prom party turned into a nightmare when Chet caught Susan in Billy Bob’s arms. No one really knows what happened that night, but a week later they found Susan’s body buried beneath the football field’s fifty-yard line, strangled to death.
The Withered Lover is the ghost of Jean Kriticos (KATHRYN ANDERSON), who perished in a fire. With half of her face and hands horribly burned and scarred, Jean wears a hospital gown and pulls an IV drip behind her.
Backstory: She was a loving mother and wife. Outgoing and smart, everybody’s favorite PTA mom, she devoted all of her time to her family. Her husband loved her and her kids adored her. Although her daughter grew up too fast, she wanted her son to remain a child forever. When the freak accident occurred, she died while racing to save her kids – her dreams of a happy home snuffed forever.
Because The Torn Prince (CRAIG OLEJNIK) is the ghost of a teenager who was wiped out in a car accident, he is quite handsome when viewed from the left, but the entire right side of his body and face are dramatically ripped and shredded, the result of his lethal road rash. A particularly gruesome aspect of his effects makeup is an intricate face piece that exposes his skull and brain.
Backstory: In 1953, Royce Clayton was Valley High’s baseball superstar, wearing his letterman jacket everywhere he went. Everything was handed to Royce on a silver platter, and he felt untouchable. But this cocky James Dean wannabe went too far one night. He challenged the local greaser to a drag race and thought he had it in the bag. But he didn’t brake in time and ended up the star of a fiery wreck instead – never to crack a bat again.
Perhaps the most subtlely disturbing of the ghosts is The Angry Princess (SHAWNA LOYER), a young woman who committed suicide. Completely nude, gashed from head to toe and drained of all blood, her full body make-up includes smeary lipstick, dark runny eyeliner and black contact lenses that turn her eyes into deep pits.
Backstory: Dana Newman was a psychotic beauty who never believed she was beautiful. Always searching for perfection, not a single strand of her hair could ever be out of place. Famous for her insane tantrums, they called her “Beauty the Beast. ” Finally giving up on achieving perfection, she took her last beauty bath and slashed her own wrists. When they found her, they said she remained as gorgeous in death as she had been in her wasted life – despite being covered in hundreds of self-mutilating slash marks.
Another angry blast from the past is The Pilgrimess (XANTHA RADLEY). Accused of witchcraft, she was sentenced to die from exposure and the abuse of her fellow townspeople. In the afterlife, she is permanently locked in wooden stocks. Her gnarled, wrinkled face was created by means of a weathered-flesh piece and further accented by opaque contact lenses, which give her a milky, sightless look.
Backstory: Miss Isabella Smith was a young lady without family who decided to take the journey from England across the Atlantic to the new colonies in 1675. But once she settled in a small New England town, her separatist ways isolated her from the tight-knit townsfolk. When the town’s preacher accused her of witchcraft, she denied it as a matter of course. But the town turned against her – much livestock had mysteriously died that month and only a witch could work such magic – so Isabella was sentenced to death in the stocks.
The theory behind The Great Child (C. ERNST HARTH) and The Dire Mother (LAURIE SOPER) is that the demented mother manipulated her giant-sized baby in an attempt to create a monster son who would be capable of carrying out her elaborate revenge fantasies. In the film, the duo is comprised of a heavyset man wearing only an enormous diaper and a vomit-covered bib over his prodigious stomach, and a tiny woman whose aged and peeling face stands out in grotesque contrast to her girlish outfit and pony-tailed hair.
Backstory: Margaret Shelburne was a shy woman who could never stand up for herself – probably because she was only three feet tall. She was imprisoned by a band of gypsy lumberjacks – forced to live in a cage as their freak show version of entertainment. But her secret union with Jimbo, the man they said had the “iron swing” with his mighty axe, produced her pride and joy – her giant 300 pound son, Harold.
Harold was spoiled and smothered from infancy by Margaret, who raised him to be her protector and to carry out vengeance on the gypsy lumberjacks who imprisoned her. Harold took to Jimbo’s axe with a passion and was soon felling rows upon rows of giant redwoods. But he soon graduated to human lumber, yelling “Timber!” every time he chopped a gypsy lumberjack at the roots. After Harold sliced his way through the camp, both mother and son were finally killed by a torch-waving mob that wanted to put Harold through the wood chipper. But despite repeated attempts, the mob couldn’t manage to stuff his giant body into the chute.
The Hammer (HERBERT DUNCANSON) is the bloodthirsty spirit of a murderous blacksmith. His ghostly incarnation features spikes and nails embedded in his head and body, a large hammer bolted to his wrist in place of a hand, and chains enveloping his torso. One of the more elaborate ghosts, his look was achieved through the creation of prosthetic appliances, including full head make-up, a foam body suit and the hammer-hand piece.
Backstory: George Markley was a happy, honest blacksmith in the 1890s – until the local townspeople wrongfully accused him of stealing and drove him out of town. Enraged, George snapped and tracked down the ten people responsible and hammered them to death. The townsfolk finally captured him and dragged him back to the blacksmith shop, where he received a brutal form of frontier justice – his captors drove nails into his body and chopped off the blacksmith’s most prized possessions, his hands, and left them out for the crows to pick over his dying body.
Another visually terrifying ghost is The Jackal (SHAYNE WYLER), whose crazed face with its yellow eyes and deadly sharp fangs peers out through a rusty metal cage that has been locked around his head. An escapee from a turn-of-the-century lunatic asylum, this feral, hunched-over creature also sports a hideous set of lethally long claws. “The Jackal” required full body makeup, as well as an iron cage anchored around his head. Prosthetic gloves with elongated nails and yellow contact lenses complete his bestial countenance.
Backstory: In 1908, Ryan Kuhn was a deeply disturbed psycho patient of Borehamwood Asylum. He was locked up because of his insatiable interest for women – specifically, for attacking and biting them! After years of unrelenting imprisonment with his arms stretched back in a straightjacket and his body twisted grotesquely, his limbs grew horrid in shape. He hated any kind of human contact and was revolted if anyone came near. When a fire broke out in his wing of the Asylum, everyone but Ryan escaped. People still talk about how he ran away from rescuers shouting “Keep away!” He preferred instead to face a fiery uncertainty than to let anyone touch him.
Finally, the twelfth and perhaps most lethal ghost is The Juggernaut (JOHN DE SANTIS), who died in a hail of bullets. As a result, in the afterlife his body is riddled with bullet holes from head to toe. The character required a full body suit with makeup and five separate appliances for his forehead, nose, neck, chin and hands.
Backstory: Breaker Mahoney was a massive, seven-foot tall serial killer. Horribly disfigured, he towed stranded motorists back to his junkyard and brutally murdered them. he would literally rip them apart with his bare hands and “break” them into as many pieces as possible. When the local authorities finally tracked him down, the immensely powerful murderer was impossible to subdue physically. But, as Breaker ultimately discovered, all men are “breakable” – and he bit the dust when the cops pumped him full of lead.
Howard Berger was justifiably pleased with the results of his work and that of co-key special effects artist, Emmy winner Charles Porlier. The more complex ghosts required a team of six make-up artists, working three to four hours on each ghost, compelling Berger to devise inventive ways to minimize the application time, such as using foam rubber rather than 35 multi-piece applications made of silicone. “There were days when all twelve ghosts were being shot and we needed to get them all finished in a reasonable time frame,” says Berger. “It’s a pretty intense process to take one of these nice, clean actors and turn them into a monster in just a couple of hours. ”
Berger and the team of artists did such a convincing job rendering the ghosts that even the filmmakers were a little unnerved. “After filming was completed,” Berger reveals, “I got an e-mail from Steve that said, ‘Will we all go to hell for making movies like this?’ I wrote back, ‘Yes, but at least we’ll be with all of our friends.’”
