With horror industry heavy hitters already in place from the 1970s, the 1980s built upon that with the rise of brilliant minds in makeup and effects artists, as well as advances in technology. Artists like Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Alec Gillis, Tom Woodruff Jr., Tom Savini, Stan Winston, and countless other artists that delivered groundbreaking, mind-blowing practical effects that ushered in the pre-CGI Golden Age of Cinema. Which meant a glorious glut of creatures in horror. More than just a technical marvel, the creatures on display in ‘80s horror meant tangible texture that still holds up decades later. Grotesque slimy skin to brutal transformation sequences, there wasn’t anything the artists couldn’t create. It Came From the ‘80s is a series that will pay homage to the monstrous, deadly, and often slimy creatures that made the ‘80s such a fantastic decade in horror.
For budding horror fans, there’s perhaps no better film for the formative years than The Gate. One of the few to star kids, it doesn’t water down the horror for its demographic. While playing on fears of abandonment and growing pains, it keeps its themes of family values from venturing too far into after-school special territory, letting Glen (Stephen Dorff) and Terry’s (Louis Tripp) fantastical journey take center stage. A simple premise, in which Glen and Terry accidentally unleash a horde from hell after digging up a hole in the backyard, gives way to a nightmare full of minions, dead men in walls, and more.
Stephen Dorff and Louis Tripp are great as the 12-year-old friends forced to contend with demons from hell, but it’s those pint-sized demons that threaten to steal the film the entire time. Not even demonic doppelganger Terry, reanimated construction workers, or massive serpentine demons can upstage the little one-foot tall minions. Somehow, the minions become even cooler knowing how they came together behind the scenes.
Special visual effects designer and supervisor Randall William Cook designed the minions. Having worked on visual effects for The Thing, Ghostbusters, Fright Night, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, and eventually The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it’s no surprise that Cook’s artistry brought a lot to the low budget Canadian and U.S. co-production. Cook created illustrations and then a maquette for the minions, and special makeup artist Craig Reardon, with his small crew of five, set about making full-sized suits using Cook as a model.
That’s right; the minions in The Gate aren’t tiny after all, but fully-grown men wearing foam latex suits. Reardon and his team created roughly 15 suits that Cook had asked for, with mix and match claws and feet designed to be worn separately to give more variance to the minions. From there, Reardon could layer the shots as needed to make it look like there were 30-45 minions on screen versus just the 15 suits they had to work with. This meant that most of the sequences involving the minions made very impressive use of forced perspective. Scenes like Al and Glen pressed against the bedroom wall as the dead workman crashed into the floor, only to spill into dozens of minions, looks straightforward but prove to be far more complex with the forced perspective. In reality, Denton and Dorff were strapped to wires, dangling above with the minions shot on a lower level against enlarged furniture, some in pieces to further the perspective, to give the optical illusion of scale. The forced perspective was taken a step further by shooting at a slow speed and having the child actors move at a much slower speed while the actors in minion suits were instructed to move faster, giving the normal speed playback even speedier minion movement.
A huge fan of Ray Harryhausen, Cook also employed the use of stop-motion animation for some of the demon work, especially the climactic battle between Glen and a massive demon. Even the small bit around the dead work man in the walls took a lot of love and planning; Reardon didn’t want it to look like just another nondescript zombie. Drawing inspiration from the book, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved, an in-depth study on naturally preserved bodies found in peat bogs, Reardon designed his Work Man around bog bodies while incorporating more traditional design elements like milky eyes. For only a few minutes of screen-time, Reardon’s Work Man remains one of the scariest parts of the movie.
The universal coming of age themes of Michael Nankin’s screenplay keeps The Gate everlasting in terms of story, but it’s Cook, Reardon, and their crew’s tireless work that makes the film hold up three decades later. The creative freedom allotted to Cook and Reardon meant their imagination could run wild during the creation of the denizens from hell, delivering memorable creatures and scenes that should continue to lure in new generations of horror fans to come.
