Editorials
The Last Minute Digital Effect Added in Post-Production of ‘The Boy’ That Improved the Ending
Sitting down with director William Brent Bell and producer Gary Lucchesi on set of Brahms: The Boy II revealed a lot of key details about what’s in store for the sequel. One thing we didn’t expect to uncover, though, was a key change that occurred during post-production that completely altered the look of Brahms in the final act of The Boy. The adult Brahms, that is. It turns out that major twist, which revealed that a very adult Brahms was living in the walls of the Heelshire mansion, would’ve looked very different had it not been for one major digital effect that, up until this point, has gone unnoticed.
In talking about the collaborative process working on these films has been, Lucchesi mused, “There is something about the process of making movies. You have a screenplay; you do all of this preparation but then there are certain things that occur during the making of the movie. I wish in hindsight, now we fixed it, but in hindsight, I’d wished we’d had a conversation in the first Boy about putting the mask on his face.”
Wait. What?
It turns out that when The Boy was filmed, the sudden appearance of the adult Brahms was shot without a mask. Bell shares, “I’ll tell you about the mask because I’ve always been surprised that that never came out. You guys know Javier Botet, right? That’s who I wanted to play Brahms in the walls. That just didn’t fly.” That Bell initially conceived of Brahms with Botet in mind, an actor known for his unique, slender frame and creating nightmarish characters in The Conjuring 2, [Rec], and more gives insight as to why Brahms didn’t have a mask initially.
When Botet wasn’t available, Bell elaborates, “Then we got a guy, who was great. To me, he was kind of like a more conservative Javier. Not quite as wild and weird and tall and crazy. But he was cool. But we shot the movie, and he had no mask on. He was just a guy with a beard and he looked crazy coming out of the walls. We tested the movie and the movie tested really well; everybody liked the movie. We were asking questions about the third act, when the twist happens, ‘Were you scared by the guy coming out of the walls?’ ‘Mm, yeah, you know, but not that scared.’ Huh. And Roy Lee, who’s one of the producers on the movie, asked, ‘Did you ever think about putting a mask on him?’” Lucchesi adds, “He had worked on a movie about 10 years ago where he had done that; he’d put a mask on somebody in post-production.”
“Yeah, The Strangers. Well, they’d put a mask in post on somebody. So, we thought, wow, that’s a great idea! We were so focused on creating the doll that we’d never thought about that. If you watch the movie, the mask was never on him. We never planned that,” Bell says before expanding that it took a lot of different designs before they settled on the final version that made it into the film. “We did tests of him coming out of the walls in totally different masks. It was just like, ‘Try another one. Try another one.’ Because you just click a button and another one is on him. It was so incredible, what they did. And had we had a real mask it never would’ve looked as cool. It wouldn’t have stayed on. And what we had to do with this movie, to some degree, is if we want to see that mask well then, we have to create it, right?”
Visual Effects Supervisor James McQuaide has a much funnier take on the situation while also hinting at just how complicated this effect really was, “It was a good looking guy; she’s running away from a good looking guy. It wasn’t very scary. We went through a couple of months of trying to come up with the right design. Something a little bit rougher around the edges, more sort of homespun. We came back to the idea that of course, it looks like a large version of the Brahms doll. I think it made it much more scary, that face, than a barista at Starbucks, which is kinda what he looked like.”
“The design was the trickier part just because there’s so many cooks in the kitchen with an opinion about what it should look like. We had some really cool designs, but trying to come up with something that was organic to the movie was the place we ultimately went. But the execution was a little bit difficult because it wasn’t planned, so there’s no tracking marker. There’s nothing to really work off of. It was like 350 shots; it was a significant part of the movie. Probably 1 in 8 shots, something crazy like that, is CG mask.” McQuaide says the digital effect didn’t just stop at the mask, “And the burn at the end, you know when the mask breaks off, that’s all CG too. In the original version he was just, again, there was no damage from the fire. We had this idea that the house burned down and he carries the scars from it, as a CG element, to sort of make the movie maybe a little more substantial. So even that is CG.”
Bell still marvels at what they pulled off with this late game addition to The Boy, “Yeah, it made it so much weirder. Trying to kiss the mask, and it made his eyes more interesting. We did so much interesting development work on that, though. The mask was smaller, the mask was bigger, then darker, the mask was made out of paper mâché. To me, doing a movie like that where there was no planning, no tracking marks, and no plan to put a mask on and it was done a thousand percent perfectly, made me realize that anything is possible in making a movie if you need to change something.”
What would the paper mâché mask have looked like on Brahms? This clip shows the unused design in action:
It’s mind-blowing to think of how drastically different the final act of The Boy might’ve been without the addition of that creepy mask. As for the sequel, Brahms: The Boy II, a physical mask was created, but you’ll have to wait until the film’s release on February 21, 2020 to see it.
The great Ernest Dickerson turns seventy-five years old this month, so we’re looking back at his most memorable contribution to the horror genre – 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight!
The film hit screens while the Tales from the Crypt series was winding down its run on television, and it stands apart with a story that feels a step or two removed from the franchise norm. That was the smart play, though, as the show’s stories – and those from the original EC comics – work best in short bites. The result is a film that holds up beautifully as a gory good time.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)
Commentator: Ernest Dickerson (director), Michael Felsher (moderator)
1. Dickerson was in post-production on Surviving the Game when he got a call from his agent saying that producer Gil Adler wanted to meet about a Tales from the Crypt feature film. It went well, so Dickerson met with Joel Silver next and secured the job.
2. The original screenplay for the film came to the producers as a spec script wholly detached from the Tales from the Crypt brand. They added the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) bookends to make it fit.
3. Dickerson was more familiar with the original EC comic books having read them as a kid, but he had watched a few episodes of the HBO series, so he knew what the current vibe was for the project.
4. Adler directed the film’s wraparound segments, meaning Dickerson never actually got to work with the creepy puppet. “Gil and the Crypt Keeper had a great relationship,” he adds, “they worked together for years.”
5. While he was new to the Tales from the Crypt family, Dickerson had previously worked as a director of photography on the Tales from the Darkside anthology series. That show is underappreciated in my humble opinion, and I will go to bat for both it and the equally underloved Monsters.
6. A big appeal of the horror genre for Dickerson is the idea of dark mysteries that challenge our imagination. For this film, that came down to the mythology being created between the characters.
7. Five executive producers are listed in the opening credits, but Dickerson says the only two he had dealings with were Silver and Richard Donner. The other three were Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and David Giler.
8. Dickerson had only ever seen Billy Zane in movies with a full head of hair, so he was surprised when Zane showed up on the first day with a bald head. “He had this case, and he opened up the case that he had all these hair pieces in, and he says, ‘So which one of these do you think I should use?’” Dickerson looked at him and suggested he just go bald for the character.
9. While the bulk of the opening exteriors were filmed in a desert just outside Los Angeles, the shot of the old church at 11:26 was created on a warehouse hangar soundstage where the film’s interiors were shot.
10. When he had read the script, Dickerson pictured the character of Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith) “as a little, tough lady.” He had recently seen Smith in Menace II Society, and while the producers had someone else in mind for the role, he fought to get her instead.
11. Just as Zane surprised Dickerson with his hair (or lack thereof), Smith arrived on the first day with her hair dyed platinum white. He “liked the idea” but asked her to please get it tweaked so it looked more yellowish blond. “It’s definitely a statement.”
12. He had seen Brenda Bakke in the 1989 sci-fi/action film from Japan, Gunhed, and thought she’d be great here as Cordelia. The rest of us might recognize her from Death Spa or Trucks.
13. Felsher comments that the film’s setup does a good job not telegraphing who’s going to live or die, and he uses the “nice guy” (Charles Fleischer) and “the kid” (Ryan O’Donohue) as examples. “You don’t play by those rules here,” he says, and Dickerson replies that he wanted to subvert those rules. That extends to Smith as well because she’s Black, “and usually in movies like this they’re the first folks to die.”
14. Dickerson says they had forty days of filming, “which, the way I’m used to working, was a very generous schedule.” It was budgeted at around $10 million.
15. This probably won’t surprise you, but Zane improvised the bit at 26:25 after he jumps out the window and says, “Fuck this cowboy shit! You fuckin’, hodunk Podunk, well, then, motherfuckers!”
16. In the original script, the demons that The Collector (Zane) raises from the dirt actually looked more like the people they used to be. “They were more human,” but the very smart decision was made in pre-production to make them look far more unique instead.
17. The demons are killed by shooting their eyes, but Dickerson felt there should be one more element to it. “Shoot out their eyes, you gotta duck because the souls come shooting out, and if it hits ya, boom, it can kill ya.” This is a fun touch.
18. He’s been asked more than once if these demons are where Peter Jackson got the idea for how the orcs would look in his Lord of the Rings movies. “They do look like orcs.”
19. He recalls having seen Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair shortly before going to work on Demon Knight, and he hoped to bring some of that staged style into his own film. An example of that in practice is Brayker’s (William Sadler) brief flashbacks to Christ on the cross.
20. Character deaths were mostly based on the idea that “each person’s downfall was going to be predicated by their weakness.” The Collector discovers someone’s weakness and then uses it against them. Cordelia wants to be loved, Jeryline wants to travel, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller) is a horndog for both liquor and ladies, Danny loves horror comics, etc.
21. Dickerson says that plenty of genre classics were in the back of his head while making the film, including Assault on Precinct 13, Alien, Aliens, and more.
22. Cordelia is possessed into a demonic form, and Dickerson’s idea for how she’d look was originally a bit different. “Since Cordelia was a prostitute, I thought that her mouth should actually be a vertical slit that was in her stomach… which would open up with teeth and a tongue.” It was nixed, he says, when “the wife of one of the producers read that and said ‘no way you’re putting that in the movie.’”
23. The key makes an appearance in the followup, Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood, but it wasn’t originally meant to. Apparently, early test audiences expected it to be a more connected sequel to Demon Knight, so the filmmakers added it in to appease them. This is where I go on record saying that Bordello of Blood is a fun time. Can’t touch Demon Knight, obviously, but it’s more entertaining than its reputation suggests.
24. They had to film Uncle Willy’s bar scene “dream” twice, once with the women topless and once with them in bikinis, to have versions for both theaters and television broadcast. “Dick’s a pro.” (To be fair, Dickerson says this in regard to Miller having to endure the makeup application, but the sentiment fits both situations, so…)
25. Dickerson says he’s “always amazed at the love that people show this film,” and adds that fans bring it up to him incredibly often. This is great to hear, as we should always be telling artists how much their work means to us while they’re still alive and able to hear it.
26. Zane also suggested the gag at 1:08:21 with the sponge coming out of his mouth. The beat reminds Dickerson to praise the actor even more, adding that he was an “ally” to the director when “bad ideas” came down from the studio suits.
27. He didn’t get any pushback on killing little Danny. He did insist on one added element, though, as he wanted to immediately follow the boy exploding in the air with a shot of his bloody and torn sneaker hitting the ground below. “And the sneaker had to be a hightop.”
28. Dickerson says there’s “something kinky sexy about” Smith being covered in blood, and then the two commentators go quiet for almost two minutes out of respect for the scene. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how Dickerson had previously mentioned Alien and Aliens as films being in the back of his head during filming, and how two scenes here reflect that – Jeryline stripping down to her underwear for the final confrontation feels like a nod to Ridley Scott’s film, while an earlier scene with Irene (CCH Pounder) and Dep. Bob (Gary Farmer) realizing they’re surrounded and choosing to blow themselves up alongside some of the demons is something of a callback to the air vent sacrifice in James Cameron’s film.
29. Asked about the film’s critical reception at the time of release, Dickerson says it received good reviews from horror-loving critics and then talks about the importance of horror in general. “Horror has always been a great way of putting out ideas, of talking about some of the things that affect us as people. Some of the best horror, like the best science fiction, talks about what it’s like to be human. Some of the best horror gets very political.”
30. The original ending would have featured The Collector showing “his true self, which is a demon made of fire.” They spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but it was “extremely difficult… back in the day of analog effects.” It was rewritten into the faceoff between him and Jeryline featuring the dancing, the crotch fire, Zane’s attempts at saying “love,” and his eventual demise from her bloody spit.
31. They both agree that a direct sequel to Demon Knight could be a lot of fun, but Dickerson says he’s unaware of any talk on the possibility.
32. Dickerson was super excited about this new Scream Factory Blu-ray in 2015, and he mentions that before its release, he had imported a Blu-ray from Germany presumably to enjoy the film in HD. He’s just like us! (Or am I the only one here who’s imported a German Blu-ray of the much maligned werewolf flick Big Bad Wolf…)
Quotes Without Context
“I was so happy to get Dick Miller for this movie.”
“There was a time when guys used to put ketchup on everything.”
“I’m a big student of Hitchcock, and the best way to make a moment of horror work is to lull the audience into a false sense of security.”
“A villain should always be the most interesting person in a movie.”
“They were a really great bunch of performers who were performing on these little leg-extension stilts wearing a diaper that had a radio-controlled tail that was being manipulated by a special effects tech right out of the frame.”
“It’s hard to direct air; it doesn’t do what you want.”
“The only censorship problem came from the producer’s wife, who didn’t want the vagina dentalis [sic] in the movie.”
“One of the executives wanted to know why the devil didn’t try to have sex with Jada.”
“It always starts with the script.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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