WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!
And they wanted Anderson to makeall of them.
I felt like I was being punkd, Anderson says.
Credit: Diyah Pera
Then came the hard part: Actually making all those monsters.
Here, in his own words, is how he did it.
As told by: David Leroy Anderson
Once I got started, I had three months.
Lewis Jacobs/NBC
Thats not very much time.
I actually got to do that makeup.
I drew that makeup.
I got to sculpt that makeup.
I kind of had to do it all on my own time on weekends.
The little girl was such a sweetheart, too.
I got to know her and her dad.
She had a great time and was a beautiful dancer.
I think she walked away very proud because she got such a terrific response from the whole crew.
She was, like, nine at the time.
Ive done a lot of horror films.
Ive worked with a lot of kids.
And I have two kids.
I just feel really responsible for them when theyre on set.
I dont want to scar them.
Just let them do their work and hit their marks.
Then hopefully they walk away and dont need 20 years of therapy after that.
Unfortunately, a lot of the detail of the work we did you dont really see in the film.
A lot of the coverage of the Buckners is very dark.
But on the DVD, I was really, really happy because you see a lot.
They spent the most time in the [makeup] trailer.
We got to know them better than anybody.
It was a warm, fuzzy feeling surrounding the Buckners.
They were all a delight.
Our buzzsaw guy was a reference to the pinhead character fromHellraiser, an homage to that.
We never had a picture of anything fromHellraiserup in the shop.
That particular actor who got that part [Gregory Zach] was the third person that we had considered.
The first one that we did a whole round of makeup tests on it didnt work.
Its a non-speaking role.
This performers gotta bring it just with his eyes.
So we cast another guy, and we did another round of tests.
And it was closer.
We were getting somewhere.
But it was just not that scary.
And while that guy was in makeup in the trailer, there was a knock at the door.
Production had sent me another performer.
And the door opened, and everybody in the trailer knew it.
The makeup artist who was doing it knew it.
The poor guy who was sitting in the makeup chair knew it.
What walked through that door was buzzsaw man.
This guy was so scary-looking already.
Ill never look that scary.
The merman, for a number of reasons, was the most challenging.
I think we did more renditions of that character than any other character.
We kept missing our cut-off deadlines.
We just kept struggling to get the final approval.
I know why Drew was placing so much emphasis on [the merman] he was the big pay-off.
There was just a lot more pressure on that one design, and therefore we worked longer and harder.
We could have the bloody blowhole that spurts chunks out?
And that was it.
It became the bloody blowhole.
For the performer on set, it was definitely the most painful makeup.
He was completely immobile.
He was basically a fish for 12 hours and had to be carried around on a stretcher.
Theres a lot of really cute pictures of the merman napping.
Wed go gently wake him up and say, Its time to kill.
