Punishing [laughs]. It’s seven weeks, which is highly accelerated considering the number of creature shots. Before we even shot them, we did a deal for US release with Live Entertainment, which did The Arrival [David Twohy, 1996] with Charlie Sheen. IS THE US MARKET CALLING THE SHOTS HERE? It gives everyone a certain amount of security know ing you’ll get distribution in at least one major world territory. Is A b e r r a t io n r e g a r d e d a s a t e s t c a se by G r u n d y ? I wouldn’t say that, no [laughs]. But the formula in the way that we’ve put this together is quite a good yardstick. W h er e
exactly do the t it u l a r c r e a t u r e s co m e f r o m ?
We’ve deliberately left it vague. In the script there is one theory: the cane toad theory. It’s a combination of that and genetic engineering. Theoretically, a lizard is genetically engineered to get rid of pests. Because of the cold, they should have died off, but they sur vived and got into this cabin and are changing. They try to kill them before they change.
So, t h e y ’ re
not y o u r g a r d en v a r ie t y s k in k ?
No, these are the ones that run up your leg and tear your throat out [laughs]. Someone actually sent me an article from Minnesota, which is where the film’s set,
is the partnership of _ Susanne Morphett, David Riley and Daniel Perry, who all hail from Perth. Carving their own niche by plying their monster-mask wares at all sorts of agricultural shows around Australia, they also garner a modicum of television work. In an office that’s more house of charnel than the latest Hellraiser, they’re holed up amidst bizarre creations that’d make your average RSPCA worker weep. “Where’s the fax?” “Under the dead dog.” However, they needed no time to contemplate the offer to perform all creature fx on Aberration. The invitation from Chris Brown had stemmed from a recommendation of Richard Taylor (Brain Dead, The Frigbteners) and their great mask and model work. Of course, this band of total horror enthusiasts could hardly knock it back. The barely-minimal, six weeks of pre-pro duction allotted to design and build the creatures
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about frogs that are aberrating. They think it’s some thing to do with the water. This huge survey was done because these kids went out for a class trip to study frogs and found that eleven out of the twenty-two frogs they’d collected were in some way deformed. Some didn’t have any back legs. Some had two back legs, joined together with one flipper. Some of them only had three legs. One had no eyes and another had an eye at the back of its throat. It’s only happening with a particular type of frog in Minnesota, but it is happening. Eighty percent of all frogs in the state are aberrations. A ny
s u r p r is e s ?
We’re supposed to be shooting in the middle of winter. It’s actually now the middle of summer. On location we’ve been putting down a most amazing amount of extraordinary material in this forest. We have this insu lation material that goes down on the roof of cabins to imitate snow. Then they blow an acre’s worth of foam across the place to be fallen snow. There’s two types of stuff we’ve been using for other kinds of snow. The first one is brilliant. It’s nappy-liners, a powder. When it’s mixed with water it turns into this kind of glutinous stuff that looks just like snow when you put it on the windscreen. t^ 7 1
from scratch was hardly an obstacle. Up to their elbows in fur and glue, they talked design. Riley: These creatures are really vicious. They like to make people into little lizard hotels [laughs]. It’s actually got homages to Alien and other stuff in it. We had creepy Geiger stuff in mind when we went into the creature design. It’s hard to do new stuff these days; it’s pretty much all been done. We want to take all this stuff and point it in a whole new direc tion. I’d really love to get into robotics. Perry: Whereas I’m really into make-up and prosthet ics. Together, we like to make the look of things which is where we merge. Riley: A lot of this stuff was done quite a few months
ago. We were going crazy sculpting raptors down in my garage in 40 degree heat; fibreglassing and mak ing this kind of mad stuff. A ny
fu n n y s t u f f ?
Riley: The deaths of several animal victims had
already been filmed in order to test the creatures’ look on film. In the process, we’d used a lot of offal.
We protected our superbly crafted models, a dog and a cat, by lining their interiors with plastic bags plastic bags we’d forgotten to remove. One day sev eral weeks later, we were called upon to do some
ie th e publicity for The Sydney Morning Herald who wanted some pictures. Remembering the animals, we hurriedly unpacked our models only to discover maggots, hundreds of the bastards.
C I N E M A P A P E R S • DECEMBER 1997