Main Article: Harbinger of the End

Marcus Nispel — originally at the helm of End of Days — was fired from the project after various disputes regarding budgetary and creative matters. Replacing him was Peter Hyams (director of The Relic), with visual effects supervisors Eric Durst and Kurt Williams still attached to the project after Nispel’s dismissal. As a result of the situation, Hyams was allowed a short preparation time for the film — spanning only four weeks. Stan Winston Studio was hired to bring to life the film’s visceral portrayal of Satan, aided by Rhythm & Hues on the visual effects front.

Satan’s winged and monstrous form was designed by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery. Due to Hyams’s late attachment to the project, the finale of the film still had to be scripturally defined. To resolve the issue, filming of the third act — where the practical version of Satan would be employed — was pushed back at the end of the production schedule, allowing more time to develop both the dynamics of the finale and the design of the Monster. Stan Winston recalled in an interview with Cinefex: “Crash spent months designing the beast while in consultation with Peter Hyams. Ultimately, he was able to conceptualize the devil in a way that was both cinematic and demonic. We didn’t want to play to some cliché image of Satan — red skin and horns just wouldn’t have worked — but the character did have to conform to some of the iconic mythology. Crash managed to touch on the key elements that identified the beast, while bringing something fresh and new to it.”

McCreery’s final Satan design.

Crash’s design was then translated into a three-foot tall maquette, sculpted by Joey Orosco, John Rosengrant, and Trevor Hensley. The maquette served both as the base of the Satan suit and the digital Satan created by R&H. The latter is first seen early in the film, although in a refractive form to conceal its appearance — which would be only revealed in full view in the finale. “There was a lot of discussion about how tangible he was supposed to appear,” Durst related. “Peter liked a refractive effect that really showed just the contours, so we worked on that, trying to figure out what the levels of refraction would be in a night city environment. We did sketches and it became clear very quickly that we needed to see it in motion, because the refraction changed once the thing started to move. So we went to animatics on it right away, as soon as scan data from the Winston maquette became available. There was a lot of modeling involved, with many structural details in the contours that had to match.”

Orosco sculpts the Satan maquette.

This was not Hyams’s first use of refractive digital effects, as observed by visual effects supervisor John DesJardin: “the early Satan shots used a variation on the somewhat simple time-travel shader from Timecop. This time we added many properties, smudging some of the refraction and cleaning up other aspects.” The resulting effect, however, was deemed too similar to the cloaking effects seen in the Predator films. The effects team thus further elaborated the program. DesJardin continues: “we softened the highlights, making a point of only bringing them up at key movements to suggest the beast’s actual definition. Then we’d take it back down again and motion-blur the image, which made him blend back into the street action.”

Regarding actual creature animation, Hyams dictated that Satan’s wings should remain tucked against its body during the early street scenes, only opening when the creature had to make a sharp turn. DesJardin said: “he was basically just a trunk. We developed root-like tentacles below the trunk with the idea [that] he could use them to propel himself along. Peter sat in with character animator Erick Lee and picked static postures of the creature with its head forward to represent it in motion, then suggested we use the tentacles to trail behind, flicking around a little. Peter also relented on the wings a bit, letting them open on occasion as the thing cornered, which we used to make its form more dynamic and expressive.”

Satan is fully revealed in the film’s finale, when he bursts from the floor of the Cathedral Jericho and Christine had sought refuge. For the first breakthrough shot, a break-apart floor rig was devised, with hinged and pneumatically-actuated plywood leaves forming a flower shape. At the center of the system was a scored plaster plug, with an air mortar diaphragm beneath that would blow debris upward as the plywood sections opened. When Satan first rises through the broken floor, a green screen shape — which would be replaced with the digital Satan in post-production — was employed.

For the following shots of Satan, a full-size, fully-articulated creature suit — over seven feet tall, with a 12-foot wingspan — was built by Winston Studio. The maquette was digitally scaled up — and milled into a rough urethane foam sculpture, which was then manually refined by the same artists that had sculpted the maquette. The skin was cast in foam latex, as well as translucent urethane for the wing membranes. Stan Winston recalled: “our demon towered over Arnold. It was really quite astounding to see this imposing visual of an actual demon interacting with him. Six to nine puppeteers were outside the beast to control various function, with John Rosengrant inside to provide focus and direction for the creature performance.” The suit featured an internal camera, which provided the point of view of the main shooting camera — allowing Rosengrant to have a better sense of his surroundings whilst inside the creature.

Performing in the Satan suit was an arduous experience for Rosengrant. “The Satan creature was probably the toughest suit I was ever in,” Rosengrant recalled in The Winston Effect, “mainly because of the position my body had to be in to make it work. My arms were outstretched, and my feet were locked together in ski boots, on a little base on a boom arm so that I could be raised and lowered. I looked as if I was being crucified. Then, I had to lean far forward, which put a lot of pressure on my back, because the suit and the head were very heavy. I had to train really long and hard to sustain that kind of pressure on my back. It was also very claustrophobic in this suit. Once it was sealed up, there was no way to breathe, so I had to be fed air from a tube. It was dark in there, too, so I couldn’t see a thing until the monitor inside was turned on.” He also added: “One of the things that drove me was that I was performing in front of Arnold, the fitness champion of the world. There was no way I was going to to let myself fail in being able to physically perform in that suit.”

Orosco and Satan.

The experience was also stressful — as well as bizarre — for the other crewmembers. Rob Ramsdell, one of the puppeteers, recalled: “we were all really concerned about John’s safety inside that suit, because of the precarious position he was in. There was also something creepy about shooting this Satan scene in a real church. It rang as awkward.” Trevor Hensley, part of the crew, agreed: “we all felt kind of weird shooting in that church. We had to tone down the usual cussing that goes on. And we were puppeteering Satan in there, which was weird in itself. I remember somebody made a little nametag for John that said, ‘Hello, my name is Satan.'”

The Satan suit on set.

Following an early test screening, however, Hyams decreed to increase Satan’s size to massive proportions — far larger than those of the suit. The practical creature was thus replaced for most of the sequence with the digital Satan — with only two shots of the practical version visible in the final cut. The Winston Studio crewmembers were widely disheartened with the decision. Hensley said: “we were disappointed to see how little of our work showed up in the final movie. We’d shot that thing for two very long days, and they ended up using only a couple of pieces of it. Those decisions are always disappointing. But we also realize that’s not our call. We’re hired to do what we do. We do the best we can. And then the filmmakers decide how they’re going to use it. It’s just part of the job.”

“By going CG,” Durst elaborated, “we could take it up to twenty feet mor more in height — like a T.rex in relation to a man — and also utilize that nice big wingspan to work with the widescreen aspect ratio.” After widely-approved initial tests, Hyams also altered some of the actions performed by Satan, taking advantage of the flexibility of the digital model. To compose the upscaled beast into the film, the practical footage was first reviewed, and the shots recreated with virtual cameras. First preliminary shots were included in the film for the final cut, then taken back to the visual effects team for finalization. The digital model was further refined for the sequence with textures photographed from the puppet version. R&H also enhanced the appearance of Satan by channeling the earlier refractive version — using particle systems to create refraction elements around and beneath the wings of the Devil.

In an early cut of the film, Satan and Jericho had a prolonged dialogue scene, eventually excised for the final version — where Satan quickly throws Jericho against the wall and possesses him. Afterwards, when Jericho impales himself on a sword wielded by an angel statue, Satan bursts from his body in a massive, fiery form — dubbed by the creative team as the ‘firebeast’. For the sequence, an array of practical elements — flamethrowers and pyrotechnics orchestrated by John Stirber — were first shot for gross fire action. The actual firebeast effect underwent a long development. DesJardin explained: “Peter had suggested that we see the entire beast on fire, so 3D digital artists Scott Giegler and Ivan DeWolf animated a version with wings out, completely engulfed in flame, which up until mid-August was the concept — it even turned up in a trailer for the movie [see the 2:06 mark in the above video]. But at the point where it gets sucked down into the hole, this firebeast began looking like a flaming chicken — so that was out.”

The problem was resolved by creating a version of the firebeast that essentially consisted in just the flaming head of the Satan creature. “They supplied 2D digital artists Sean McPherson and Sean Lee with colourful renders for the facial details. From there, we could separate red, green or blue image channels to pull out certain details. That allowed the 2D fire elements to be warped around the face before adding the detail back in. It was a fine line to walk in order to keep dark areas within the flame, which were needed to define planes of the face.”

For more images of Satan, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: The Zorgons [COMING SOON]

Keep away from Pumpkinhead,
Unless you’re tired of living,
His enemies are mostly dead,
He’s mean and unforgiving,
Laugh at him and you’re undone,
But in some dreadful fashion,
Vengeance, he considers fun,
And plans it with a passion,
Time will not erase or blot,
A plot that he has brewing,
It’s when you think that he’s forgot,
He’ll conjure your undoing,
Bolted doors and windows barred,
Guard dogs prowling in the yard,
Won’t protect you in your bed,
Nothing will, from Pumpkinhead.

–Ed Justin, Pumpkinhead

Whilst working on Parasite (1982), veteran Monster Maker Stan Winston began considering the possibility of directing a feature film himself. The chance arose when producers of DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group sent Winston a copy of a script for a low-budget horror film — titled Pumpkinhead — in order to hire him to create the titular creature, a demon of vengeance summoned by a farmer whose son was killed. The story was inspired by the eponymous poem written by Ed Justin, also the film’s writer. Winston realized that he could actually direct the film. He recalled in The Winston Effect:  “it was a small picture, something I thought I could handle as a director; and I felt there was a lot that I could bring to the story. So I told the producers, ‘yeah, I’ll do the creature — but only if I can direct the movie.'”

Co-writer of the film Gary Gerani further elaborated in an interview: “Billy Blake, Richard Weinman and Howard Smith were the original producers, and they were looking at people in the field. Stan had come off doing second unit photography for Aliens, so there was a feeling that he was a first class creature creator and a hell of a second unit director, so let’s do a deal where he can direct, which he wanted to do, and give this low budget movie a monster that can stand alongside Alien and Predator.”

Gary Gerani and Mark Patrick Carducci, original co-writers of the film, considered more than one conceptual version of the creature. With Winston’s involvement, Pumpkinhead began gravitating towards the duo’s original idea — which in turn had been inspired by Lovecraft — combined with elements of later ideas. Gerani elaborated: “Mark and I first played around with the revenge demon as a Lovecraftian scaly monster like the ones in our Super 8 projects. Then we got sidetracked into an interesting area; a lot of people thought if it’s called Pumpkinhead, it’s gotta have a pumpkin for a head. We got into trying to do a Sleepy Hollow-type of creature where the witch would tell Ed Harley to go to a graveyard, dig up a corpse, cut the head off, bring it back; in the meantime she’s carving out this pumpkin with these evil eyes, and when he brings the body back, she brings it all to life. When Stan got involved, you’ve got arguably the greatest creature maker around. You’re not going to tell him to simply put a pumpkin on a human body, so we got back to the Lovecraftian idea. It’s still a bloated head, and we even threw in an extra line in the film about how he comes from the old pumpkin patch in the graveyard.”

Promotional stills.

Winston expanded the script with themes inspired by Forbidden Planet, one of his favourite science-fiction films. He explained: “the essence of Forbidden Planet was the Monster of the Id. Ultimately, what killed everyone was this creature that had been created out of the subconscious mind. That concept had always grabbed me, and I wanted to bring some of that to Pumpkinhead. On the surface, Pumpkinhead is a demon that a witch conjures up; but, at a deeper level, Pumpkinhead is an extension of Ed Harley. By the end of the film, Ed comes to understand that the only way to kill Pumpkinhead is to kill himself. That’s the story I wanted to tell.”

The writers and Winston were all enthusiasts of classic Monster films, and the rewriting process was pleasant for them: “with Stan we thought this guy would give us a great Monster, and he liked the script, the whole simple moral fable of it,” Gerani said. “We did a few rewrites with him after that; Mark would go to California, and I had a 9 to 5 job at Topps in Brooklyn. I went to the set a couple of times. Mark would come back and we’d bang out our revised pages and hope Stan was pleased. One of the good things was Stan was such a horror buff in addition to a creature creator that we were all kind of on the same page. For the sequence in the burned-out church, Stan knew that we were all familiar with Howard Hawks’ The Thing, so he suggested we do the same kind of moment with a silhouetted Pumpkinhead standing in the doorway.”

Occupied with director duties, Winston was mostly unable to collaborate to the design process beyond simple director approvals; Pumpkinhead was designed and built by the artists of Stan Winston Studio. Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis conceived the appearance of the creature. “Since Stan was directing the movie,” Gillis recalled, “he turned the creature work over to us. Stan said: ‘I’m the director on this. I’m the client — you guys are the effects guys.’ It was great to have Stan’s encouragement to just go with it, on our own. We sat down and started drawing, and then we presented those drawings to Stan, and he made suggestions. That’s how the character of Pumpkinhead developed.” Woodruff added in an interview with Icons of Fright: “It was like your parents turning over the keys to the house and saying, ‘Ok, we’ll be back in three months’, and every day was just an amazing day at work. You just felt like nothing is going to go wrong with this movie. Not that it wasn’t hard work, you just knew that everything we built was going to be used the proper way because there was a director involved who knew and understood the importance to make our stuff on set work.”

Pumpkinhead concept by Alec Gillis.

Gerani elaborated on the conceptual approach to the creature: “we wanted it to seem like another life form from another dimension, like that famous line that ‘magic is just another person’s science.’ What we view as magic is another realm of existence we’re not aware of yet. That’s how Stan and his sculptors approached Pumpkinhead, like he’s conforming to the physical laws of somebody else’s universe. Maybe what we perceive as Hell is simply an alien environment or dimension filled with exotic, ultra-vicious life-forms.” Following these guidelines, the creature design was heavily grounded in reality, and was primarily inspired by reference photos of cadavers and decomposing bodies. “It was mostly from cadavers and dead bodies,” Woodruff said.”We definitely wanted it to have the feeling of something that had been dead and something that was partially human, but also more evil and monstrous. Not in a science-fiction way, but more of a folklorish kind of way. A legend that was brought to life.”

Various designs were considered, with the final Pumpkinhead taking elements from all of the previous iterations. The creature features overgrown bones on its shoulders and legs, long and skeletal fingers, and pale eyes with slit, reptilian pupils — almost unnoticeable in the film. “They just used their own initiative,” Gerani said, “and said, it’s a demon. What doesn’t look conventional or corny? They eliminated horns but thrust up his shoulder blades to convey it in an interesting way.” Completing Pumpkinhead is its namesake bloated cranium. Its color scheme also reflects its nature, with hues based on decaying flesh. Pumpkinhead was also portrayed as growing from a fetus-like stage which is unearthed to begin the summoning.

The maquette.

Winston’s limited collaboration also eased the process. “There was a shorthand with Stan that made it so easy,” Rosengrant related. “We could go to him with something, and ask: ‘is this enough? Will this do it?’ And he could look at it, and immediately say, ‘yeah, that will be fine,’ or, ‘no, we need more.’ That’s very different than the normal situation where we have to overbuild, just in case the director changes his mind and wants something more once he is on the set. Stan knew exactly what the tools were, what he needed and what he didn’t need. We didn’t have to go through the process of educating him, as we do with many directors. That made the whole job easier, and a lot more fun.” With the final design selected, construction of Pumpkinhead began. The fetus stage was sculpted by Alec Gillis and John Rosengrant and painted by Tom Woodruff, Jr.; it was built as a featureless dummy covered in dirt, as well as a simple cable animatronic that could rear itself. A second stage, seen only in one single shot of the film, was also sculpted and painted by Shane Mahan.

The final stage Pumpkinhead was sculpted by Alec Gillis (for the head), and Tom Woodruff, Jr. and John Rosengrant (for the body). Rosengrant and Howard Berger painted the creature, which was built as a full-size suit, performed by Woodruff. The skin was cast in foam latex, with spandex embedded to enhance the suit’s durability, whereas the claws were cast in translucent resin. For reasons of budget, the creature suit’s hands were poseable, but not articulated; two insert animatronic arms were thus constructed by David Nelson.

Both a fully-articulated hero head and a stunt head were built to be mounted on the suit, right above the performer’s actual head — to increase the Monster’s height. Pumpkinhead’s digitigrade leg design also dictated that a system of leg extensions would be employed. They were devised by Richard Landon, and used in combination with a harness due to their design. “We never really intended [the extensions] to be weight-supporting so that I’d be able to walk on two legs,” Woodruff said. “The idea was always that we’d have some kind of rig system to take some of the weight off, because we didn’t want to build them up so big that we’d have to make them bulky. We wanted to keep everything really sleek in design.”

Pumpkinhead’s leg extensions were among the first to be successfully employed in a film, and the technology used to build and use them was refined from Boss Studios’ unsuccessful attempts with the original Predator. Scenes with Pumpkinhead shot from the waist up did not even need to employ the extensions, and as such the performer simply walked on platforms to maintain the illusion of the creature’s height. Gerani commented: “what’s interesting is Predator originally had Pumpkinhead’s legs, these satyr-like legs, and it was difficult for him to walk, which is why in the film you only see quick glimpses. You really only see him walking in a church, and that’s because the stilts are off. The Predator has a lot of running around to do, so that’s why Pumpkinhead was given that unwieldy leg arrangement. It works pretty well, I think.”

Woodruff, who could see through two holes in Pumpkinhead’s neck, wanted to infuse specific vibes in the performance, also inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s special effects work. “We had to get the feeling that it was a creature born from a dead body,” Woodruff said, “a regenerating thing. That was the point where I tried to work in those Ray Harryhausen-type moments, always trying to look toward his stuff. I incorporated a lot of his idiosyncrasies into not just Pumpkinhead, but things I’ve done since then. There are times where I’ll try to put a lot of that body language into a performance.”

In the end of the film, to illustrate the creature’s bond with the farmer, Pumpkinhead’s face mutates into a more humanoid configuration, reminiscent of Ed Harley’s face. Again, a hero head and a stunt head were built; John Rosengrant sculpted the new face, infusing traits and connotations from Lance Henriksen. Ed is ultimately damned to become the next Pumpkinhead — and is seen being buried as a deformed fetus, which was created as a featureless dummy, sculpted to include Henriksen’s features.

Thanks to Winston’s experience with creature effects, Pumpkinhead‘s budget was used to full potential. “It’s funny, but we never had a sense of being constrained by the budget on that show,” Mahan recalled, “and that was because Stan knew what to spend the money on and how to get the most out of everything we built.” He also commented on the experience: “When I revisit Pumpkinhead after all these years, and I realize that it was done in 1987, all in-camera, and for only three million dollars, I’m amazed at how much movie is there. I think it is a really impressive example of a first-time director’s work. And it is still used as a model for low-budget films. People reference Pumpkinhead all the time when they are looking at how to make an effective low-budget movie.”

Crew shot.

Winston remembered the film fondly: “all the things I had ever done on my life came together and helped me as a director for Pumpkinhead. I loved every part of the process, from the camera work to the editing to the sound mixing. Rather than being intimidated by the job of directing Pumpkinhead, I was energized by it. And, in the process, I learned that I was a pretty good director.”

For more images of Pumpkinhead, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: Pumpkinhead

Hans Ruedi Giger, the original Alien designer, did not return to work on Aliens. None of the filmmakers involved in the project contacted the artist, whom at the time was attached as a creature designer to Poltergeist II. “we didn’t know exactly how long that commitment was, but we heard that he was busy,” director James Cameron said. “But honestly, I think that if we had really wanted to fight for him, we could have worked around it.” Giger himself recalled in The Alien Saga documentary: “I was a little depressed because nobody asked me to work on this film. I was in Los Angeles at the time working on Poltergeist II, and I asked around about Aliens. For me, it would have been the most logical thing to work on that film. I was very anxious to collaborate, but nobody called me. I’d much rather have done a second Alien than a second Poltergeist — because, naturally, I felt more related to Alien. Perhaps the Poltergeist II people wanted to keep me away from Aliens for fear of losing me. I inquired everywhere, but no one could or would inform me about it.”

Cameron, having already successfully collaborated with Stan Winston on The Terminator, hired the artist and his crew of Stan Winston Studio to bring the horde of StarBeasts to the screen. The creative team wanted the new Alien designs to adhere to the aesthetic estabilished by the first film, whilst also trying not to copy it in an uncreative manner. “My attitude on the Alien was to render unto Giger what was Giger’s,” Cameron told Cinefex, “but hopefully not limit myself too much in the process.” Winston himself said: “we tried to be as true to the original film as we could, without disallowing ourselves a little bit of artistic freedom to do things that we considered — if not improvements — something to keep your head above water, so you’re not just doing what was done before.” The special effects crew had at disposal some of the original models portraying all the stages of the Alien’s lifecycle — save for the Chestburster; those served as a base to create the new models for the film.

The Alien menace is actually visually introduced in the film when the Marines enter the Hive — composed of secreted resinous material. Similarly to the deleted Eggmorphing scene in the first film (which, at the time of Aliens, was simply excised and did not appear in any cut of the film) the Aliens pinned hosts to walls. Cameron explained: “the Alien structure provided an interesting opportunity for us to do a Gigeresque-type structure created biologically by the Aliens — much the way ants do when they cement the walls of their tunnels using saliva mixed with granules of rock and sand.”

A structure of otherworldly geometry, with swirling biomechanical shapes, the Hive was built as a massive ‘make-up’ for the Power Station set. It was sculpted in its various components in clay and then moulded in latex and fiberglass, depending on the specific piece. Production designer Peter Lamont explained: “We got two castings a day from each mold. Some were cast off in fiberglass and others were vacuformed. In all, there were hundreds of pieces, most of which were painted by one of our scenic artists. We spent about three weeks on that while the power station was being cleaned up. Then we moved into the plant and started fitting these things into place. A team of painters had already gone through with I don’t know how many gallons of silver spray paint, so already it was starting to look not much like a power station. By the time we finished, it was really transformed. We had just three weeks to complete the work once we got inside. It was quite a chore. We started on the lower floor and were still working on the upper floor when production began. As Jim came up shooting, we were gradually retreating behind.” Most of the cocooned colonists were sculpted dummies with faces cast from various actors.

Building the miniature Hive.

When the Hive is introduced, the camera pans down the ceiling of the colony structure, encrusted with the resinous material. The sequence actually employs a miniature devised by Robert and Dennis Skotak, combined with forced perspective. Robert Skotak explained: “It would have taken forever to do that for real, not to mention the expense. So after thinking about it for a while, we decided the best way to do it would be with a hanging miniature. The way the shot was set up was that the actors would be very close, literally right on their heads underneath it — and then they’d kind of look around and walk back into the depth of the set. So what we needed to do was to continue the encrustation up above the actors, and also continue the pipe work and the scaffolding and the catwalks and everything else. The art department had gone to Acton and gotten all the measurements — where the lift was, where the pipes were, basically the whole floor plan. Then, to save time while the plant was being cleaned up, they reconstructed that section in plywood on L stage and built the cocoon mass over it in carved styrofoam. While it was there on the stage. Dennis and I set up a camera in a position we’d selected while at Acton and determined all the measurements we’d need for the hanging miniature and its supports. Then we ran some film through the camera of the beginning, middle and end of a tilt-down, made prints and traced on top of them where we wanted all the lines and pipes and everything to go. We gave that sketch to Steve Begg and he went up to Acton with Chrissy Overs, and together they finished the miniature on site.”

The miniature was 10 feet high and 12 feet wide, and had to be blended with the full-size Hive set beyond it. Dennis Skotak recalled: “there were a lot of last-minute adjustments to be made, mainly because the live-action set was not quite ready until a day or so before we started to shoot. Since a lot of what we had to do depended on the final set dressing and paint job, it was pretty crazy those last couple of days trying to get our blend just right.” Cameron decided to shoot the sequence in the fog, and as such vapour had to be emitted in lesser amounts on the miniature — since it was closer to the camera (a uniform emission would have caused “an inconsistency in aerial density”). Dennis Skotak continues: “it was a very delicate balance. We found as we were there that by adding the slightest amount of fill light on the miniature and then wetting everything down and blowing in just the right amount of fog that it all worked together. It was transitory, though. Cast and crew would be standing around waiting, and when everything looked right, we’d say: ‘that’s it! Shoot!’ — and everybody would go for it. The blend was there literally just for moments and then it would be gone. We were very fortunate that after all the struggle it worked.”

The Alien Eggs underwent cosmetic changes in proportions and animation — with their petals splitting and moving downward for their entire length. Rick Lazzarini devised the hero animatronic used when an Egg opens. “I used a cable stand-off on polypropylene technique,” he said, “to allow the petals, [or] lips to curl back and seal back up organically. The Hero Egg I worked on was used in a number of shots in the film.” Winston Studio also built several background Eggs — either closed, for Eggs with Facehuggers still inside or open, for already hatched Eggs. Small scale vacuformed eggs — eight to ten inches in height — were also constructed for the miniature Egg chamber set.

The Facehugger’s role was expanded upon compared to the first film. “In the first film, the Facehugger — after its leap onto John Hurt’s face — appears simply as an inert form,” Cameron said. “In Aliens, we changed that. Now it has the physical capability, should it miss on that first leap, to run around on its eight legs and leap again — which made for a really interesting sequence.” The design of the Monster was partially changed, with its underside inspired by Giger’s paintings — a vaginal opening with an extruding proboscis. Cameron explained: “the bits of oysters and stuff inside [the first Facehugger looked great, but I did want to see the disgusting thing that had been down the inside of Kane’s throat. You never see it in the movie, so I figured we’d gross everybody out. All of Giger’s designs have a really sexual undercurrent to them, and that’s what horrified people about the Alien as much as anything. It worked on a kind of Freudian subconscious level, and Ridley and Giger knew that and went for that. This film was never intended to be as much of a horror film as the first one, it was working on a different thematic level, but I still wanted to be true to some of those ideas, some of those design concepts.”

Winston added: “we took a few artistic liberties, nothing anyone’s even likely to notice. It was just one of those things. If you work on something long enough, you’re bound to find things you feel can be a little bit improved. Sculpturally, I think ours was a little more organic than the first one, although the first one was brilliant. The finger appendages on ours are a little more like fingers than they were on the original. We made the knuckles a little more knuckle-like and on the tips of the fingers we actually put nails. Basically, we took that which we saw as the intent of the original design and carried it a step further. Also, we lengthened the tail by about six inches so we could do more work with it — wrapping it around necks and getting a whip-like action out of it.”

Alec Gillis sculpted the Facehugger, with the original models as reference — whereas Lance Anderson devised the internal mechanisms of the main models. Several different Facehugger with specific ranges of motion were built and used depending on the requirements of the sequences. As opposed to the original creature’s actually organic underside, the new Facehuggers had foam latex skin. Various dead and decomposed Facehuggers were built for the first Hive scene and the Med Lab scene, and a dead Facehugger with real organic innards — including chicken skins — was devised for the autopsy sequence.

In the Med Lab scene, two of the Facehuggers in the stasis tubes are still alive. To portray the creatures suspended in water, the models were controlled by cables. “For the [Facehugger] that slams up against the inside of the tube,” Winston said, “the difficulty was that it had to be operated underwater. The tube had to have a water-tight seal, but we had to be able to move in and out with our cables. Getting the tail to whip around in a confined space and underwater was a major challenge. We tried various things such as air pressure and water pressure, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, Ray Lowell came up with a spring-loaded tail that was cable-operated. Pulling on the cable would curl the tail up very tightly and then releasing it would allow it to whip open. At the same time, two other cables moved the base of the tail in a 360-degree axis so that it would pivot around while the tail itself was whipping. It worked beautifully.”

The two Facehuggers are released by Burke in the Med Lab. In this key sequence, several models were employed, including a fully articulated hero Facehugger. “Lance worked out most of the finger mechanisms before we left for England,” Winston said, “then, after we got over there, the tail whipping action and the extruding tongue elements were added, along with some fine-tuning of the controls. Everything worked on that one, requiring something like nine operators. For scenes where it’s crawling up the table, we built another one that was basically the same except that it didn’t have the tongue element within the body. Then Ian Rolph worked on a third one that had just the finger articulations. That was to help it scurry along and turn around on the wall before leaping off. We also made a series of floppy Facehuggers that had articulated fingers, but the fingers were left loose so the creatures could be thrown around like you’d throw a dummy off a cliff. Some of those were also used in the scenes where the Facehuggers are blown up. It’s amazing how some really good dynamics came out of stuff as simple as that. We’d be wondering what sort of fancy doodad to come up with for a particular shot and Jim would say, ‘let’s just make a bunch of dummies — we’ll throw them and blow them up.’ And for quick cuts that worked.”

Building the scuttling Facehugger.

One of the Facehugger animatronics was devised to scuttle around on the floor. Winston recalled: “I wanted to do a pull-toy type of thing, where we would literally pull it across the floor and a wheel would turn underneath or something and cause the legs to move. In a way, that’s pretty much what we ended up doing; but at the start we couldn’t quite figure out how to do it, so we got off on a few tangents.” Ultimately, Cameron was inspired by his earlier work on Piranha II. Winston continues: “Finally, Jim called me from England and said: ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of this, Stan, but I did this thing for Piranha II, where a fish was pulled through the water over a wire and we had a little mechanism inside to make the tail wiggle.’ So, working from that idea, he drew out a little design of what he thought the insides could be for the Facehugger, sent it over here, and Rick Lazzarini proceeded to make it work — which was quite a job since there were still an awful lot of problems to overcome. The Facehugger was on a wire that wrapped around a rubber-surfaced gear on the inside and was held taut by two operators on either end. Pulling the Facehugger along that wire would cause the gear to move which in turn would move other smaller gears connected to the legs. The gearing mechanism turned out to be very intricate, but the simple brilliance of the idea was that there was a correlation between how fast you pulled the Facehugger and how fast the legs would go. If you pulled it fast, the legs would move fast; if you pulled it slow, the legs would go slow.” Lazzarini himself added that “it could even ‘jump’ if the front operator moved his end of the cable up and down rapidly.”

An early dream sequence portrays Ripley’s nightmare, where she sees the Chestburster pushing itself through her chest. “It’s actually a wonderful effect,” Winston said. “She pulls her top up and you see her whole body stretch as the Chestburster pushes out from the inside. For that particular gimmick, Sigourney was on a slant board under the bed with a duplicate appliance body on top and an operator underneath pushing the Chestburster up. It was particularly effective because anyone who’s seen the first film knows exactly what it is, but it never actually bursts through. Tom Woodruff was largely responsible for that effect.”

When the Marines first enter the Alien Hive, Dietrich discovers one of the colonists still alive. The cocooned woman is however rapidly killed by the creature erupting violently from her body — the Chestburster. Winston commented in Superior Firepower: The Making of Aliens: “The Chestburster in the original Alien was one of the most shocking and wonderful effects in film history. We had to repeat it, but we had to do something a little different.” The design’s head and snout were partially altered, but the most prominent change was the addition of two developed arms — a trait originally considered by Roger Dicken for the original Chestburster. What remained in the final creature for the first film was a sculptural suggestion of arms at the sides of its small torso. Tom Woodruff, part of the crew, recalled: “the thing we were noticing  in the original sculpture was there was an indication [that] there were to be little arms on the thing, and I wasn’t really aware of them in the film.” Alec Gillis, part of the crew, added: “[Cameron felt that] it was a bit too larval, a little too disconnected from what it would later become.”

Adding the Chestburster’s teeth.

A Chestburster with arms would be able to help its eruption from the host’s chest — and would additionally be able to crawl on the Hive’s walls. Winston elaborated further: “the only thing we added to the Alien Chestburster was a pair of tiny little arms that folded up very tightly against the body. We thought the Chestburster ought to have them to help pull itself free — and, after all, the big one it grows into has arms. To maintain continuity, we made our Chestburster look exactly like the original when it first emerges. Then these little arms come out and work. Of course, the scene and the moment are so dramatic that only the most discerning eye will even notice, but we thought they ought to be there.”

“For the Chestburster scene,” Winston recalled, “we built the set so that the woman — Barbara Coles — was leaning slightly forward, cocooned between a couple of pillars. The lower part of her torso — from the waist down — was a fiberglass duplicate of her body surrounded by all this cocoon stuff. She could thus lay right up into that form and the upper part of her body would be real and the lower part would be fiberglass. That was the configuration at first when she speaks. Then, for the scene where the Chestburster comes out, she was on a slant board with a foam rubber appliance from the neck down.”

Out of the mould.

The actual Chestburster was sculpted by Tony Gardner, and portrayed by two distinct puppets. The first model was used to actually burst through the colonist’s chest; Bill Sturgeon elaborated and built the mechanisms of the ramming Chestburster. “It had a very strong metal structure and cables that were used to provide its various movements,” Winston said. Three joints in its waist allowed it to move, achieving a crawling motion. “We were literally able to punch it through like a punching rod,” Richard Landon, creature effects coordinator, said. “[It came] through the foam latex skin and the t-shirt that [the colonist] was wearing, with a lot more energy than the John Hurt Chestburster from the first film.” Meeting an issue similar to the set-up for the first film, the crew had to film multiple takes of the bursting sequence, as the pre-distressed t-shirts did not tear appropriately until the last take.

The second animatronic, a fully articulated hero model, was developed by Steve Norrington. “That one had even more life than the first,” Winston said, “mainly because it didn’t have to push through anything, so it didn’t have to be as strong.” The puppet featured multiple layers of vertebrae-like discs, through which cables ran — allowing a total of four directions of motion for each segment. Cable actuated rods for the arms and a full jaw opening mechanism were also included. “For the last scene,” Winston said, “we built a complete duplicate of the actress in her death position — head, body, everything — which we then put into the set. At the same time, we replaced the original Chestburster with the one Steve Norrington had made and had it writhing around and really going crazy. The movement was stupendous — the little sucker was really alive!” To the dismay of Winston’s crew, however, the entire set — including the Chestburster — had to be torched.

ANGLE ON WALL as something begins to emerge. Dimly glimpsed, a glistening biomechanoid creature larger than a man. Lying dormant, it had blended perfectly with the convoluted surface of fused bone. The troopers don’t see it.

-James Cameron, Aliens script draft, 1985

With the death of the Chestburster, the Hive awakens. “I think if you can do one, you can do any number,” Cameron explained. “Anyone who’s been through the process of creating a creature effect, or a character that’s sculpted in clay and molded and blown and painted or whatever, knows that to make one takes six months and to make two takes six months and a couple of extra days. I’m exaggerating slightly, but there’s an economy of scale there. It does create additional problems when you’re shooting, though. All the things that can go wrong with one creature go wrong five times as often with five creatures. On the other hand, you have times as much to look at so your attention is a bit divided.”

In the original story treatment for Aliens, Cameron included both the Alien Warriors (“my term for the single adult seen in Alien,” according to Cameron) and a new Alien caste among the horde — the ‘Drones’ — whose role was to excrete resinous material to build the Hive. “The Drone is a small albino version of the Alien creature,” the original treatment reads. “Where the Warrior has a set of striking teeth within its head, the drone has an excreting probe, like an organic stucco-gun [sic].” The concept was maintained in early drafts, but dropped in further drafts, and was not even explored in any conceptual designs.

In the final film, the Alien horde is represented by the Warriors — which adhered to the originally established anatomy for the creature; the filmmakers were creatively constrained by the fact it had been shown in its entirety in the climax of the first film. Winston elaborated: “I loved Alien, it was probably my favourite horror movie of the decade. But if there was anything that I was disappointed in, it was at the very end when the Alien gets blown out of the ship and you realize at last that what you’ve been waiting to see all this time is simply a man in a suit — a great suit, but a suit nonetheless. I found that very disheartening in the movie, and even more disheartening going into Aliens knowing that millions of people had seen this thing and therefore knew exactly what the Alien looked like. Our hands were tied — we had to be true to the original.”

For that very reason, the artists were sent one of the original Alien suits to their Studio for reference purposes. Howard Berger, part of the crew, recalled: “we pulled this thing out of a crate, and it was unbelievable to see how it had been constructed. It had black-painted, hard macaroni pieces glued all over it to give it texture, with black-painted bottle caps at the waist; and the feet were just black Converse tennis shoes, covered with a slip-latex skin! When we got this thing out, put it on a mannequin, and saw it in broad daylight, it was amazing to realize what Ridley Scott had gotten away with, just by using slime and careful lighting and the right camera angles.”

Even using the suit as their fundamental reference, the filmmakers allowed themselves cosmetic changes to the Alien anatomy. The most prominent example was the removal of the Alien’s signature translucent dome on its head, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. Cameron recalled in a Cinefex interview: “on the original Alien, there was a translucent cowl covering the whole top of the head that looked kind of like a porpoise back. We planned to do the same thing with ours, and to that end Stan had Tom Woodruff sculpt up a ribbed, bone-like understructure that would fit underneath and be slightly visible through the cowl. When it was finished, they gave it a real nice paint job and I took a look at and said, ‘hey, this looks much more interesting the way it is.’ So we ditched the cowl and decided that this was just another generation of Aliens — slightly mutated.” A later explanation — initially suggested by David R. Larson on an issue of Starlog, and approved by Cameron — portrays the differences as results of an aging process. From a practical standpoint, the frenetic actions that were to be performed by the Alien suits represented a constant danger for the domes to receive consistent damage. “Jim just wanted to remove [the dome],” Gillis said, “thought it would be a hassle. He was afraid of it cracking or it having to be replaced — we’d have to cut and switch the dome.” The design of the ridges was actually based on the patterns that Giger had painted on the sides of the original Alien’s underdome structure.

Winston’s sketch of the Alien hand.

The removal of the dome implied that the Alien’s skull would be exposed; to maintain what Winston called “the Alien’s eyeless menace,” the human-like skull portion was smoothed over and painted with darker tones. Traces of it are still present, in the form of small indentations in the front of the Alien’s head — detectable upon close inspection. Other changes were strictly made to distance the appearance of the Aliens from “the man in a costume look of the original.” Those include the Aliens’ hands, whose fingers were greatly elongated. “We’ve redesigned the hands so that they are longer than original,” Winston said, “the fingers are a little bit longer — again, we took certain licenses to get away from the human look of a hand in a glove; and then we’ve developed articulated mechanical hands for close-ups, which do things that a person’s hand in a glove couldn’t do!” Interestingly enough, the sixth digit (corresponding to the double opposable thumb) was removed. The first digit of the Aliens’ feet was also modified and designed to grow at an angle, a trait included for them to convincingly climb walls. The rest of the changes amounted to simple cosmetic modifications. Winston explained: “It was all quite subtle. Details that were obviously tacked onto the first one — little hoses and things — we worked at in a sculptural way so that the organic and inorganic elements blended together better. It’s nothing you could ever detect on film — just the kind of thing you do to keep from getting bored duplicating exactly what someone else has already done.”

The original Alien suits were rather detailed but were impractical: they could not perform the fast and agile movements that Ridley Scott wanted to portray. In order to avoid the same issues met by the filmmakers of Alien, Cameron and Winston decided to modify the structure of the suits — with an emphasis on movement rather than detail. “I thought that quick, blurring, lizard-like, or insect-like leap was more important than the physical, sculptural design of the suit,” Cameron said, “and I think that that’s a mistake that a lot of make-up and prosthetics people make when they’re dealing with this sort of thing is that they lavish all their attention on the sculptural detail –the surface texture, etc. — and they fail to realize that people need very few pixels of information to identify a human figure, and most of that identification is through motion. The way we walk is so ingrained in us mentally that you can see it just like that; so what we did was we actually redesigned the suit and made it simpler and less sophisticated and basically freed it so that it was much more flexible.”

Winston explained further: “what Jim wanted were movements that were sporadic and odd and strange, so that even though they were men in suits, they didn’t move like men in suits. So the big thing for us was to figure out a way to make these guys move and act in ways that were unlike a human — hanging from ceilings, hanging from wall to wall, doing insect-like moves and so on. The Alien in the first film could never have done these things because it was a full rubber suit and was very difficult to move around in. To avoid that problem, we had to come up with an alternative design that allowed for great freedom of movement. We did that by eliminating the rubber suit aspect altogether and using instead black leotards with lightweight foam pieces attached to them. If you were to look at them hanging on a rack, you’d think, ‘my God, those are just black leotards with pieces of stuff on them.’ But when you see them in the film and they’re wet and they’re slimy, you can’t tell the difference at all between ours and the original — and ours had complete freedom of movement.” The lighting and angles of the film also aided in the objective.

The Aliens were sculpted and constructed by Tom Woodruff, John Rosengrant, Julian Caldow, Nigel Booth, Lindsay McGowan and David Keen. Various stuntmen and dancers portrayed the Aliens in the various scenes featuring the creatures; none of them reached Bolaji Badejo’s towering height, and as such the filmmakers had to resort to camera trickery. Cameron recalled: “for Alien, they went out of their way to find a very tall person to be inside the suit — Bolaji Badejo was something like seven feet tall. We knew right off that we weren’t going to be able to find ten people who were seven feet tall. On the other hand, in studying Alien we found that there was really only one shot in the entire film that shows a direct scale relationship between the creature and a human being. In all the other shots, it exists separately in the frame.” In actuality, both the Alien and an actor are seen in the same shot in a number of sequences, but only one — the Alien raising in front of Lambert — offers a real sense of scale. Cameron continues: “we decided that rather than go for height, we’d go for people who had the right physique to be in the suits — the thinnest people we could find that had the strength to do the kinds of movements we wanted, such as hanging on wires and crawling upside-down and that sort of thing. In the end, they averaged under six feet tall, but by putting them on footstools or doing low angles on the creatures and high angles on the people looking at them we were able to create the impression that the Warriors were much taller than they actually were.” The Aliens’ tails were at times puppeteered with wires. For specific sequences, upside down sets were built and filmed with the performers in the Alien suits; the footage was then mirrored vertically, creating the illusion of the creatures scuttling on the ceiling.

The hero puppet.

One of the full stunt puppets.

The suits were actually combined with a large number of stunt and hero puppets with various purposes. The Winston Studio crew built a total of six, eight feet tall stunt puppets — whose purpose was to be damaged, shot at, or crushed. “Whenever we could,” Winston said, “we used one of the puppets because they were about eight feet tall and very thin — there was no way they could have been humans in suits. A couple of them were rod and cable actuated and we could put their arms into positions that a human just couldn’t get into. Others were floppy puppets that were just jointed so they could be thrown or crushed or blown up — whatever was needed.” Insert animatronic arms were also built. For the most detailed actions, a single, fully articulated hero puppet was constructed from the torso up. It featured articulated lips, head, neck, and hands, whereas its arms were puppeteered with rods. To further differentiate the Aliens, the suits included hollow blade-like extensions on their arms, something absent in the stunt and hero puppets.

Giger commented on the Alien designs, saying that “I didn’t like the ribbed cranium of the Alien Warrior, although you couldn’t see the Aliens very much.” Otherwise, the artist stated in a Cinefantastique interview that “It’s all beautifully done, everything, the designs and the way they’re executed.”

For more images of the Aliens, visit the Monster Gallery.

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Next: Aliens, the Alien Queen

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• StarBeast — Aliens
• StarBeast — Aliens, the Alien Queen

A PIERCING SHRIEK fills the chamber.

She turns. And there it is.

A massive silhouette in the mist, the ALIEN QUEEN glowers over her eggs like a great, glistening black Insect-Buddha. What’s bigger and meaner than the Alien? His Momma. Her fanged head is an unimaginable horror. Her six limbs, the four arms, and two powerful legs, are folded grotesquely over her distended abdomen. The egg-filled abdomen swells and swells into a great pulsing tubular sac, suspended from a lattice of pipes and conduits by a web-like membrane as if some vast coil of intestines was draped carelessly among the machinery.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

Before being attached to Aliens, and even before the production of The Terminator, director James Cameron wrote a treatment for a story called Mother, which featured “its own type of Alien Queen.” Although it would never eventually be greenlit, Mother was heavily influential on Cameron’s conception for Aliens. First written towards the end of 1980, the treatment fundamentally concerned “a female, genetically engineered creature attempting to ensure the survival of its young,” hence the title itself. The concept of the Alien Queen and the climax of Aliens itself was, in fact, an idea first conceived for Mother. Cameron continues: “in the final confrontation in Mother, a human in a ‘power suit’ — a utility exoskeleton that is a sort of cross between a fork-lift and a robot — fights the alien creature that I called the ‘Skraath’ or ‘Skraith’, a black six-limbed panther that I had previously created for another project called Labyrinth.”

Cameron’s concept of the Skraith. Whilst the idea had to be visually adapted for Aliens, this sketch would later serve as the starting point for the Thanator in Avatar (many other elements from that film were also extrapolated from the ideas for Mother).

In a deleted scene from the first film, the Alien’s lifecycle had already been revealed — with the so-called Egg-morphing. Cameron, however, exploited on its excision to introduce his new idea. He explained: “If you follow Dan [O’Bannon]’s original concept, the closure of the original cycle was the human host turning back into a cocoon. I never found that to be very satisfying as it showed — when one had the facehugger attached, the embryo implanted, and when it burst out it killed that person. There was nothing going on with John Hurt in that respect. So there was a different version of it when the Alien grabbed Harry Dean Stanton and presumably put him into a cocoon. It’s certainly no great logical detour to assume that it might have used him as another host, but I think it would be a bit odd that he turned into an egg. That’s something that would have been hard for the audience to swallow because it involved the transformation of the human host and although one can assume the Alien can metamorphose,  to have its biological properties take up residence in a human being and change it was going beyond the ground rules they set themselves. One of Alien‘s great attributes was that it set up a very weird biological process, but it has a basis in science fact all the way through, like the cycle of a digger wasp which paralyses its prey and injects an egg into the living body to mature. There’s a validity in all of that, but I dispensed with it because we never saw that in the film anyway. Had it appeared in the film I wouldn’t have violated any logic turbulence.”

Without the Egg-morphing sequence (which would be reintegrated in the Director’s cut of Alien decades after the production of Aliens), the original film did not explain how the Eggs in the Derelict spacecraft came to be. Cameron thus elaborated the Queen’s role in The Winston Effect: “that adult [Alien] form — one of them, anyway — couldn’t possibly have laid the thousand or so eggs that filled the inside of that Derelict ship. So, working from that image — acres and acres of these quite large eggs, two and a half to three feet tall — I began focusing on the idea of a hierarchical structure where the central figure is a giant Queen, whose role is to further the species.”

The director explained further in a letter to Starlog: “Extrapolating from entomology (ants, termites, etc.), an immature female, one of the first to emerge from hosts, grows to become a new Queen, while males become Drones or Warriors. Subsequent female larvae remain dormant or are killed by males… or biochemically sense that a Queen exists and change into males to limit waste. The Queen locates a nesting spot (the warmth of the atmosphere station heat exchanger level being perfect for egg incubation) and becomes sedentary. She is then tended by the males as her abdomen swells into a distended egg sac.”

James Cameron’s first Alien Queen concept.

Since the integration of the Queen concept in Aliens‘ script, Cameron had a precise idea of what the Mother creature’s appearance should eventually be. Winston told Cinefex: “Right from the start, Jim had a concept of the Alien Queen in the back of his head. In fact, when we first began talking about the project he showed me the beautiful rendering he had done of it which I liked immediately.” Heavily influenced by Giger’s biomechanical aesthetic, Cameron envisioned a tall, proportionally thin and feminine Monster, with an elongated head ending in a crown, and six limbs.

Although the anatomy of the Queen would inevitably conjure the image of a dinosaur — a bipedal creature with a tail — Cameron wanted the design to distance itself from those, instead taking inspiration from arthropods: “I feel a sense of authorship when it comes to the Queen. Somebody once described it as an anorexic dinosaur, which I suppose is inevitable even though that’s not what I had in mind. In fact, I wanted specifically not to suggest a dinosaur concept — at least overtly — because that would have been a little too commonplace and boring. For me, the Queen is really a blend of what Giger does with what I wanted to do, which was to create something that was big and powerful and terrifying and fast and very female — hideous and beautiful at the same time, like a black widow spider.”

One of the maquettes. Two wooden figures represent the placement of the two stuntmen inside the animatronic.

Cameron also conceived the basic structure of a full-size animatronic Alien Queen, a marvel of unprecedented complexity. Suspended from a cable rig, the creature would contain two puppeteers that would control one large and one small arm each — in order to achieve organic fluidity to their movements. The rest of the Monster — which included the head, legs, and tail — would instead be puppeteered with a combination of hydraulic mechanisms, wires and rods. Although Winston was intrigued by Cameron’s concept of the Queen, he was initially skeptical about the intended structure of the puppet, for primarily practical reasons. “Jim had seen what we could do with puppets on The Terminator,” he said, “and so it made perfect sense that he thought of puppeteering techniques when he needed a way to realize the Alien Queen. But, even so, it was a huge leap of faith to believe we could build a 14-foot tall, acting puppet.”

One of Winston’s concepts.

Winston tried to elaborate his own renderings of the Alien Queen. He explained: “there were a few little things about the design that I thought could be improved, so I worked up a few sketches of my own and showed them to Jim. Actually they were pretty much like his, although on one of them I had deleted the extra set of arms and reconfigured it so that only a single stuntman would be needed inside.” Cameron rejected the ideas, adamant to adhere to his vision.

Giger’s Alien Monster IV. Notice the hands and the neck of the creature, which were translated onto Cameron’s Queen design.

Though the director did not intend to use Winston’s designs, some of their traits were implemented in the final design — which, otherwise, essentially adhered to Cameron’s concept. “One thing Jim did like,” Winston continues, “was an idea from my redesign of the leg that gave it a double joint and made it look less human. In the end, Jim took into consideration some of what I’d said and the things I’d drawn and he went off and drew another Queen which was similar to his first but much more refined. In fact, when he came back, it was obvious that that was the Alien Queen. There was no doubt about it. We then sat down together and worked out a scale drawing — literally blueprinting her out in profile and front view, with her exact shape and exactly how she would have to be done to get two people inside.” The final Queen design also included more overt influence from Giger’s paintings — such as Alien Monster IV, which provided inspiration for both the Queen’s neck and hands. The Queen’s head also included a front portion able to move independently from the crown and ‘retract’ inside it when at rest. When the Queen is revealed, she is still attached to her Egg-laying sac, inspired by queen termites.

Cameron’s final Queen design.

The garbage bag test.

Once Cameron defined the final appearance of the Queen,  the director worked with Winston to further elaborate the structure of the full-size animatronic, and whether or not it could be actually brought to the screen. A test was made, with a ‘garbage bag’ mock-up Alien Queen. Winston recalled: “once we came up with a design and an idea of how we were going to get it to work, we rented a crane and built a quick little body plate setup out of wood that would hold two stuntmen. Then we made a rough mock-up of the Queen using black foam-core and plastic trash bags and suspended our stuntmen inside it. For the big arms, we used ski pole extensions — which were lightweight, but very strong — and attached them to some creature hands I had developed for another project. Each stuntman would hold one with his arm stretched out straight so that from his shoulder to his fist would be the Queen’s upper arm and from his fist to the end of the pole would be her forearm. For the smaller arms in front, the guys were able to use their own arms without any extensions. We set this thing up out in our parking lot to see if it was going to work — and it did. There was still a lot of fine-tuning to be done, but the basic concept was good.”

The Alien Queen was first built as a 1:4th scale maquette, which served as a base for the construction of the full-scale puppet, as well as a moulding base for the quarter-scale rod puppet used in the miniature sequences. The maquette was sculpted and painted by a team of sculptors: Shane Mahan for the head; John Rosengrant for the body; Greg Figiel for the arms; Alec Gillis and Willie Whitten for the legs; and Brian Penikas and Shawn McEnroe for the tail. “We all had such a wonderful time sculpting that thing,” Rosengrant said in The Winston Effect. “At the end of each day of sculpting, we’d all look at it, and say, ‘this is going to be great.'”

The creation of the full-size animatronic Queen began with the construction of a solid understructure able to support the various components and mechanisms, as well as the two internal stuntmen. The two puppeteers inside the Queen were Nick Gillard and Malcolm Weaver. Winston recalled: “the first thing we had to do was build the inner body of the Queen. The strong fiberglass shells that would hold the stuntmen and the strong aluminium plate inside that would carry the hydraulics. That inner section would in large part dictate the size of the Queen’s body, so it was necessary to work that out in advance.” Assigned to the fabrication of the supporting structure were Rick Lazzarini and Wayne Sturm. Once completed, it was shipped to London, where the rest of the construction would be held. “We set up shop on a large effects stage at Pinewood,” Winston said, “and began building the different components of the Queen — which basically we designed and built and sculpted exactly as we had done the miniature. Armatures were built for the legs and arms and body and head and tail — all separately.”

The first section to be constructed was the Queen’s tail. “The simplest armature to build was for the tail, so I decided we should do that first,” Winston said. “Not that it was simple by any stretch of the imagination, but the tail was probably the easiest to build quickly and I figured it would be a good break-in project for my English crew to help me assess individual strengths and weaknesses. Once the tail armature was done, we could then go to clay on it while the rest of the armatures were being built.” The tail was sculpted by Steve Norrington, John Robertson, Christine Overs and Philomena Davis, whereas its internal mechanisms were devised by Ray Lovell and Richard Landon. The torso had to accommodate two stuntmen inside of it to operate the arms. Winston said: “foam human figures representing the two men were placed inside our already-completed body plate, and a wire mesh sculpting armature was constructed around it. That way we could be sure of having enough room.” John Rosengrant, who had sculpted the maquette’s torso, also sculpted the full-size torso. Welded steel armatures were built for the head, arms, and legs. Shane Mahan, who had sculpted the maquette’s head, also worked on the full-size head; Chris Overs, Steve Norrington, and Philomena Davis sculpted the outer arms; John Rosengrant, Tom Woodruff, and John Robertson sculpted the inner arms (which matched those of the Alien Warriors); and Graham High and John Robertson sculpted the legs. The same people collaborated in painting the Queen. A team of mould makers from Pinewood — headed by Keith Shannon — worked on the casts and molds of the Queen’s components. To minimize the weight of such a massive puppet, the Queen’s skin or surface was cast in a very light polyfoam — placed directly over the armature sections — and fiberglass for the more rigid parts, such as the crown extension.

For most of the sequences involving the full-scale puppet, it was supported by a crane arm; depending on the shot, it would be above, with wires, or from below, with a rigid bracket mount. Winston said: “the wires and the bracket both attached to a point midway down the Queen’s back. The wires were used primarily for the shots where you see her full body. Usually, though, you never see below her knees, and that’s where the bracket came in. The bracket came out of the Queen’s back, down one side of her spine and then under her body where it connected to the crane arm, at her pivot axis. The configuration of this bracket — which was built for us by John Richardson and his effects crew —  enabled us to shoot the Queen without showing the crane arm, because the arm connected to the bracket well below the frame line. The bracket itself was also virtually invisible, mainly because we could run it down either side of her back and it would be concealed by her spiny vertebrae. The pivot action that allowed her body to turn was hydraulically controlled by a power steering unit off the crane arm. So an operator, if we wanted the Queen to turn from right to left, would simply turn a steering wheel from right to left and the body would do the same.” Two pivot devices allowed the Queen to respectively tilt forward and back and move her neck up and down. Trevor Butterfield devised the hydraulic mechanisms of the body. The controls for all body portions were connected to separate power steering units, each maneuvered by a single operator.

Rick Lazzarini works on the mechanics of the Alien Queen’s head.

The Queen’s head had a wide range of motion. Both a stunt and a hero version of it were built. “We had two slightly different versions,” Winston said. “One was our major fighting head — which was built to take abuse — and the other was our ‘hero’ head which was finer tuned and lighter weight. Functionally, it was about the same as the fighting head, except that it had an extruding tongue mechanism inside and also had tilt capability. In addition to hydraulic controls, the head had cable-actuated functions as well. The face, for example, had its own movement that was independent of the head. The first time the Queen is shown, in fact — when Ripley discovers her in the Egg chamber — her face extrudes from the head almost like a turtle coming out of its shell. Along with the 360-degree facial movement, there were also cable-operated jaws and snarling lips.”

Since the elbow movement was to be controlled by a wrist, the Queen’s arms had to be very lightweight and maneuverable. Winston said: “it was especially important that the large arms be as lightweight as possible. As with our foam-core and trash bag mock-up, the stuntmen’s arms reached only as far as the Queen’s elbows, so the whole movement of each forearm and hand had to be controlled by the wrist of a person whose own arm was stretched out straight. For the forearms, we again used a ski pole set-up — this time with hands that could be either positionable or floppy. Depending on the shot, we could position them in dynamic poses or loosen them up so that they would move around freely when the arms moved. In either case, there was no real articulation as such — but amazingly, the approach worked very well. With all the thrashing around the Queen did, it was impossible to tell if the hand movements were free or directed. For our fighting arms, the ski poles were foamed right into the forearm section, which could thus take quite a beating. We also had a set of lighter-weight arms that were polyfoam down to the Queen’s elbows, but then the forearm was a thin vacuformed shell that weighed practically nothing. Those allowed the stuntmen to have much freer movement — but they were very fragile, so we couldn’t use them to bash up against things or else they’d crush.”

Insert arms were also built for scenes requiring great dexterity, such as when the Queen tries to catch Newt under the Sulaco floor grates. Winston explained: “the insert arms — which were done by Ray Lovell — had completely articulated fingers, cable-controlled by external operators. These we could use in one of two ways. Either we could position the Queen with her elbows out of frame — then come in from the outside with these articulated hands — or we could connect the whole articulated arm right to the Queen’s body. If we did that, though, we couldn’t have our stuntmen inside.”

For the legs, Steve Norrington and Richard Landon devised inner articulated armatures, in two versions. “One was for the full legs that were puppeteered externally by wires,” Winston said. “The other was for a separate set of legs that had no foam below the calf. These were used for closer shots where the feet were not in frame and could therefore be moved about simply by having operators grab onto the base of the armature and manually step the Queen through her paces.”

The internal stuntmen also contributed to puppeteering the Alien Queen’s lower body section and tail. Winston explained: “there was hydraulic movement of the tail at the base for ups and downs, but the side-to-side moves depended upon the amount of pressure the stuntmen put on their footplate — which also happened to be the Queen’s hips. Putting pressure alternately on one side or the other would cause the hips to move from side to side. That, combined with the hydraulic action, created a great deal of base tail movement. At the same time, the outer extremity of the tail was actuated by external wires — usually a combination of two or three wires, each controlled by a different operator.”

Although Cameron intended to use the full-scale Queen for most of the sequences, he acknowledged that it could not perform specific movements required by a number of scenes in the script. It was decided to combine the Winston animatronic with a quarter scale puppet, maneuvered with rods and wires. Stop-motion was initially considered, but ultimately discarded for budget and practical reasons. “As a director, I find it tough to deal with stop-motion,” Cameron recalled. “I was very happy with what was done on The Terminator, but by that point in the story we were dealing with a mechanical device and I didn’t feel the look of stop-motion violated anything we’d already done. I was a little more worried about it with Aliens; the scenes involving the Alien Queen were very important, and what we were trying to do was create a real and believable character. Plus, when we started to analyze the types of shots we’d be doing we realized that most of them would require fairly quick action — turns and spins and rapid strides — the sorts of moves that in stop-motion would cause so much displacement per frame that the arms and legs would end up strobing. There are things you just can’t do in any other way, though, so originally the plan was to have a rod puppet version and a stop-motion version. But eventually it got down to budget and it became a choice of either one or the other. Given that, the rod and cable-actuated puppet seemed more appealing for a number of reasons. One was that I had never worked with that kind of thing before and I wanted to fool around with it and see what could be done. Also I just had a feeling that with a lot of the floor effects we’d be using — smoke and steam and that sort of thing — we’d have more flexibility with puppets we could shoot ‘live’ on a miniature set.”

To build the  fully articulated small-scale puppet, Cameron hired Doug Beswick — who, like Winston, had already collaborated with the director on The Terminator, being responsible for the stop-motion effects of the Robot. Among his effects crew for Aliens were mechanical designer Phil Notaro, cosmetics supervisor Tony Gardner, and construction supervisor Jim Belohovek. “Our puppet was going to be the same size as Stan’s miniature model — about three feet tall — so while they were still in the process of sculpting, Phil would go over there and take measurements and photographs of it so that he could begin working on some early mechanical designs.” As devised by Beswick and Notaro, the Queen would be supported by a pole that extended from the base of her spine and was attached to a maneuverable overhead crossbar. Her basic motion was controlled by rods attached to her feet and inserted through slots in the miniature set floor. The Queen’s proportionally thin design made it complex to devise a mechanical system that could be fitted inside her anatomy. Beswick continues: “from a mechanical perspective, the design was very difficult — mainly because the Queen was extremely complex and extremely skinny. During that first month when the model was still being sculpted, Phil was able to do some of the mechanics we’d be needing, but not a whole lot because the dimensions weren’t totally locked in yet. In fact, we ended up having to do a couple of things over — like the back joint. Phil underestimated how deep they were going to sculpt the undercuts all around the thorax and, as a result, when it was finished the mechanism he’d worked out for it didn’t fit. So he had to cut it way down, and even then it just barely made it.”

The internal mechanisms fit tightly inside the miniature Queen. “The thorax narrowed down to a tiny triangle-shaped area that was maybe three inches from corner to corner,” he said. “That in itself wasn’t bad, but because the Queen had so many mechanical functions we ended up having to run 49 cables through that area — through a hole that was only about an inch and a half around. Complicating things further was the fact that the Queen was going to have to bend at the waist. As a result, we had to put in a massive joint that would enable her to bend with all those cables in there, plus an inch of foam all the way around. It was important that we have a lot of control over the body. Most especially, it had to be solid enough to hold its position so that when the head was slashing back and forth, the body wouldn’t follow it. The arms were also a problem. They were only three-quarters of an inch in diameter on the outside, yet they had nine functions each. The arms and shoulders moved up and down, forward and back, and rotated. The elbows and wrists bent, the forearms rotated, and even though they were smaller than a soda straw — about three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter — all of the fingers had to be functional. We kept trying to talk Jim into either simplifying the Queen or fattening her up a bit, but he was very adamant that we stick to the design. It got to be kind of funny because we’d go to him and say, ‘couldn’t the fingers be a little bit bigger?’ And he’d say, ‘that’s not the design.’ Or we’d say, ‘there’s not enough room for a mechanism in here.’ And he’d say, ‘but that’s the design.’ Everything we asked for, we didn’t get.” Ultimately, the small scale puppet replicated the final Queen design perfectly, as Cameron had intended it to do.

A basic aluminium armature was built and mechanized. Available space was always a concern. “As each new mechanism went in,” Notaro said, “space became very tough to come by. I’d lay out a game plan for where I could put something — usually in some tiny little space somewhere — and then I’d have to go in and shift everything all around to actually make it work. It was a long, continuous process. By the time I finished, there was virtually no room left inside at all.” The Queen puppet was fully articulated; the head could be moved widely, complete with the signature independent facial motion, as well as opening jaws and an extending tongue. Her lower neck section could also perform a wide range of movements. The outer arms could move fluidly, and were fitted with functional fingers — whereas the inner arms had more limited motion. The wrists of both versions were floppy, allowing the hands to move about as the arms were puppeteered. The Queen’s back spines could also move up and down whereas her tail was both mechanized and puppeteered with external wires.

In order to minimize the number of required puppeteers for the 1:4th scale puppet, Notaro devised coordinated cable functions that could be controlled with a single joystick — an idea that also allowed more organic movement. Notaro explained: “oftentimes the difference between jerky, unnatural-looking movement and fluid, natural-looking movement is the way the functions have been organized for operation. When I hook up these kinds of things, I try to group the cables together in such a way that one puppeteer can handle several functions. But they have to be interrelated functions. On the Queen, for example, the head, neck and face functions were all fed into one set of joysticks so that just one operator could control everything needed to give the character expression. That’s the only way to get a real flow in the character. You don’t want to have one operator controlling two different functions; nor do you want to have one function operated by a whole bunch of people. It just makes sense. If the functions are interrelated, you can get a better feeling for the character and make it look more realistic. It also means less breakdown in communication. If you want something to happen, you tell one person as opposed to telling three or four and then trying to choreograph their movements.” The Queen’s 49 cables were controlled by ten joystick systems, operated by a total of five puppeteers on the set — although four assistants were also needed: from above the set, two supported and directed the Queen, and two others puppeteered the legs from below the set. At times, the Queen was also shot upside-down, in order to better conceal the wires.

Placing the Queen’s skin also proved to be difficult — since the special effects artists had to determine the thickness of the layer of foam latex. “Usually, we have a fiberglass substructure in our figures,” Notaro said, “but, in this case, there was no room for one. So the foam had to be thick enough that we wouldn’t have metal things poking through it, yet thin enough to still bend and fit the character. We had a core that was put inside to hollow out the foam body, but by the time I was done putting in all the mechanics, Tony had to literally cut the foam down to paper thinness in some spots.” The Queen’s large crown also posed a practical challenge due to its sheer size and ratio between it and the Monster’s neck. The structure had to be light and resilient. “It was about 18 inches long,” Beswick said, “which was huge in relation to the tiny neck joint it had to rest on. So it had to be very light, yet strong enough to make it through shooting. We made it out of the thinnest fiberglass we’ve ever used — about 30 thousandths of an inch thick. We used a little bit of gel coat, then one layer of angel hair, one layer of half-ounce cloth and a very little bit of resin. We did it in two sections — the top and bottom separately — and then seamed them together. Amazingly, it was very strong and it held up through the filming like a trooper.”

A more robust, stunt version of the Queen puppet was built by Graham High, Verner Gresty, and Steve Onions.  “Jim realised it was a bit precious to risk on the egg sac sequence,” High said, “and took too many operators to get a smooth performance, so Stan asked me to build another more robust cable controlled [version].” The stunt Queen, supposedly simpler, actually featured a total of 70 control cables. It was used to shoot scenes where extensive articulation was not required. High and his crew also built a third stunt puppet, but it was never actually used for shooting. Both miniature versions of the Queen seen in the film featured an additional finger in the inner arms — but they were filmed so that it would be never shown onscreen, keeping consistency with the footage of the full-size creature.

Following Cameron’s instructions, the Queen was animated with quick and agile movements. Beswick said: “one of Jim Cameron’s comments when he saw our dinosaur from My Science Project was that the Alien Queen would have to move very fast — almost like a blur. The dinosaur had to move very slowly, which was actually more difficult. It’s really much easier to get smooth movement from something that’s moving quickly than it is from something that’s moving slowly. I think Jim got the effect he wanted from the Alien Queen — quick, yet fluid action.”

Expectedly, both the miniature and full-scale Queen proved to be very complex to film, although the anatomy of the Mother creature allowed more screen exposure than the Warriors. Some of the Queen sequences were shot at a quicker speed, at times with 12 to 16 frames per second. “In photographing the Warriors,” Cameron explained, “we tried to be circumspect so as not to make them look like men in suits. That was always a concern. With the Queen, however, we felt sure that it would hold up because it clearly isn’t a person. It has extra limbs and spines and other features that defy normal human geometry, and we, therefore, knew we could show it longer without blowing the game. All we had to do was make it look nonmechanical — which proved not to be a major problem, given Stan Winston’s handiwork and my own tendency to shoot action scenes in very quick cuts.”

The Queen is introduced in the Egg chamber, which was built both as a miniature set and as a full-scale portion of the environment. The scene, in fact, employed a combination of the full-scale Queen and the 1:4th scale, stunt puppet built by High and his crew. In this ambience, the Mother creature is secured in position by extensions of hive material, and is still attached to her Egg sac– which was built both as a partial, featureless extension of the full-size puppet, and as an animatronic extension of the 1:4th scale puppet. The miniature Egg sac was also filled with miniature Eggs, KY Jelly, and egg yolk. A miniature puppet of the Queen’s ovipositor was also built. All of the components of both versions of the Egg sac were cast in translucent foam latex. Dennis Skotak recalled: “it was a very difficult environment to work in, and as usual, Jim was very specific about how everything had to be. The egg sac had to operate in a certain manner, the eggs had to move in just such a way and the ovipositor had to deposit an egg precisely and with just the right amount of goo. To create a breathing effect, we had wood poles on the sac leading away from the camera and wires to move the Eggs inside. Then, to get the ovipositor to work, someone had to reach way over through an opening in the side of the set, slide his hand into the Egg sac from the rear and guide the Egg out. One of the biggest problems was that there was so much slime in there that we’d get an Egg all positioned and ready to go and it would keep popping out before we got to shoot it. So someone would have to climb back in and reposition it — and it got messier and more disgusting every time. In fact, everything about that set was unpleasant. There were KY jelly and ‘superslime’ dribbling all over the place and it was extremely hot. We had steam rising from below and smoke and all kinds of smelly things in there — even cans of freon spurting from both sides. It was like shooting in hell.”

Ripley sets the Egg chamber ablaze and shoots the Queen — also discharging her grenade launcher at the creature in the process. Skotak continues: “that was another messy one — especially since we found that the most dynamic way of shooting it was up close, with a fairly wide lens, so the sac exploded right into the camera. We0d get everything all set up and then blow the sac apart with charges and all of this goo would come splurting out and collect in a bucket down below so we could recycle it. For some reason, shooting that scene always drew an audience. We’d warn people to keep their distance, but invariably someone would wind up with a face full of slime.”

Lashing in a frenzy, the QUEEN DETACHES FROM THE EGG SAC, ripping away and dragging torn cartilage and tissue behind it. SEEN DIMLY THROUGH swirling smoke, it rises on its powerful legs and steps forward.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

When the Queen detaches from her Egg sac, “it wasn’t possible to do that in full-size, so we were faced with the difficulty of dealing with flame in scale. Bob came up with the idea of using mirrors. One of them was placed behind the Queen and positioned in such a way to reflect a flame bar we had set up about 15 feet away. At that distance, the flames — which were six or seven feet high — looked quite small in the mirror. It was a good scale. In the same shot, another flame bar was positioned similarly, but in such a way that when photographed through a beam-splitter, flames would also appear to be in front of the Queen. Obviously, we could have done the same effect optically, but this method allowed us to move the camera during the shot and also introduce mechanical effects and falling debris in front of the background flames — and do it all quite simply.”

Ripley sees a silhouette moving in the smoke… a glistening black shape which FILLS THE CORRIDOR TO THE CEILING… the QUEEN.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

The Alien Mother chases Ripley and Newt as they reach the lift at the end of a corridor — one of the last scenes to be filmed with the 1:4th scale Queen. “The idea was that the Queen was really too big to fit in the corridor very well,” Notaro said, “and that’s how Ripley gets ahead. For us, it was a difficult shot in that she had to be crushed down to much shorter than her usual height and then squeezed through a quarter-scale set representing the hallway. To make it work, I readjusted the support post so that rather than coming out of her back and up, it came out from the rear, away from the camera. Then I disconnected the joysticks and ran all the cables through slots I had cut in the post. She had to travel about six feet down the corridor, so I put the post with the cables on it on a camera dolly that I’d rented and then reconnected the joysticks. It was still a very tight squeeze. Even shortened to her minimum height, she just barely fit in the hallway.” As Notaro had to fly back home, the Queen was eventually maneuvered by other puppeteers at Pinewood — but according to him, “it came out real nice.”

During the film’s climax, the Queen’s acidic blood announces her presence in the Sulaco. Several different chemical combinations were tested, but ultimately the crew had to resort to the polystyrene approach. Richardson recalled: “we went back to the polystyrene approach but tried to give it a different look. Instead of acetone, we used carbon tetrachloride — which produces basically the same effect — and we mixed it with all sorts of dyes and soaps and other chemicals so that when it hit not only would it dissolve the polystyrene, but it would smoke and bubble while doing so — which was much better than just seeing something melt through. Also, I found that by adding metallic powder onto the surface of the polystyrene, as it dissolved the powder floated on top of the solution — and looked very much like molten metal.”

The Queen violently impales Bishop with the dagger-like tip of her tail — then lifts him up and rips him apart. Winston explained the complex effect: “the Bishop rip-apart was a multistep effect. At first he’s just standing there and he gives a little jolt and for an instant you think maybe he’s got a Chestburster inside him. Then the tail comes right through him from behind. The normal way to do that effect would be to put him on a slant board with a fake body, but we didn’t want to do that. We wanted him to be standing in plain view and then suddenly have this thing shoot out of his chest. To do it, we made a slightly built-up chest plate for Lance Henriksen that allowed a flexible rubberized tail to be inserted and take a bend. So in the start position, the tail piece was lying flat inside the chest plate. It was then pulled up and out through his shirt by a wire that you couldn’t see because of the way it was shot — wires can be hidden. Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis developed that part of the effect. Then we did a switch. The next shot was a variation of the old arrow-through-the-head trick. John Richardson’s crew built a harness that went through Lance’s back. On the front side, there was a rigid tail piece that was the length we had pulled out in the previous shot. The back side connected to the Queen’s actual tail. Lance’s feet weren’t in the frame, so we were able to put him on a teeterboard to lift him up. Jim set up the shot in such a way that it starts out tight on Lance with the tail sticking through his chest, then widens out to reveal that it is, in fact, an Alien tail that has come through from behind and finally follows that tail all the way up and into the drop-ship where the Queen is looming overhead. With her tail, the Queen lifts Bishop right up to where she is in the drop-ship. Her arms come out. One hand grabs the upper part of his body and the other hand grabs the lower half of his body and she literally rips him in two. Lance said they weren’t paying him enough to do that shot, so we had to come up with a dummy rig.” The two-part dummy that had to be ripped apart featured a spring-loaded armature that would “pop apart” and push the Queen’s hands (which were put into slots) along with it, creating the illusion that they were actually tearing the android apart.

After ripping Bishop apart, the Queen lowers herself down from the dropship; the full-scale Queen was used. Winston recalled: “for the scene where she lowers herself down from the dropship, we ran wires from the pivot point on her back up through the ship to the top of the stage. Our stuntmen were inside operating the arms and we had wire riggers off to the side lowering the Queen down onto the ramp. Other wires — connected to the knees  and to the ankles — allowed the legs to be controlled from above too. It was like a giant marionette. And so the moves wouldn’t look floppy, we ran additional wires from her ankles to specific landing points so she could step down firmly in a dynamic position. Her tail also had to uncurl, which meant other wires and other puppeteers. It was pretty rugged. Jim had multiple cameras going and we did it a multitude of times, but the shot was worth it.”

The Alien Mother chases Ripley when she runs towards the cargo hold door. This was actually the first scene to be filmed with the 1:4th scale Queen puppet. “We had everything working on that shot,” Notaro explained, “two guys supporting the Queen from above, two others walking her from below and five cable operators for the other functions. In all, the Queen was capable of about thirty movements, but Jim wanted one more when we got to shooting — a rotating move right at the top of the tail so that she’d be able to turn more quickly. So we added a tiny mechanism in her butt that allowed her whole body to turn around farther and faster. That was also helped along by turning the post she was mounted on. By turning the post, everything turned.” After several sessions of rehearsal, smoke and alarm lights were introduced into the set as the scene required. The sequence was shot at 36 frames per second, meaning that the puppeteers had to maneuver the creature faster than usual.

Cameron allegedly “showed no mercy” to the small-scale Queen puppet during filming, according to Notaro: “during our next shot, we had two puppeteers literally ramming the puppet into the sliding doors as hard as they could — over and over again. Then, after about ten takes, Jim would say, ‘here’s how I want you to do it.’ And he‘d it three times harder than anybody else had. Luckily, the Queen turned out to be very durable. We did have some slippages in the mechanisms, but that was to be expected since they had been built to fit into a very thin, small area and they were being abused very badly. I was constantly adjusting things to keep it operating correctly. We also had to keep it looking good because we might do a scene one day where she was completely battered and the next day do a scene where she had to look brand new. There was constant maintenance going on.”

The climactic fight with the power loader ensues. Special effects supervisor John Richardson explained: “during the fight, there were a lot of different things happening all at once. In fact, for the scenes where we had the Alien Queen and the power loader working together, the whole stage was full of special effects people pulling wires and pushing levers. It was quite a sight.” The sequence employed an orchestrated combination of footage with the full-size Queen and the 1:4th scale puppet. When the Power Loader violently smashes the Queen with its lifting arms, the dummy version was used. “We used the floppy Queen for a lot of the tumbling and falling sequences,” Notaro said. “It was just hard and soft foam pieces glued together. We’d throw the floppy Queen over a bunch of boxes, for example, then cut back to the articulated Queen for when she stood back up.”

Ripley realizes that the only way to defeat the creature is to eject it out of the Sulaco’s main airlock — a method familiar to her. “Where Ripley wallops the Queen with the Power Loader arms, then grabs her by the neck and lifts her into the air — that was all done live action,” Notaro explained. “We picked it up with the puppets at that point, just as Ripley is about to toss the Queen into the airlock. We had a couple shots of them fighting, then the Queen breaks one of the hydraulics on the right knee of the Power Loader and it buckles up, sending both of them crashing to the bottom of the airlock.”

When the Queen falls into the airlock, the dummy Queen was used. The full-size creature was then filmed under the Power Loader model. To portray the Queen being ejected into outer space, the airlock portion of the set was bolted to the ceiling, with a starfield blanket below. Both the miniature and full-size Queen (which was adequately supported by wires) were used when the creature attempts to hold onto Ripley’s leg, before finally falling to her demise.

The final shot of the Queen writhing aimlessly as she falls towards the camera was again achieved with the 1:4th scale puppet — which was attached to a motion control system, and filmed against bluescreen. Visual effects supervisor, Brian Johnson (who had already worked on Alien) commented: “in addition to the rotation, the Queen had cable-operated head movements, cable-operated arms, and legs, plus a few exterior wires to jiggle the tail a bit — all of which were nonrepeatable. So that was another instance where we had to use bluescreen.”

Giger himself commented on the Mother Monster, asserting that “the Alien Queen is very complicated, like the way I would have done. I like how she moves.” He also said in an interview with Cinefantastique that “She’s a bit smaller in the face than my Alien, but my basic design was very well studied. She was frighteningly well animated.”

For more images of the Alien Queen, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Aliens
Next: Alien³, The Beginning

Main Article: Hunter — Predator

“A monster from another planet that kills for sport.” This is the brief, poignant description of the Predator given by producer Joel Silver in a promotional interview. Shortly after the release of Rocky IV, a joke made its way in Hollywood claiming that, since Rocky had run out of Earthly opponents to fight, the next one should come from another planet. Said joke unwittingly inspired the Thomas brothers — Jim and John — to write their first script: Hunter, later retitled Predator. “We had an idea about doing a story about a brotherhood of hunters who came from another planet to hunt all kinds of things,” Jim said, “but we realized that wouldn’t work very well, so we picked one hunter who was going to hunt the most dangerous species — which had to be man, and the most dangerous man was a combat soldier.” The first-time writers, devoid of agents, slipped the script under the door of Fox executive Michael Levy – who shared it with John Davis and Joel Silver, the future producers of the film.

Throughout the script drafts, the Predator progressively changed appearance. Key features, such as the basic humanoid configuration, the ‘luminous’ green blood, and camouflage technology remained consistent. Initially, however, the creature was much more human-like: in a 1985 draft, the Predator was described as featuring a “strikingly human-like face.” In addition, “beneath the smooth, hairless, nearly traslucent skin, a delicate network of VEINS and VESSELS can be seen, pulsing rapidly with pale green blood.”  The eyes of the alien — perhaps implied to have evolved within a lightless environment — were “pink and weak-looking, like an albino”. Later versions of the script excised the more detailed descriptions of the creature, allowing more creative liberty for its design.

Steve Johnson and Boss Film Studio was initially hired to bring the Predator to life. Part of the crew was also Steve Wang, who would later aid Winston Studio with the final creature (“Fate truly had cursed him to be such an integral part of the show,” Shannon Shea commented in retrospect). Johnson was immediately provided with a design upon which to elaborate since the first meeting. “We have this meeting and we’re sitting around a board table and it’s the usual suspects,” Johnson recalled. “It’s all of the executives. It’s Joel Silver, the producer; it’s John McTiernan, the director. With great pomp and ceremony, McTiernan comes in and slams down a bunch of designs that have already been done by a production designer, and they were awful.”

The designs Johnson was provided with portrayed a tall and gangly creature with insectoid and reptilian qualities. “It looked more like a cross between an insect and Speed Racer,” said Boss Film sculptor Stuart Land, “or pick any Japanese cartoon hero. Or, maybe, one of those man-things that fight Godzilla. The production drawings were very good, but as a design for a new scary thing, it wasn’t.”

A key trait of its anatomy were the digitigrade legs, an anatomical feature that had never been constructed as part of a creature suit before. This meant that Johnson and his crew had to research and develop a whole new technology to make it work. Combined with the fact the creature suit would have to be shot on location — in a jungle — Johnson immediately told the producers and director that a suit version of that design would be impractical. “It was ahead of its time, let’s put it that way,” Johnson said, “but the head did suck. They said, ‘here’s what we want you to make.’ What they needed was a character with backward bent reptilian legs, extended arms and a head that was out here and they wanted to shoot on the muddy slopes of Mexico in the real jungles. It was virtually physically impossible to do. I told them it wouldn’t work.”

Jim Kagel with one of the original maquettes.

Despite Johnson’s remarks, McTiernan insisted to proceed with that design and translate it into a fully functional suit, which was to be worn by famed action star Jean Claude Van Damme — who took the role in hope for his career to benefit from that. “They wanted to just tell the guy to hop around like a frog and it was Jean-Claude Van Damme who had no idea what he was getting into,” Johnson related. “He was just off the boat from Brussels. He thought he was going to show his martial arts abilities to the world.” According to Land, Van Damme was definitely not the best choice for a suit actor. “The creature was supposed to be very tall and very thin,” he said, “so who do they hire, but Jean Claude Van Damme, short and muscular — short for an alien! He was an unknown then, having just finished his first Karate film. His ego was the same, though. But, I have to give him credit. He achieved everything he bored us with week after week.”

The final maquette of the original Predator.

The initial maquettes were sculpted by Jim Kagel, and once the design was finalized, the full-scale sculpture of it was crafted by Steve Wang. The special effects team built only one hero suit and a ‘red’ mockup suit, which was to be used as the base for the camouflage effect. The first problems came in during Van Damme’s first fittings. “Jean-Claude comes in and we’re fitting him in this red suit and just assuming, like the slaves that we are, that the higher ups have told him exactly what’s going on,” Johnson recalled, “but he thought this was actually the real look of the monster in the movie and he was, ‘I hate this. I hate this. I hate it. I look like a superhero.’ He was so angry! I’m like, ‘Jean-Claude, did no one tell you? It’s a cloaking device. You’re invisible for half of the picture. This is not you’; which made him even angrier because he thought he could do his martial arts, he could fight Arnold Schwarzenegger. He didn’t realize that he was just kind of a stunt man, right? We get him out there for the first shot and he’s just seething. We got him in at lunch and you could see his eyes through the rubber muscles of the neck and he’s like, ‘I hate this head. I hate it. I hate it. Hate it.'”

The hero suit had a thick, arched neck with a mechanism that allowed the head to perform a wide range of motion. Parts of the costume were also casted in clear vacuform plastic, to create an exoskeleton-like surface. “The head was so highly articulated we had to build an upper body puppet to contain everything. It could even look 360 degrees over its own back.” The full suit, as Johnson had predicted, also incorporated mechanical cable-operated arm and leg extensions. The technology for the leg extensions was still a novelty at the time of shooting, and proved unsuccessful: the first functional ‘prototype’ leg extensions would be first used about a year later, during the production of Dead Heat. In later tests, external supports from a harness and a wire rig were also added. It was also attempted to mostly shoot

The finished suit.

Only a small number of scenes were actually shot with the Boss Film Predator, which proved itself too impractical for the action sequences requested by the script, also due to the aforementioned harnesses. Shannon Shea commented on his Blog: “requiring a crane to hold the creature up on it’s spindly alien legs severely affected the shooting schedule and was too limiting for director, John McTiernan, to constantly frame out.” Both the actual creature and the ‘red suit’ resulted inefficient. “The basic problem was that they were on location in a jungle,” said Shane Mahan in The Winston Effect, “with no controlled soundstages and sets, and they needed a creature that could climb and fight and walk through water and everything else you see in the film. The original suit just didn’t fit the action requirements.”

Production assistant for Boss film, Chris Mason, also stated in an interview:  “I remember, in one of my last days at Boss Film, that we came in and they had packed all the pieces into crates for shipping down to the Mexico locations. Later, I had heard that the suit didn’t allow for the kind of ‘movement’ that the director had hoped for, because this guy was literally hung in a harness. Also, the alien was only intended for a lot less action, and that, on the jungle set, they wanted it to do more than it was originally designed to do. About the comment that it was a terrible job of creating… well, that’s up for interpretation, I guess! [Boss Studios] had designed a really cool suit. I think once this suit got to Mexico, things changed out on location, in the jungle… There was no way that the Boss suit would have done any of what the Winston suit was eventually asked to do. The idea behind the Boss design was to make a creature that would have made it hard to tell that it was a ‘man in a suit’.”

The combined issues derived in the decision of the director to just start anew with the creature effects. With the original monster gone, Van Damme also left the project. “From my perspective,” said Shannon Shea in his blog, “the only place where the Boss crew went wrong (and by that, I mean, where production went wrong since they had to approve the design process every step of the way) was that they were way ahead of their time. Their concept exceeded the contemporary effects technology where it came to leg extensions.” The film crew now still needed the titular monster. Shooting of the climax and other creature-centered scenes was shifted to the end of the schedule, and shooting was ultimately interrupted for six months.

Robert Short and illustrator Alan Munro were then brought in by production consultant Mitch Suskin to collaborate with McTiernan to redesign the Predator. “The first attempt was to cover the existing suit with an armored space suit to make it more fearsome,” Short related. However, it was quickly decided to entirely discard the original iteration of the creature and redesign the Predator from scratch. During this new design phase, Fox briefly contemplated replacing the Predator with an out-of-character version of the creature from Alien. “While my team was in the middle of the redesign, the studio thought that it would just be a lot less hassle to use an already existing creature they already owed than deal with trying to create a brand new creature after the Boss suit stalled,” Short related. “So, for a while the Predator concept was just going to be replaced by the Alien.” This idea however did not resonate for long.

Thus, a new approach was devised — making the Predator a more animalistic character: a hunched beast wearing armour and a space helmet. It is at this stage that Robert Short and Alan Munro endowed the new creature with multiple mandibles on the sides of its mouth, an essential trait the two artists borrowed from their own unused concept art the they had devised for the unmade Roger Corman film Goblins.

Although McTiernan decided found the mandibles a fitting design choice, he was still unsatisfied with the beast-like version — instead wanting the character to look more advanced; he selected the base of the design in an illustration of a Masai warrior. “The director brought in a line drawing of a real Masai Warrior created by artist George Jensen,” Short said, “and development shifted to create an African alien warrior.” The design curve shifted back to a humanoid configuration — but this time it became a retro-futuristic, tribal warrior character. Munro sketched two iterations of the suited Predator and a study of the Predator’s face, complete with the the mandibles inherited from his earlier concepts, as well as the dreadlocks. concepts featured a protective mask or helmet, as well as dreadlocks growing from the creature’s head. The concepts, delivered to the studio, became the essential foundation of the Predator design.

Munro’s Predator…

…and its face.

Rick Baker was contacted to bring the Predator to life, but could not join the project due to scheduling issues. Based on the groundbreaking work on The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger thus suggested Stan Winston and his creature effects crew. The advice was quickly accepted. “My feeling from reading the script was that the Predator had to be a real character, rather than a generic creature,” Winston related. “He needed to be a very specific character — and that’s what we came up with.” By the time Winston became involved in the project, the time to develop and construct the Predator was significantly decreased — to only six weeks. He explained: “there was a lot of pressure to get this done, because production was waiting for the new character so they could start shooting again; and there was additional pressure because somebody else had already failed.  We didn’t want to be their ‘strike two’.  Not only that, we’d been recommended by Arnold, who was a dear friend, and we didn’t want to let him down.” To avoid schedule conflicts with the other project Winston Studio was concurrently attached to — Monster Squad — the crew was split in two.

Stan Winston’s Predator concepts.

In designing the Predator, Munro and Short’s concepts were used as a starting point; Winston’s iterations were largely a refinement of the Munro illustrations. Steve Wang was instead assigned the Predator armour, which was inspired by Japanese science-fiction designs.

Stan Winston’s final Predator head design.

Winston and Wang briefly considered removing the side mandibles, deeming them as an old design trope. Ultimately, instead of removing them, they were combined with a traditional mouth. Once a satisfying design was selected, it was sculpted into a maquette by Wayne Strong. Many details of the concepts and maquette were excised in the final iteration of the Predator — including chest spikes (alien substitutes of chest hair) and a forked tongue (in Winston’s drawings); the latter would return in the animatronics devised for Predator 2. The relatively simple humanoid anatomy of the new concept would allow more freedom in shooting, without the need for cranes, harnesses or other supports — issues that had determined the failure of the original suit on location. Winston said: “often you’ll hear filmmakers say, ‘let’s do something that doesn’t look like a man in a suit. I’ve said it myself, in fact. ‘Let’s do something more high-tech, not a man in a suit.’ But a man in a suit works just fine as long as you connect the character’s mythology as humanoid, as an alien man.  ‘Man in a suit’ only denotes the technology that got you that. As long as it doesn’t look like a man in a suit, it doesn’t matter if that’s the technology that got you there.”

On set.

Creature performer Kevin Peter Hall — who had played another extraterrestrial hunter in Without Warning — was hired to play the creature, due to his impressive height of 7′ 2.50″. “I’m not just somebody shuffling around in a monster suit,” he said. “I’m a kind of puppeteer from the inside who is attempting through arm and body movements to give the creatures I play a sense of personality.”

Based on a mould of Hall’s body, the Predator was then sculpted in full-size — by Steve Wang, Alec Gillis, Shane Mahan, Shannon Shea and Matt Rose, with the last working on the head and the former three on the body. The mandibles were sculpted separately to ease the detailing, moulding and assembly processes. Due to time constraints, the Predator’s body armour — with the exception of helmet, shoulder cannon and wrist gauntlets — were sculpted directly onto the body and moulded with it. At this point it was suggested that the Predator would have elongated fingers — a design trait inherited by the Monster Squad Gillman. Finger extensions were sculpted and mounted on Hall’s hand casts. Again, time restraints affected the crafting process. “The responsibility of creating the Predator created substantial pressure on Steve Wang,” said Shea. “With such a quick schedule, the body sculpture would have to be completed first and at a record pace.”

Steve Wang paints a Predator head.

The suit was cast in foam latex, with the teeth cast in acrylic. The relatively quick-sculpted texture detail was compensated with an innovative, layered painting process devised by Winston and Wang. “Steve told Stan he was concerned that the sculpture would not be as refined as he had hoped,” Shea related, “to which Stan told Steve that the Predator suit was going to be all about the paint job.” Wang based the colour scheme and patterns on the desert locust; the brown spot pattern was instead inspired by an old banana peel. In retrospect, Shea defined Wang’s painting work on the Predator as “an industry changer.”

You’re… one ugly… motherfucker.

The Predator’s head was an elaborate mask whose features were mostly mechanically-operated; only Hall’s eyes, endowed with contact lenses, could be visible from the outside. Richard Landon designed the mechanics of the Predator’s face, which included nine servomotors that enabled motion of the brow area, mandibles, as well as a subtle “cheek squint” that enhanced the realistic quality of the animatronic. As a last addition, the lower mandibles — which previously did not open as widely as intended — were fitted with an external servomotor, hidden within the ‘backpack’ of the Predator. The dreadlocks were moulded and attached onto the head one by one. The performer’s jaw movements puppeteered the gross movements of the Predator’s mouth, with finer motion controlled by the servomotors.

The Predator with the final mask used in the film.

A total of two suits was built, along with a stunt head, a hero head, and a ‘caved-in’ head used when the Predator’s head would be covered by the helmet — in order to ease Hall’s performance. Additionally, a red spandex suit was built for the sequences featuring the Predator’s peculiar camouflage. It was created by Shannon Shea with the help of Leslie Neumann; the dreadlocks were excised from it, as they would significantly add time to the displacement and animation process required for the camouflaging effect.

The first suit test in Los Angeles proved that some design changes were required; along with other things, the elongated fingers were excised to ease Hall’s performance. Shea recalled on the matter: “we suited him up with as much as we had finished — which was a suit, a pair of unpainted hands with the finger extensions, and a test, stunt head that Steve had painted but had no dreadlocks on it. As we stepped back and looked at the creature, we noticed that some things were going to have to change instantly. Kevin, although his fingers looked long and spider-leg-like, was having difficulty handling the weapons and holding onto the little tools in his medical pack. New gloves would need to be sculpted, molded, run, seamed and painted immediately.” All the suits were fitted with a coolant mechanism, used to mantain the performer’s body temperature at normal levels.

The Predator’s blood is a glowing green liquid. Originally, the creative team had intended the blood to be glowing orange; when the special effects team was requested to make the blood of that color, some shots had already been rotoscoped with that feature. Due to an unavailability of glowing orange sticks, the production was forced to make the Predator’s blood green instead of orange — to the dismay of the visual effects team, who had to re-rotoscope the shots that had already been completed.

The Predator with its original mask.

The mask that the creature originally wore featured a complex texture design — a translation of the monster’s connotations to a mechanical device. According to Shannon Shea, Matt Rose designed it to be “intimidating, beautiful, and yet look somewhat functional.” Producer Joel Silver, allegedly, “hated it instantly,” said Shea. “He said that part of the mystery of the Predator was that first he was ‘invisible’ then next when we see him, he’s wearing a mask, and finally he takes the mask off to reveal the face.  Matt’s design ‘tipped the hand’ too much revealing what was going on underneath.”

The helmet was discarded and a new design was commissioned and built — with more tribal features and a more vague, smoother appearance that seemed to harken back to Munro’s original drawing. The original mask prop would be later recycled for one of the members of the Predator tribe in Predator 2.

The finished cannon.

Of the Predator’s original weapons, only the wristblades and the shoulder cannon — all designed, sculpted and painted by Steve Wang — made it to the final film.  The formers, mechanized by Wayne Strong, used customized air rams for the extending action. The shoulder cannon was developed by David Kindlon, and was manually coordinated with the movements of Hall’s head to create the impression that the helmet directly controlled the cannon. A spear and a spear-gun — seen in use only when the Predator injures Blain, seconds before shooting him in the chest — were proposed, but were ultimately discarded. Those ideas would be later recycled for the sequel.

A sword was also planned, but excised after the first suit test. Shea explained: “originally, there was to be a sword handle sticking out of the backpack close to the gun. You can see the ‘curve’ of the blade represented by the curve of the backpack (which always reminded me of a shrimp for some reason). But when Kevin turned his head to the left, the protrusion of the Predator’s muzzle would smack right into the handle of the sword, so it was eliminated. From a trivia point of view — there were two fiberglass swords that were run and painted. They ended up hanging, blades crossed on the wall of our truck when we got to Mexico.” The Predator’s medical kit was created by Brett Scrivener; a ‘spreader’ tool was also reconfigured into a ‘clamp’ by Richard Landon. A loin cloth was also built out of fabric as a last addition, to cover up a the raised belt line in the suit (a failed attempt to give the illusion of longer legs). Final touches included the netting and sculpted laces decorated with the bones of alien preys.

Stan Winston commented in retrospect, saying that “the Predator is an iconic character, as well known and loved in science fiction film history as any character out there. And he’s basically a man in a suit. I think one of the reasons that the characters that have come out of Stan Winston Studio are so memorable is because they are not about the technology. We use higher technologies where they need to be used; but we don’t use them for their own sake.  Predator was a perfect example of that philosophy.”

For more images of the Predator, visit the Monster Gallery.

Next: Predator 2

The Thing is first seen imitating a Swedish Norwegian dog. The part was played by a trained animal actor — a half wolf, half Alaskan malamute dog named Jed, trained by his owner Clint Rowe. He performed in most sequences with the exception of the beginning chase scene, where another dog, painted to be indistinguishable from Jed, was filmed.

Having gone to the Norwegian camp to investigate, MacReady and Copper find a deformed corpse and bring it back to have it examined. The ‘Split-Face’ Thing, as it was called by the crew, was created as a static model moulded in fiberglass, with urethane and foam latex portions, as well as foam latex innards for the autopsy scene.

Bottin with the phony dog.

Once the Norwegian dog enters the kennel, it sits down still. It is here that Jed is replaced by the first creature effect in the film — the “phony dog” as Carpenter calls it — a puppet portraying the Thing’s first transformation in the film. The phony dog was the first of two Dog-Thing puppets whose mechanical components were devised by Arbogast, and featured some of the most complex mechanics in the project.

As originally storyboarded, the dog would have gone through a frantic epileptic seizure before its head — whose mechanics were designed by Bob Worthington — peeled back, making its fiberglass skull fall off. Eventually, Carpenter decided that the sequence would be more startling if the dog’s head were to split open suddenly — and cut the seizure sequences.

After the dog’s head peels back, the sequence cuts to the second Dog-Thing animatronic designed by Arbogast — dubbed by the crew the “meat-hole dog” for its lack of a discernible head. It was wire and cable-operated, and needed up to 17 technicians to operate. In the scene, thin and long tentacles erupt from the dog’s body — an effect shot in reverse with urethane tentacles being whipped about and then pulled inside the animatronic body. The puppet was also designed to grow spider-like legs and spit a pressurized viscous fluid on the dogs.

The next stage in the transformation — the main Dog-Thing — was actually designed and built by Stan Winston and his crew. Winston had been contacted by Bottin earlier in production to ask if he would be ready if needed. Overwhelmed by the workload, Bottin eventually did summon Winston to help with the Dog-Thing. “There was a rather intricate effect which was needed, that Rob felt he didn’t have the time to do,” Winston said. “The studio told Rob to just hire more people, but Rob didn’t feel he had the time to supervise a bigger crew. So he wanted me to design the effect; otherwise they were going to have to drop it from the film.”

Having previously worked on the werewolves from The Howling, Bottin was glad to pass the Dog-Thing over to Winston.  He said: “it got to the point where I was thinking ‘if I have to do another stinking mechanical dog, I’ll go nuts!'” In another interview, he said: “I’d already done The Howling, and I didn’t want to see another dog! I didn’t care if it was mutated, I didn’t care if it was riding a skateboard. And I did not want to do Cujo either. No more dogs!”

With little time available, Winston quickly discarded an elaborate animatronic, and instead designed the Dog-Thing as a hand puppet. He started with a photograph of himself with his hand raised, over which he drew the shape of the Dog-Thing. “I designed the character to fit the puppeteer, basically,” Winston said. “I literally drew the picture of the puppeteer, and then designed the character over the puppeteer. And that became the Dog-Thing.”

Once the practical approach was established, the Dog-Thing had to be visually designed — and Winston carefully observed Bottin’s other effects to maintain continuity. “I had two problems to contend with,” Winston said. “One was to design a creature that was definitely a dog-thing, but at the same time was definitely not a dog. It also had to balance with the other effects. It couldn’t stick out like a sore thumb.” Early concept art had been provided by Huebner, but the creature was redesigned from scratch by Lance Anderson and Jim Kagel, who sculpted it as a progression of the earlier ‘meat-hole’ dog — furless, with more deformed dog legs and a monstrous, asymmetrical dog head emerging from its back.

The puppet was constructed by Anderson and Michiko Tagawa — and featured radio-controlled eyes and cable-operated leg movements and lip snarling. Winston explained: “the gross body movement was just operated manually by the puppeteer inside this thing. Lance Anderson puppeteered it from below an elevated kennel set, actually wearing this Dog-Thing puppet over his head and upper body.”

The tentacles and tendrils slithering out of the main body — a Bottin effect — were actually shot in reverse, dragged underneath the elevated set; the same approach was used for the shot of the whimpering dog being enveloped in the Thing’s tendrils. After it is wounded by shotguns, the Thing grows two humanoid arms to grab onto the ceiling of the kennel — an effect designed by Bottin and built by Jim Kagel. Bottin himself wore the foam latex arms for the insert shots.

Once the Thing has attached itself to the ceiling, it attempts one last attack before being burned. A new main body was crafted, with the earlier monstrous dog head as well as other mouthed appendages, eyes and protuberances alike. It featured cable and wire-controlled functions, as well as air bladders. The body splits open to reveal a flower-like maw — dubbed the “pissed-off cabbage” by Bottin — which lunges at Childs before being burned.

Ken Diaz works on the Tongue-Flower.

Bottin designed the effect because footage was already filmed of the camera reaching Keith David and the rest of the cast. Bottin first envisioned a stalk with a lamprey-like mouth, but the final design — crafted by Diaz — was eventually inspired by the creature in the 1980 film Blood Beach: a flower-like mouth on an extended neck. Diaz based the anatomy of the monstrous form on the mouths of real dogs: its 12 petals were crafted to look like dog tongues, and lined with multiple rows of canine teeth.

The stalk that houses the dog-tongue flower-mouth was taken from a mould made for the Norris-Thing neck stretching shots, which Diaz found lying around the creature effects shop. Vince Prentice, part of the crew, said: “by the end of the project, we could walk into the foam room and make a whole monster out of all the parts that were there. We were able to save a lot of time by just scavenging stuff we’d already made.” What follows is the burned Dog-Thing — an incomprehensible mass of flesh, limbs, mouths and teeth, tentacles and dog parts. It was moulded in urethane with soft parts crafted in foam latex and urethane.

Only apparently dead, the ‘Split-Face’ attacks Bennings from underneath a blanket. Tentacles shot in reverse and food thickener created the illusion of Bennings being assimilated; and when the Bennings-Thing is discovered in the midst of its transformation, the monstrous hands were actually gloves crafted from moulds created for the Palmer-Thing’s hands. In the following shot, a dummy was set on fire.

I know I’m human. And if you were all these things, then you’d just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn’t want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It’ll fight if it has to, but it’s vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it’s won.

In Lancaster’s script, the Norris transformation scene was much more quiet than the final version — which became one of the film’s major set pieces. Ploog initially wanted to focus on tentacles erupting from Norris’s feet; Bottin differed: he had the idea of the Norris-Thing splitting its chest to reveal toothed jaws. The effects artist elaborated the concept trying to impersonate the Thing — to think as if he himself were the alien: “Well, if I were a Thing from outer space, and I’d been shocked over and over with paddles, what would I do? Well, I’d rip open my chest and bite off the doctor’s arms with my ribcage!” He also added: “when the guy’s stomach suddenly splits open and changes into a big mouth and bites the guy’s arms off — if you think about it, it’s logical. The doctor is bugging him and it’s trying to play possum. What’s it going to do? Best thing to do is just let the guy fall in and bite him.”

Effects technician Archie Gillett devised a mechanical false body for Charles Hallahan — with an inner armature of fiberglass and foam latex skin and innards. The teeth were moulded in acrylic with a razor-sharp edge. Originally, the chest-splitting mechanism was conceived as a relatively scissor-type lever operating the fiberglass jaws; however, the technician lying beneath the table did not have enough leverage or strength for the mechanism to work. To solve that issue, Gillett added a hydraulic ram that could open and close the body cavity. It was originally intended to have the body spitting blood and ichor before it gnawed on Copper’s arms, but problems during shooting prevented the gag from appearing in the film.

Hallahan was also underneath the table on which the fake body was put, with his head and shoulders extending above and blended with the fake torso. The jaws bit through specially-prepared replica arms made in gelatin (for the skin and flesh, with blood tubes inserted) and dental acrylic (for the bones), suspended by a brace for the close-up shot. For the next shot, another fake body was constructed in foam latex and fiberglass, and the now armless Copper was played by real amputee Joe Carone, endowed with a mask that reproduced Richard Dysart’s facial connotations.

A third fake body violently spits out green ichor thanks to small explosive charges, while thin urethane tentacles — operated from underneath — writhe about. In the next shot, the camera pans up to reveal that a monstrous form has emerged from the Norris-Thing’s chest — with spider-like legs, deformed humanoid limbs, and a monstrous head with Hallahan’s likeness on the front end of a serpentine, intestine-like neck. Suspended by cables, this creature was devised as a marionette operated by wires from above. Bob Worthington supervised the construction of six different puppet heads, each with individual functions and ranges of expression. The head, whatever the version, was maneuvered through a hole in the false ceiling (concealed by the head itself through appropriate camera angles) and its facial expressions were all radio-controlled.

MacReady is quick to torch the monstrosity to death, and the Norris-Thing gruesomely detaches its own head, which falls on the floor. A half-dozen of different Norris heads were sculpted and built — each with its range of radio-controlled expressions, again engineered by Worthington. Most of the facial expressions were radio-controlled, and the eye movement was instead cable-operated — with a rig designed by Gillett.

Ploog’s humourous rendering of the Norris-Thing head scene.

Hallahan’s head and neck were again reproduced in foam latex and fiberglass — and divided at the neck. A puppeteer under the table could move the head from side to side and control the mouth, combined with the radio-controlled facial expressions. The stretching neck effect was achieved with a manually-operated shaft of steel hidden within the innards of the neck itself, which was pushed with the hips of an off-camera operator.

The stretching flesh was fashioned with a concoction of heated plastic and Bubble Yum bubble gum — something that led to accidents on set. “We set it up,” Bottin said, “got the lighting perfect; John was on top of the camera checking the angle one last time. Everything was ready to go — except that there was supposed to be fire in the scene, so we called in one of the effects guys to set up a fire-bar, which is a hollow metal bar with holes in it, hooked up to a tank of butane.” The toxic fumes emitted by the heated plastic were also unexpectedly flammable, and had filled the room. “John gave the cues,” Bottin continues, “and when the fire-bar finally ignited, a huge ball of fire — it must’ve been eight feet in diameter — engulfed the puppet. I just stood there, dumbfounded. All I could say was it’s– it’s on fire…’ after a beat everyone started yelling ‘put it out, you idiot!’ We had to shut down for two hours to clean up the mess. Every now and then, John will look at me and say, ‘it’s– it’s on fire…” Although no injuries were involved, a second take obviously had to be made.

The head slowly falls with simple gravity. Once on the floor, the head wraps a long tentacle or tongue around a table leg — another use of reverse filming with puppeteers pulling cables back — and then drags itself across the floor. To perform the action, technicians beneath the table pulled on cables and monofilament fishing line.

The transformation culminates in the Norris head-Thing growing arthropod-like legs and eyestalks — an element conceived because Bottin wanted a darkly comic relief. “I thought it would be fun to go ahead and throw that in,” Bottin said. The initial shot of the growing parts was achieved on an elevated set — with the legs and eyestalks being pushed from underneath a hollow dummy head. In the next shot, the Norris head-Thing is a cable-operated and radio-controlled puppet with mouth and limb movements.

Extrapolating from Bottin’s concepts, Gillett elaborated a feasible mechanical design to portray the walking creature: the false head was mounted on a custom-built radio-controlled wheeled device. The movement of the legs — which were built in thin-guage aluminium tubing — were linked directly with the motor that drove the wheels. As the wheels sped up, so did the legs — which were connected to cam shafts with one control lobe each, giving the illusion of random writhing. “I’d be embarrassed to tell you how much work and how much time was spent on those heads,” Bottin said. “People would shit! Most people would think it just wasn’t worth it. I don’t even think the producers know how much it took.”

For more pictures of the Thing, visit the Monster Gallery.

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