New Flesh from Old Bones
Creating The Uninvited's Microwaved Man

www.creature effects.com

In the summer of 1995 Creature Effects had been one of the first special makeup companies to comment on the now infamous Roswell alien autopsy footage. When we declared that the alien featured in the film was faked we were inundated with calls from the world's press and Ufological organisations. How could we be so sure? The first thing we had noted was that the weighting and posture of the corpse had been wrong for a figure in the prone position, the second was that from some angles a number of moulding seam lines were clearly visible.

Subsequently, when Zenith Productions contacted us about creating an autopsy figure for their forthcoming science fiction thriller The Uninvited, we found our thoughts returning to the world's most famous alien. Unanimously, we agreed that our autopsy figure shouldn't display the same characteristics - the actor would need to be lifecast lying down, and our mould would need to be seamless. There was one problem however. We had only sixteen days to complete the job. No sleep for the next two weeks then.

The first part was simple, an alginate cast of actor Stan Dupp was made with the actor lying on a baseboard. The cast was made in one piece and although heavily undercut, was flexible enough to remove whole. Melted plastillene clay was then brushed into the cast to a thickness of a quarter of an inch, and then backed with a lightweight rigid polyurethane foam. When the clay had hardened the cast was placed back on the baseboard, and the alginate was peeled away to reveal a plastillene replica of the actor that we could sculpt directly onto.

The book Standard Autopsy Procedures proved invaluable to us in determining how cuts are made and what can be seen when the skin is parted and reflected. The exposed flaps, ribs and thoracic musculature were sculpted in wet clay, and the abdominal cavity was hollowed out. We took some artistic license in deciding not to reflect the neck flesh as it would obscure the face, and we knew it was our work on numerous other likeness heads that had convinced the production we were the team for the job.

The sculpture was then ready for moulding. Again we knew that to eliminate any seam lines the whole sculpture would need to be cast in one piece, which would inevitably mean a silicone mould, with a multiple pieced fibre glass jacket. This was going to take time, and it wasn't going to be cheap, but if a job's worth doing...

As part of our continuing experiments with translucent materials, we had been testing a number of gelatine formulations, one of which we thought we could probably adapt and use for the skin of our corpse. Gelatine is made from reduced animal bones. It doesn't smell too good and is like napalm in its molten state, but it has its uses. As a makeup material it is nothing new - Jack Dawn made gelatine epicanthic eye folds for The Good Earth as far back as 1937, more recently Stan Winston used it for the robot makeups in Heartbeeps, and Dick Smith used it for some decomposing heads in Ghost Story. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in it as a makeup material, particularly because of its translucent qualities. On this occasion its relatively cheap cost, and the speed with which we could turn castings around, were deciding factors in our choice. Also instrumental was the fact that gelatine is reusable, if a casting wasn't good enough we could melt the gelatine back down and start again.

In the script when the body is opened the pathologist is stunned to see that the cadaver's internal organs have cooked, as a result he is dubbed The Microwave Man. It seems fitting then that the microwave should play such a major part in his construction. Nearly twenty kilos of gelatine dissolved in a solution of sorbitol and glycerol and translucent face powder, talc and red flock, were microwaved in small batches and painted into the silicone negative. Within four hours the gelatine had cooled enough to be backed up with a flexible polyurethane foam. The following morning the multiple pieced jacket was unbolted and the silicone mould carefully peeled back from the gelatine casting.

To our delight our first casting was usable. The few air bubbles that existed, were easily filled with more melted gelatine. Whats more, a couple of very late nights had put us ahead of the game. We still had a week left.

After we had artworked the rib cage area we stood back to admire our handiwork. It looked good, but we all agreed there was something wrong. It was too artistic. Too sculptural. When we were doing our research the thing that struck us time and time again was that the ribs and their overlying musculature looked just like something you'd see hanging up in a butcher's shop. The muscle fibres were less defined than we had made them and they were shot through, and sometimes sheathed in films of fat. We looked at each other and knew we had come across the old debate. Reality versus filmic reality. Sometimes reality isn't filmic enough, so we have to try to improve upon it, stab wounds for example tend to look pretty unspectacular. Many real mummified bodies often look fake, looking for all the world like papier mache. Sometimes we go for a sort of hyper reality, what we expect to see rather than what actually exists. It's a delicate balance, and sometimes sculpture isn't the answer. We found that by using hot gelatine over the top of our artworked musculature we could create those translucent fatty layers and membranous sheaths that would be impossible to realise by sculpture alone. Similarly sculpture wasn't the answer when we came to create the charred intestinal organs that line the corpses' abdominal cavity. These were made from Gelflex, a vinyl material that when melted then poured into freezing water, forms into very organic visceral shapes which would be almost impossible to sculpt.

Whilst the fabrication approach looked great and saved us time, there was no getting round our next task. Stan was more than blessed in the body hair department, and it took us most of the remaining time to punch his arms, legs, genitals, abdomen and facial hair. It was painstaking, backbreaking work, aided this time by the fact we were working with hair that was tapered at one end, bringing a touch more reality to our hair work, especially on the eyebrows and eyelashes.

To simulate the discolourations caused by blood having settled in the body after death, the corpse was artworked with alcohol based inks applied with an airbrush. In the past other makeup artists had found it necessary to seal the gelatine in order to achieve a surface to which acrylic based paints could adhere. This was traditionally done with a plastic sealer or cap plastic. We found that the inks bit into the surface of the material and, when dry, were impossible to remove. The inks also worked well on the vinyl we had used for internal organs.

The scenes with our corpse were shot at a real morgue at the Norwich & Norfolk Hospital, and got an exceptional reception from both cast and crew. Perhaps the most important reaction however, came from one of the mortuary pathologists who was on hand to see that the actors went through the autopsy procedure with some degree of accuracy. He pronounced it right on the money, and provided us with the sort of inside information that will ensure that if we ever have to provide another autopsy corpse we can make it that extra bit more life - or should that be death - like.