And we’re back! The computer was dangerously fragmented, which surprised me, because I’d had it set to auto-defrag every week. That obviously didn’t do the trick, and Defraggler has just spent the last day-and-a-half trying to fix it from the brink of total failure. I had to uninstall Morrowind and Oblivion to free up space in the nearly-full hard drive, which brought a tear to my eye. Anyway, back, fixed and apparently working … and back to the reinspiration.
I love behind-the-scenes photos, and Buzzfeed has listed 40 of the coolest production images from well-known films.
Alien actor taking a break (via govtrust)
The Wolfman, 1941
Linda Blair with her robot double (via notsopathetic.tumblr.com)
These images have a dual appeal in that they diminish the scariness of the film (it’s only a film, it’s only a film!) while revealing a little about how the movie was made. This always adds to rather than detracts from my enjoyment of it. Many years back, I went along to see the Circus of Horrors maybe a dozen times, and in doing so struck up a friendship with some of the cast.
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I learnt that Wasp Boy’s 18-inch corsetted waist was just down to practice – you just tighten it a little every day and eventually your internal organs rearrange themselves to accommodate your new shape (tip: don’t try this at home). As for sword-swallowing, again, that was just practice: he started off just “swallowing” a pen and then moved on to bigger and bigger instruments until he could shove a longsword down his gullet. The guy who got his foot sawn off had lost his real foot in an industrial accident, so they fitted him with a prosthetic filled with fake blood that would be amputated with a chainsaw every night. The guy who did the aerial stunt work? He was just insane. Since he was the best aerial acrobat I’ve ever seen, I was not surprised when he disappeared off to show the Millennium Dome cast the (literal) ropes.
Then there’s Bruce Campbell’s wonderful memoir, If Chins Could Kill, which covers the production of the Evil Dead trilogy. He says that when Ted Raimi was suited up to play the zombie-grandma in Evil Dead 2, he got so hot in the latex that sweat poured out of his ear as he was suspended on wires. You can clearly see it, and I get a kick out of spotting that every time I watch the film.
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And, yes, I still shudder when I watch those clips, because even knowing that it’s fake, and knowing how they did it, there’s still that primal sense of revulsion that makes the horror so effective in the first place.
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Read Buzzfeed’s full list here
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Reinspired 