At the Museum of the Moving Image there was a display on the second floor on special effects for horror movies. Two of the exhibits were from The Exorcist and Freddy Krueger Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and how the more memorable scenes from the movies were created. I decided to look at the scenes before I read how they were done to see how well the effects were used.
In the scene of the “The Exorcist” where the girls head does a full rotation, they used a life sized animatronics dummy of the actress. They showed a scene of the actress in the bed and then switched her with the dummy after that scene and used a controller connected to the doll to make the head rotate. When I watched it before knowing the trick the rotation of the head looked animatronic with the head sticking here and there. At the end of the rotation, the head completely stopped before snapping forward. I do not know if that was used as a way to surprise or shock, the audience but it made the trick more noticeable for me. When I watched it after I read the scene description the dummy was more noticeable. I noticed the line on the dummy’s neck where the head rotated. I think it could have been done better with a smoother rotation and if possible creating some way to make the dummy’s facial expression change.
In the Freddy Krueger movie, it was a scene of the souls of the people Krueger killed trying to escape his body while one of the other characters are exorcising him. For this, they used a larger version of the shirt Krueger wears and put a flesh colored latex rubber in the tear they made. They then had actors push against it to make it appear as if they were souls bursting from his chest. The scenes of the live actors and larger shirt where shot as a close up to hide the effect. For the shot showing the real actor playing Krueger they used a flesh shaped rubber that looked like the souls in the scene and placed it on the actor in the rip in his shirt. The rest to make them appear to be moving in the scene was done by computer. This was a lot harder to tell what they did and unlike the previous movie, the special effect was not easy to notice once I was aware of what they did to achieve the affect.
I’m not a big fan of horror films but this makes me curious of how some other scenes in a few horror films I’ve seen where done. Especially older horror films before use of green screen and computers were major tools for special effects.
