|
The hardest part about being a zombie is when they're air-brushing acrylic
paint around your eyes and up your nostrils.
You have time to think during 21/2 hours of makeup work but the thoughts
while that airbrush runs are mainly: close your eyes and hold your breath.
After that, skulking for the cameras is a walk in the park.
I got the idea to try the undead life with word that as many as 70 extras
a day were playing zombies in the $10-million-US horror movie House of
the Dead . The day I joined the crowd in North Vancouver's Seymour Demonstration
Forest, there were only five.
The movie stars German actor Juergen Prochnow, Vancouver's Ona Grauer
in the sort of role that Jamie Lee Curtis used to do, and fellow Vancouver
guy David Palffy as the head zombie. The movie's plot has some teens holding
a rave on an island. Prochnow pilots the boat that takes them to the island
and he passes on rumours of monsters on the island. Seems a long-ago experiment
in eternal life has gone amok.
Bad news for the teens, great fun for Maureen Terezakis, co-ordinator
of the movie's prosthetics team. A show like this is to her what church
ceilings were to Michelangelo.
"For any prosthetic artist to be on a zombie show is a cool thing,"
says Terezakis, whose last job was on TV's Dark Angel. She leads me into
a big makeup tent to a chair facing a mirror, lights and a table covered
with latex deformities.
"Let's give him something juicy," she tells prosthetic artist
Shane Zander.
Something juicy turns out to be a gash across the forehead and another
down the cheek. My eyebrows are glued flat so that they won't be torn
away when the latex mask is taken off. When fellow artist Christopher
Clark joins the crew, he glues a jutting piece of latex bone to my bare
forearm. All of which will take 45 minutes to remove when filming is done.
Clark, a 20-something sporting multiple piercings, got into prosthetic
work as a boy in Vancouver when he used to customize his toy action figures.
He gravitated to amateur theatre, eventually switching to movie work.
It's a short ride from the make-up tent to the movie set. Palffy and Grauer
are filming a sword-fight scene in a cemetery set as the second-unit guys
set up my scene nearby. I'm a face in the trees in the movie's early scenes.
I wait around with fellow zombie Aaron Harrison. At well over six feet
tall with a high forehead and shoulder-length hair, he'd be a distinctive
presence even without layers of zombie makeup. "The makeup artists
are as gentle as can be, but after five days in a row, your skin does
get raw," says Harrison, who's been doing extra work since the '80s.
The hours can be long and pay starts at $10 an hour for non-union zombies
-- no scab jokes, please. Union extras start at $18.72, rising to $25
if they have to wear full-body zombie suits with heads glued on for the
whole day.
Cameraman Richard McNeal and assistant director Kevin Leslie set up by
a couple of saplings. It'll be my job to skulk down a hill, peer out from
the trees as if watching something pass and then continue skulking sideways.
I do a couple of dry runs so someone can measure from my nose to the camera.
"Relax," says McNeal. "Some people get more jumpy when
the camera starts rolling but I need you to keep it down."
Right, got to keep that undead pulse rate slow. After a couple of takes,
McNeal turns to assistant director Kevin Leslie: "Well, that one
didn't suck."
Music to a rookie zombie's ears.
gschaefer@pacpress.southam.ca
© Copyright 2002 The Province
back
|
