American Cinematographer - December 1987 - 83

Weird

Make-ups for Living Dead

by Ron Magid
After

Kenny Myers was selected
by producer Tom Fox to helm the
make-up effects for Return Of
The Living Dead II, he began to
take elaborate precautions to in¬
sure

that he and his

crew

were

prepared for

any eventuality so
that there would always be

enough time to make things
work.
Even at the outset of

pre-production, with three
months before the
to

cameras were

roll, Myers was already feeling

the pressure

of the inordinately
large number of effects Living
Dead II would require. Myers
so anxious to capture as
much time as possible prior to

was

even hired a
small crew on his own money
before the funds came through
that were to officially kick off his
work on the film. "I had about

production that he

six

people on for about three
weeks before I had the rest of the
crew

come

in," Myers recalls.

"Tom Fox

kept saying, 'Hold on,
Kenny, the money'll be there'
and finally, on a Friday at twelve
midnight, I met him at a truck
stop on Route 5 and he handed
me a large check and said, 'Start!'
It was almost like we were doing
some
drug deal behind this truck
stop."
Despite assurances from
the production to the contrary,
Myers' first order of business
was
actually designing ghouls.
"Originally, they were going to
bring in somebody to design
characters and then the director
and I would sift through and OK

them, but that

pened

never

hap¬

the organization was
just not there. So I ended up
-

pumping out drawings as

quickly as possible, which I'm re¬
ally not set up to do; I prefer to
sculpt a character and show it

three dimensionally. Fortunately,
there wasn't one illustration I did
the director didn't like

-

we

just

Myers admits, "was knowing
slap together a ghoul
as
quickly as the make-up would
that I could

got lucky. I would hit the director

allow,

so

I decided it would be

10 pm and say, 'You like
this?' - 'Yeah!' - 'Bye!' Then,

best if

we

began to pre-make this

whoom! I'd rush back up to my
lab and have someone start

make-up trailer into a sort of
Woolworth's you walk in and
come out with
any kind of ghoul
you wanted!
"For our foreground
ghouls, we worked with a 'Ghoul
Crew' of seven or eight actors
who were with us every night,
whose make-ups we could
change from night to night. We
sculpted two different chests for

at

sculpting."
From his experience on
previous Living Dead film,
Myers knew he was going to
need a lot of background and
foreground zombies, some of
which he would undoubtedly
have to conjure up on a few
hours' notice. The question of
how to best prepare for the up¬
coming onslaught drove him to a
unique answer that could revo¬
lutionize make-up effects done
on a
large scale: Mix and match
ghoul bodies, masks and facial
appliances. "The only thing that

the

made

me

December 1987

feel comfortable,"

stuff

-

I wanted to make

Kenny Myers applies

his revolutionary

mix-and-match ghoul
ma eup'

our

-

each actor, to which we could
also add bits and pieces of flesh

and bone to alter them further
set if need be. These were all

on

glued onto pullover shirts, plus
had individual legs so we
could mix and match almost any
combination of ghoul body parts
we

American

Cinematographer

81
American Cinematographer - December 1987

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