'Re-Animator' Special Effects: Simple But Effective
The $65 million stage adaptation of Spider-Man is being re-tooled again — and it raises questions about whether stage shows should try to imitate Hollywood-style visual effects. For Re-Animator: The Musical, the answer is to go low-tech and clever. Stuart Gordon directed the 1985 cult horror film classic, and he has guided the adaptation to the stage, bringing along the talented special effects team from the film. The result is a play that engages the audience with simple-yet-ingenious special effects. There's even a splash zone where theatergoers can sit if they want to be sprayed with blood.
T: From member station KPBS, Beth Accomando reports on how the show's creators are making sure their audience has a bloody good time.
BETH ACCOMANDO: The first two rows of seats are neatly wrapped in plastic in anticipation of the carnage to come. Welcome to the splash zone of "Re-Animator: The Musical."
: So I said, okay, blood is part of the story, and we decided that we should have a special zone for the audience who really likes blood to be able to bathe in it, to be showered with it.
ACCOMANDO: Tony Doublin says the production goes through two to three quarts of blood a night.
: It also had to be very stylized, you know, because there was no chance to do it over again. You know, you got one shot at it, and it has to work.
ACCOMANDO: Both the play and the film are based on an H.P. Lovecraft story about Herbert West, a young med student who discovers a reanimating agent that can bring the dead back to life.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL, "RE-ANIMATOR: THE MUSICAL")
U: (Singing) Re-animator. Re-animator. Re-animator.
ACCOMANDO: Doing a stage play now is like doing a low-budget horror film in the '80s because there was no CGI and no budget for optical effects. So everything was done like you would in live theater, says Gordon.
: This is stuff - it's the simplest stuff. It goes all the way back to ancient Rome. You know, in those days, they used to have, you know, chicken blood and little bladders and - that they can explode on stage.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL, "RE-ANIMATOR: THE MUSICAL")
: When you have a practical effect on stage or on screen, it does have a tendency to grab the audience better.
ACCOMANDO: John Buechler is another member of the returning effects team.
: The actors have a tendency to react to it more realistically because it's honestly there, and the audience is there in the moment experiencing whatever happens.
ACCOMANDO: Like watching a possessed large intestine fly out to strangle Herbert West. John Naulin collaborated with his wife, Shayna, to create the supple intestines.
: She took this flesh-colored material that is actually designed for making the inside lining of swimming suits, and she sculpted it. And it literally moved like a feather boa, weighed almost nothing.
ACCOMANDO: So adding a rubber tube to pump blood meant that it was still easy for actor Graham Skipper to put the prop into action.
: We don't have intestines that will actually attack me, so then it's up to me as an actor to pretend that they're attacking me, to time out with the stage manager who's under the stage pumping the blood out, time that with him, so that I'm squirting it at different parts of the stage and onto the audience, mostly onto the audience.
ACCOMANDO: Skipper makes it his personal goal to shoot the blood out as far as he possibly can, and that delights people like teenager Gabriela Rodriguez. She came with her drama class from Cesar Chavez High School in Phoenix.
: I was sitting fourth seat in, and I - like, right in front of, like, the intestines right at the end. So, like, I pretty got much - got splattered. I'm completely - I'm soaked right now. It's a nice feeling.
ACCOMANDO: For NPR News, I'm Beth Accomando.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL, "RE-ANIMATOR: THE MUSICAL")
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