Oscar Horrors: Makeup for the Recently Deceased

Daily Oscar Horrors until Halloween!

HERE LIES...Beetlejuice which heard its name repeated just once at the 1988 Oscars when it won Robert Short, Steve LaPorte and Ve Neill the award for Best Achievement in Makeup, banishing Scrooged and Coming to America to play with the sandworms.

Michael C. here. As a child of the Eighties I spent my formative years inundated with every variety of gore, slasher, and massacre Hollywood could throw at me, and yet it was this zany ghost story, more comedy than horror, that succeeded in getting under my skin where so many so many escaped mental patients failed. Such is the ability of a little twisted imagination to triumph over buckets of blood. There was just something about the sight of Alec Baldwin popping eyeballs on his fingers like so many olives that never failed to creep my seven-year old self out. Tim Burton knows - or at least used to know - that there is excitement in skirting the line between enjoyably goofy and genuinely unsettling. (See also: Large Marge)

There are many moments in Beetlejuice for the makeup team to show off. There is the rotting of Baldwin and Davis during the exorcism, the general moldiness of the title character and the hilariously slow-on-the-uptake football team ("Coach, I don't think we survived the crash.")

Best Most Fun Achievements in MakeUp

A big reason I harbor such affection for this work is that it never for a second attempts anything approaching realism. The makeup team aims instead for the more admirable goal of being fun. Keaton's look as Beetlejuice, for example, is so unapologetically theatrical with his fright wig hair and the dark circles around his eyes that he wouldn't be out of place in a silent movie. 

But this is to the film's credit, and why the Oscar was justly awarded. The creative character design of Beetlejuice is still fondly remembered while thousands of more technically impressive ghoulies have blended together into a late-night cable blur.

Oh, and I can't be the only one who has always wanted to see this from Adam and Barbara's point of view, right?

Beetlejuice costume ideas for Halloween
Makeup and Hair posts 
"80s Oscars" articles
Previously on Oscar Horrors

Oscar Horrors: Carrie White Burns In Hell

In the daily Oscar Horrors series we're looking at those rare Oscar nominations for horror movies. Happy Halloween from Team Film Experience.

Here lies… Sissy Spacek’s Oscar for Best Actress in Carrie (1976). Carrie White may burn in hell (along with her ill-fated off-Broadway musical), but Sissy Spacek’s nomination remains a shining beacon of hope that genre fare from little-known actors don’t have to be relegated to, ahem, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films Awards.

Can you conceive of it today? A 26-year-old actress, in one of her first major roles, portraying an introverted teenage high schooler with supernatural powers who kills the students at her senior prom. Sounds like fairly standard genre stuff, especially when coming from the minds of an up-and-coming writer (Stephen King was paid $2,500 for the book rights) and director (Brian De Palma). Yet somehow, it became one of the few horror titles to earn prestigious acting nominations at the Academy Awards. Can you picture this happening today?

Didn’t think so.

Spacek’s performance as the titular Carrie White was only her fourth major film role after Prime Cut (1972), Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), and Ginger in the Morning (1974). Spacek would go on to win the statue just four years later for a musical biopic about Loretta “the Coal Miner’s Daughter” Lynn, which makes this breakthrough Oscar nomination all the crazier. Did the Academy see something in her that broke through the conventions of the genre, or was this merely one of those rare moments when they were able to look past all the barriers and recognise the defining, film-changing performance within? Her only other nomination and win of that awards season came from the National Society of Film Critics. High praise, sure, but tell that to Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Yolande Moreau, Sally Hawkins, Naomi Watts, Reese Witherspoon, Ally Sheedy… well, the list goes on (presumably...the strike rate was so high going back just 10 years that I figure there must be plenty more without spending the time to research.)

Somewhere behind the smooth as honey tracking shots, blood-splattered prom dresses and John Travolta (“in his first motion picture role!”) smashing a pig on the head with a mallet (I couldn’t quite stomach Carrie as a younger man due to this very scene), Spacek emerged. It probably helped that the young actress had the gloriously villainous Piper Laurie in her back pocket to help shine a light on her. Laurie, a previous nominee in 1962 for The Hustler, received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for being a mother that would make even Mary Jones shake in her boots. As mother/daughter combos go, the Whites are a doozy of a pair.

A quick look at the original trailer and you’d be hard-pressed to believe this was the sort of thing that would be to the Academy’s taste and yet Spacek’s repertoire of jutting sideward glances, shy upwards looks from behind flattened hair and high-pitched whelps of demonic terror makes for one of the greatest horror movie performances of all time. At a glance Carrie looks like little more a schlocky teen horror title; would Academy members even watch a film like that today? That Spacek lost the Oscar to Faye Dunaway in Network is hard to quibble with, but the miracle of the nomination is enough to keep me happy. 

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Oscar Horrors Rosemary's Baby, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, The Fly and more..
Top 100 Best Actress "Characters"
Sissy Gets Her "Star" 

Oscar Horrors: Redressing Dracula

HERE LIES … Eiko Ishioka’s costume work for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), which smothered the rest of the nominees with reams upon reams of flamboyant fabric to slither away with the statue that year. And it damn well deserved it, too.

JA from MNPP here. In the fall of 1992 I was fifteen years old and had found myself in the first blushes of cinemania, and as a budding horror enthusiast I was obsessed with Francis Ford Coppola’s film before it had even come out. It was more difficult way back then before the internet so we relied on things called “magazines” to keep us in the know, but I went one step further where this movie was concerned – I bought the “pictorial moviebook,” as it calls itself on the cover, and I studied it like the bible. And with its heavy focus on Ishioko’s work it was the first time I’d ever given much thought to a film’s costuming.

As Coppola had said, he wanted the costumes to be the set…

And are they ever. Ishioka was a visual artist and had done some memorable work for the stage version of M. Butterfly and Paul Schrader’s 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters before this, and she brought with her an eccentric batch of influences, to put it mildly. From the human musculature that influenced Dracula’s armor in the opening scenes…

Visual splendor and bizarre influences after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Oscar Horrors: A Two Faced Oscar Win

Oscar Horrors Continues

Here lies... Fredric March’s charming Dr Jekyll face, devoured by the monstrosity that is Mr. Hyde. Though his Hyde face didn’t manage to scare all the other nominees away – March tied for the Best Actor award that year, and in a field of only three nominees – when you stop to think about it, his win was still quite a feat. 

Hollywood’s idea of what constitutes a good performance has changed over the years so it’s almost inconceivable for a performance of such exaggerated expressionism in a horror film to stand a chance of winning today. (Although, give this to Robert and I’m sure he’ll prove me wrong by drawing parallels between March and Natalie Portman’s Nina.) Oscar-y or not, however, the performance is a marvel; perhaps the only thing that remains so fresh about the film 80 years on.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) is a horror film, but to the desensitized eyes of my generation – for whom horror means gore and brutality and 12 people sewn together ass-to-mouth – it plays more like a campy horror comedy. What keeps the film grounded (and serious-minded) is its sensitively realized performances, particularly that of March, who gets every note right.

The Jekyll to Hyde transition, with no CGI!

As Jekyll, March is handsome and charismatic; as Hyde he’s hideous and violent. The two characters are purposely the opposite sides of the coin. They share nothing in common and March plays both of them really well, but the real reason the performance is so great is the way he connects the two. It’s key to the narrative, as it is in the original book, to imply that these two wildly different characters can exist within the same person. As Dr. Jekyll announces in the opening:

My analysis of the human psyche leads me to believe that man is not truly one, but truly two ...the good self... and the bad self.

March manages to capture that in his performance. As Hyde, he shows an aggression that can be reflected in his self-distrust as Jekyll. All of Hyde’s uncontrollable cruelty can be traced back in Jekyll’s internal conflict. And the duality can be seen in his eyes the whole time.

Hyde with his favoured prostitute. Sexuality is a major element in this pre-Code film.

Rumour has it, when the 1941 remake was released and universally panned, Spencer Tracy, who played the leading role, received a telegram from March. In it, March apparently thanked him for the biggest boost of his career. Tracy’s portrayal paled in comparison. I haven’t seen the remake, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I agree with the consensus. March’s performance is one for the ages.

Other Oscar ACTING Horrors...
Rosemary's Baby - Best Supporting Actress
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane -Best Actress in a Leading Role
The Exorcist -Best Actress in a Supporting Role 
Carrie - Best Actress in a Leading Role

Oscar Horrors: King of the Zombies' Tribal Beats

In this series, Team Experience is looking at Oscar nominated or Oscar winning contributions from or related to the horror genre. In this episode, Robert Gannon -- who dreamt up this whole series for us! -- looks at a true oddity in Oscar history.

HERE LIES...The original score of King of the Zombies (1941). There are a few interesting things to note about the Oscar nomination for a brief horror film (67 minutes!) that has not aged well. The least of which is that, music aside, it's not a particularly great or memorable film.

The year is 1942. Music is still a respected category at the Academy Awards. In an odd twist, 20 films are nominated for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture. Only at the 1945 ceremony were more films nominated in the category. At this point in Oscar history, there was no limit on the number of nominees. The nominated films simply met a quality threshold. That meant films like Citizen Kane and How Green Was My Valley could compete right alongside B-pictures like King of the Zombies.

As far as I'm concerned, King of the Zombies is the best nominated original score from that year. The zombies in this politically incorrect horror film are voodoo zombies, converted from slaves on a remote island off the coast of South America. Strains of a secret ritual rise and fall out of the sound mix, confusing the American travelers who crashed on the island. Various drums pound out a syncopated rhythm while a chorus of unseen voices chant and sing out a uniform refrain in (presumably) a made up language. It's a haunting blend that offers some of the only scares in the entire film. For a modern equivalent of how the score is used, think of how ineffective The Village would be without James Newton Howard's tension-building score.

I spend a lot of time listening to and researching film scores for my music direction work. The score of King of the Zombies is one that I can pull up in my head instantly and start playing. It's precise, it's perfect for the film, and it's very memorable.

King of the Zombies' score by Edward J. Kay set the foundation for modern voodoo zombie films. If there are voodoo rituals involved, you will hear the same tribal-inspired rhythms and chant-like vocals with nothing else in the mix. It's amazing that a film this small and inconsequential so readily established a horror covention.

Other Oscar Horrors...
Rosemary's Baby - Best Supporting Actress
The Swarm - Best Costume Design
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane -Best Actress in a Leading Role
The Birds - Best Effects, Special Visual Effects
The Fly -Best Makeup
Death Becomes Her -Best Effects, Visual Effects
The Exorcist -Best Actress in a Supporting Role 
Rosemary's Baby - Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
Beetlejuice - Best Makeup

Carrie - Best Actress in a Leading Role
Bram Stoker's Dracula - Best Costume Design
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Best Actor in a Leading Role
Poltergeist - Best Effects, Visual Effects
Hellboy II: The Golden Army -Achievement in Makeup
The Silence of the Lambs -Best Director
The Tell-Tale Heart -Best Short Subject, Cartoons