What Is The Quantum Terror? Part 2
Inspiration & Creation of a special effects heavy Lovecraftian world on a shoestring budget.
Click Here To Watch The Quantum Terror
Inspiration
The first time I attempted to make a movie I was a mere sixteen years old. I remember having no conception of the amount of work that went into making one and in hindsight, that was always the right way to go into these things.
It was in May of 1992 after seeing an advanced screening of Alien3 at the United Artist Theater at the Thousand Oaks Mall. I was a huge fan of the first two movies and had been obsessively anticipating the release of this third sequel. I had recorded the half-hour-long HBO ‘making of’ special on VHS and watched it over and over. (Keep that special in mind, it’s going to come up again in a major way.) I had bought all the monster movie magazines with articles and production photos. If there was a newspaper ad, I clipped it and saved it. I was so ready to see it that scoring a sneak preview ticket felt like winning the lottery.
Anyway, the movie was terrible. Not only did it seem to have an open disdain for its predecessors in the same way that Star Wars fans got to experience with The Last Jedi but it also came with that hubris you see in people who stride into a gathering, proclaiming that they’re about to show up everyone in the room, only to trip over their own feet. The story was nonsensical, clumsy, and worse, boring. Tonally, it was a one-eighty from the story progression that had thus far been so flawless, completely abandoning the structure and arc of the first two, yet offering nothing of substance to take its place. I tried to pretend that I liked it to stave off the disappointment but deep down it was just so disheartening to see something so great suddenly fall on its face so embarrassingly.
BUT there was something about that movie that excited me so much that it cut through all of that. In fact, I dare say it changed the course of my life.
I thought that the special effects were the coolest I’d ever seen. It wasn’t so much that they were the best, in fact, some of them, like the rod puppet at times looked like such garbage that it took you right out of the movie. However, seeing it came with the epiphany that if you wanted to create a monster on a budget, it didn’t have to be a full-size animatronic creature or a guy in a suit. You didn’t have to build every set. It could be a miniature and there were ways to place them in front of the camera so that it looked like they were full size with actors in the same frame. I know this is old knowledge now but to me, who didn’t have access to computer programs for compositing, it was a revelation.
The sets and gothic underground corridors were fantastic. They really did set a dark and scary mood. The script may have been a disappointing mess but they worked just fine. I liked them.
I became so excited that within a few days I had convinced myself that I could make my own Alien movie and I almost had my friends on board, including Danny, whose dad had a video camera that took VHS tapes. Long story short, after making miniature hives using hot glue, painted driftwood, and bits of scrap drywall from my parents remodeling the living room, my friend all tapped out, thinking I was crazy to believe I could make a movie. The paper mache alien head and my attempt at a rod puppet couldn’t convince them otherwise, the cardboard guns didn’t cut it, and my scouted locations of concrete drainage tunnels were insufficient. Fan film hadn’t yet entered the lexicon so to them it was just a silly fantasy from whom they viewed as their least mature friend.
I could have done it, though. It would have been glorious.
Then & (sort of) Now
Okay, so let’s jump ahead to about 2014 when I had just moved into a new rental home outside of Austin, Texas. A lot had happened between then and this point, including me becoming friends with Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. who were the team behind the practical effects for Alien 3. They had recently formed an offshoot production company called studioADI from their main FX company Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated so that they could crowdfund and produce a movie called Harbinger Down. I had become one of the lead promoters for their Kickstarter campaign, an experience I intend to write more about another time but suffice it to say that the creation of this movie meant a lot to me. If my role models who had created so many of the movie monsters I so admired couldn’t produce their own film, what business did I have believing that I could?
Soon enough they were successful and now it was my turn. The new home my family and I occupied had two defining factors that relit that old flame I once had for my unrealized Alien fan film. The first one wasn’t anything unique but this was the only place I had ever lived since I moved out of my parent’s house to have a garage. A garage is a magical space that can become so many things and for me, it became a film set. The other was that across the street was a little wash tunnel that went under the road, to prevent flooding. It wasn’t anything special, it just let out the other side but I knew that with the right camera angles and editing, it could become the gateway to an underground world.
Whatever this world was, it was calling me to write a script about it. I wasn’t going to make a fan film at my age. I needed to own the story. I knew my resources would be limited. I could only shoot in and around my house if I was going to keep production costs low and shooting schedules efficient. I had to make sure the cast, who I’ll dedicate another post to later, was small and use every trick in the book to make it seems like my little production bubble was a whole world.
Locations and Sets
So, I had a tunnel as one location, the interior/exterior of my house, and a neat little path that and ran between houses a few streets down that somehow felt evocative to me.
My garage would have to serve several functions as shooting went on. I remember director Sam Rami saying that all the basement scenes for the first Evil Dead film were shot in a garage, too and I thought those setups looked great. Since the house was a rental and I barely had any money, I knew I could construct anything heavy-duty. I ended up buying one-inch-thick styrofoam sheets that were a little over eight feet high, bounding them together into fake walls and painting them to look like concrete. The effect was so convincing that the cast and crew kept forgetting that they weren’t real and leaning against them, only to have them bow in and nearly collapse on them. At least it was impossible for them to be crushed by a falling wall.
I knew this wouldn’t be enough to convince audiences that my characters were in a whole network of underground tunnels, though. My longtime friend Heather Lowe was always building amazing things for her children like dollhouses and homemade toys, that I thought if I handed the task of building miniature to my specifications to her, she’d make a bang-up job of it. I was not wrong.
Again, I’ll write more about her work in the next part of this Substack series but suffice it to say that combined with the different practical effects creature puppets that effects artist Jenna Green and I created, the world of The Quantum Terror was on its way to becoming fully realized.
Stay tuned for part three when I’ll be talking about monsters a makeup effects.
Click Here To Watch The Quantum Terror
Did you miss part one? Read it, here:
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