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Behind the Scenes
Making Up The Pendulum

While the grisly tortures of the Spanish Inquistion would boggle anyone's mind with horror, these hideous acts were even more terrifying to the makeup crew of THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM. Faced with the realizing the unthinkable was Greg Cannom, an Academy Award-winning effects artist who gave us the supernatural fabricated flesh and blood with THE LOST BOYS and MERIDIAN. Helping to sculpt and paint his work was Matt Falls, whose first challenge was creating the corpse that gets whipped to ashes at the film's beginnning.

"Since the Duke of Alba Molina had been buried for years, we went through a lot of mummy books to get the right 'look' for him. But the Duke still couldn't appear like a real mummy, since they looked almost fake, as if they'd been constructed out of cotton, latex and tissue paper. So we sculpted a face with a lot of grisly character, then attached it to a skeleton from a medical supply company. A body was formed on top of it with all sorts of toxic chemicals, and was ready to be whipped a couple of days later," Falls said.

But Falls' painstaking construction was no match for the film's real Inquisitor. "The skeleton was very solid, which allowed us to disconnect an arm or a leg during the cut-away shots. There was a Duke that could be completely whipped apart, and a body with breakaway bones for close-up inserts. But Stuart Gordon insisted on lashing the corpse himself, and gave it everything hed had. The body instantly exploded and pieces went flying everywhere! I guess he didn't know his own strength," Falls said.

In one intriguing scene, Falls had to reassemble the Duke's corpse from the dust, and the materializes in front of the hallucinating Torquemada. "We agonized over that effect, and it ended up being simple beyond belief. We got the molds that the skeleton was formed in and then filled them with dust. They were then laid on the set's floor, and the material was blown away with a fan. When we revered the film, it looked like the skeleton was coming together from ash. Sometimes the easiest stuff really looks the best," Falls said.

Correctly positioning Cannom's effects in front of the camera was vital to giving them gruesome authenticity. "We built a couple of mechanical hands for Mendoza that Torquemada could put his fingers through. The armatures had holes in the palms to achive the effect, but the hands worked so well because they were placed in front of the actor. The technicians could twist them about as he grimaced, which gave the hands a lot of realism. Fake arms and feet were also were puppeteered for the pendulum scene, including a couple of artifical rats the could be sliced in half. Our creative ability was constantly tested on the set, and we ended up ad-libbing a lot of stuff with suprisingly good results," Falls said.

Probably the PENDULUM's most disturbing aspect for Falls was getting inpiration for his delightfully horrid work. "Sometimes you have to look at pictures of accident and burn victims, which isn't very pleasant," Falls admits. "But you have to go to those lengths if you want an effect that isn't pretty. Though something very stylized can be done from your imagination, it still won't have that necessary 'shock' value."

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