Face Your Fears: The Beast confronts Steven, (inset) Craig Reardon’s unused Lon Chaney-inspired Beast head, and Robbie turns his back on the clown doll.
he looked up at his reflection in the mirror, he would have seen a decaying corpse look- ing back. This would have been a wonderful scare even if we’d done that; Mike Mc- Cracken, my partner on the film, spitballed another approach. He said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if the same thing that just happened to the steak happened to him?”
MC: Those are actually Steven’s hands tearing the flesh from my fake head. I remember handing him my wristwatch and ring to wear for the shot. I was watching him rip my face apart and he was having a wonderful time!
CR: I thought Spielberg would have fun doing it and, frankly, he would not be so dis- pleased with the demolition work when he saw the dailies! The only quibble I have is that the hands come up into shot at too straight an angle, but I couldn’t see that as I was seated directly behind Spielberg operating the mechanisms in the head. Tobe was observing on a stepladder, urging us on, but I think he was so involved in looking at the face that the inappropriate angle of Steven’s forearms was the last thing he was focused on. However, the general public were caught totally by surprise. At many screenings, that shot was the hit of the movie, which was certainly gratifying at the time.
Of course, the moment that distills every child’s worst nightmare is the clown attack. OR: I tapped into my own personal fears for that because I was terrified of clowns. I once had this little Charlie Chaplin doll – and it wasn’t the Chaplin that we all know and love – it was this creepy pale-faced toy that used to sit on my shelf. It had these weird eyes that seemed to follow me around. I was actually thinking about how much that thing scared me when we were shooting that sequence. We finished it in just a couple of hours and one of the tricks they used was a reverse camera. When the clown wrapped its arm around me I had to go from a very big emotion to a small one as the clown arm was pulled away. It was simple but that scene always scares people.
Is it true that you almost choked to death shoot- ing that gag but Spielberg noticed and quickly intervened? OR: I’ve heard that story but I don’t remember that at all. Honestly, I’m not sure what took place. If peo- ple saw me being choked by the clown doll, then maybe it did happen. I had such a good time on Poltergeist I’ve probably repressed the memory. There are a lot of things I can recall clearly, but that isn’t one of them. Either way, it makes for a good story and helps create a mythology for the film.
Craig, what can you tell me about The Beast? CR: The Beast was basically a disembodied head whose function was to scare the living hell out of the audience. It was to explode out from the luminous closet at the same point where a large skull with glowing eye-sockets now appears instead. This is the work of Industrial Light & Magic. I had nothing to do with it. During pre-production, I sketched a number of alternative designs, one of which was pre- ferred by Spielberg. A head was fashioned that had
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enough theatrical malevolence that even if glimpsed for a second it would terrify the viewers. I’d hoped to come up with a visage that would scare a contemporary au- dience the same way as Lon Chaney had done in his unmasking scene in The Phan- tom of the Opera – a landmark scare in horror film history – and I think I did. However, the filming of this creation, as handled by ILM, was so complicated in its execution and different from the way I was told the shot would be composed that it never delivered on the potential inherent in the head itself. I actually saw the dis- carded takes. They didn’t get it up there. The head was in effect thrown away. It was my major disappointment in the film.
W ere there any other significant scenes deleted from the final cut?
MC: In the film, you see Marty go upstairs to investigate the sounds of footsteps and Carol Anne crying. There was an extensive sequence that followed on from there, which we shot on this little hallway set. I turn the handle of the bedroom door but it just keeps turning and turning. Then the camera dollies in on my hand as the door clicks, opens, and there is this gigantic whoosh! They had these big wind machines that would blast in your face and blow your hair back. You see them all through the movie when there’s a big scare and I got some of that. Then this ghost suddenly lurches out of the bedroom and lifts me ten feet up in the air. It bites me on the side as I’m screaming and writhing, then throws me down to the floor. I was hanging by a harness on wires and the special effects guys had me rigged with tubes underneath my clothing. Steven would say, “Okay, it’s biting you!” I would be shrieking and the guys would push a button and this liquid would ex- plode out of my shirt in the shape of a giant ghost mouth. They called that gloop “ghost saliva” but it looked more like semen. Now, you only see the aftermath where I hurry back downstairs and show Dr. Lesh and every- body the bite-marks. By the way, here’s some trivia: Steven loves self-referential jokes and the original climax of that scene had Robbie staring at my bite- marks before look- ing into the camera and say- ing, “[This place has] jaws!”