HOW THE TER RIFYING MUMMY IN LOT NO 2 49 WAS BROUGHT (BACK) TO LIFE
HEY’VE WORKED with legendary filmmakers and created characters for a slew of iconic properties – but Lou and Dave Elsey from Igor Studios would “do Ghost Story forever” if they could, despite the annual tales from Mark Gatiss being created on a fraction of Hollywood budgets.
SFX goes behind the scenes on the filming of A Ghost Story For Christmas: Lot No 249 with the creature makers to see how they bring the dead to life…
OPE N THE CASKET
DAVE: We had a very, very short amount of time to think about this.
The first thing to do was to research all the different mummies from all the films that have been done before. We didn’t really want to go down exactly the same route that every other one has gone down.
Of course, we’re already familiar with lots of them, being horror movie fans. We looked at everything – the Boris Karloff mummy, the Christopher Lee mummy from the Hammer version. There’s even mummies in Abbott and Costello movies that we looked at. Obviously there’s a theme with all of them. But we also looked at some of the illustrations and things that had been done. Then we set about doing designs of our own, which featured certain aspects that we hadn’t really seen that much in other mummy films. LOU: There were also photos and references of real mummies that we discussed with Mark that he liked the look of – he sent us a lot of stuff, we sent him a lot of stuff. He liked the leathery skin – it was trying to put a mix of all of these different ideas into this one character.
DAVE: We sent him maybe 10 or 11 designs.
LOU: They were all quite broad, very different styles.
DAVE: Mark literally chose the bits of the mummies that we had done that he liked and then we incorporated them into the finished design. We had great guidelines in that Conan Doyle [author of the original story] is very descriptive of what he wanted, and Mark obviously wanted it to follow the description as much as possible.
MAN BEHIND THE MUMMY
DAVE: One of the great things about this was that we got to work with James Swanton. He just has the greatest face; he can do incredible expressions; he’s very, very good.
LOU: We had a great foundation building on a good actor, who was the perfect canvas for this character we were creating.
DAVE: Once we knew it was him, we started working on castings of his face and hands and a body cast as well, to work out how to create in three dimensions what we had designed in two dimensions. We sculpted appliances for his face which we moulded, and then created rubber appliances
