Oscar Horrors: Setting The Table for The Pale Man

Oscar Horrors continues with Michael on everyone's favorite Guillermo del Toro film

HERE LIES... Pan’s Labyrinth, winner of the 2006 Oscar for Best Art Direction.

I could go through Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth a scene at a time picking out all the brilliant little details that makes its imagery so indelible, but for this post, let’s limit our focus to the film’s most famous scene: The Pale Man. The monster that has a table full of delicious food but only feeds, to use del Toro’s words, “on the blood of the innocent.” There have been thousands of scenes where one form of monster or another stalks the story’s protagonist. It is one of the basic equations of the horror genre. So what do set decorator Pilar Revuelta and art director Eugenio Cabellero do with this one that shakes the viewer on such an elemental level? 

Of course it helps to start with one of the all time horrifying creatures in all of cinema. Del Toro instructed the team to imagine an old obese man who quickly lost a lot of weight, and when that proved insufficiently nightmare-inducing proceeded to erase the face of their designs.

But beyond the surface there are many elements to the scene most viewers will only register subconsciously. Like... 

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Oscars Horrors: Hellboys and Albinos

In this series, Team Experience is looking at Oscar nominated or Oscar winning contributions from or related to the horror genre. Horror has many hooks (and other deadly pointy things) but it's historically lacking in Oscar bait.

HERE LIES... Hellboy's makeup, sent to the grave from Benjamin Button's cradle in the 2008 competition for Best Achievement in Makeup for 2008; aging in reverse buried ageless supernatural creatures. 

Have you ever found yourself wholly confused by what Oscar's makeup branch looks for in a movie? Aside from aging prosthetics, where latex is lathered on to  take movie stars from cradle to grave in bloated biopics, there seems to be no consistency in how they vote. Benjamin Button's aging, which was surely heavily computer abetted, won the Oscar whilst Nicole Kidman's nose in The Hours was ruled ineligible due to computer touchups years earlier.  If you stop to recall that that the subgenre of movies that is most obviously makeup dependent (the zombie movie) has never received one makeup effects nomination it sets the head spinning right off one's shoulders. What are they looking for? It's my dream to corner one of them one days and ask just that question.

The case of Hellboy II: The Golden Army is an interesting one because, though the movie is rife with beautiful prosthetics work, many of the characters appeared in the earlier film Hellboy (2004) for which Mike Elizalde and Thomas Floutz did not receive nominations. Technically makeup work within a sequel must be sufficiently "new" to qualify. Was it the adorable site of Little Orphan 'Code Name: Hellboy' in the prologue flashback? 

The makeup work was so perfect that child actor Monste Ribé could even brush his fake teeth!

Why was the amazing sight of Ron Perlman as the adult Hellboy in 2004 not enough for a makeup nomination? Perhaps we're so accustomed to seeing genre favorite Ron Perlman buried in latex and prosthetics that it's only the site of him without (like in Drive this year) that warrants any double takes and "how did they do that?" wonder!

Or maybe the nomination came from those twin Royal elves Prince Nuada (Luke Goss, pictured) and Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) and their albino skin and weirdly creepy scarring?

Either way I hope the makeup artists or Guillermo del Toro got around to thanking Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta for the Fire & Ice inspiration... "NEKRON!!!!!"

Have you ever seen the Hellboy movies?
Hellboy would sure be a tough costume to pull off for Halloween.