For
veteran makeup artist Todd McIntosh, working on the new DARK SHADOWS was a childhood dream come true. A devoted fan of the original series,
McIntosh, who finished a six-year stint on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER not long ago, was delighted to work on the recent WB pilot, which
failed to be picked up for the network’s fall schedule.
“I
don’t know what the final reason was that they nixed it,”
says McIntosh, “The way it was explained to me, almost everyone
making the decisions didn’t like the show, but no one could
say what they didn’t like. One person wouldn’t like an
actor, another person didn’t like this choice or the lighting
or whatever, but nobody could come to a cohesive, point-the-finger-at-one-element
and say, ‘That’s what’s wrong with it.’ It
probably would have been better if they could. If they could have
pointed at one actor and say, ‘That guy is ruining this whole
pilot; replace him and let’s go!’ they’d have been
able to make a decision. But the different factions were looking at
it and saying, ‘Well, it’s not right, but I don’t
know why. Let’s just not put the energy into it—and besides,
it costs $5 million!’ ”
McIntosh
headed up the makeup department, with prosthetics built by Andrew
Clement of Creative Characters. Their collaborations included Barnabas
Collins (Alec Newman) in varying stages of decomposition
as he’s brought back to life, and the equally cadaverous demon
(HELLBOY’s Doug Jones)
seen in the opening sequence. According to McIntosh, “Victoria
Winters [Marley Shelton] is on the train to Collinwood when she falls
asleep and has a dream where a kid in a Halloween costume suddenly
becomes a monster. It made sense to me that if the kid is in a red
devil costume, the monster should be a devil or demon of some kind.
“The
director [Ed. - PETER PAN’s P.J. Hogan, below with Shelton
and Jones in the demon getup] waffled on this a couple of times, and
what he came back with was that the creature she sees in her dream,
which gives her a bit of a warning, is some victim of Barnabas from
the past. At the same time, we still had to build the corpse of Old
Barnabas in the coffin, and to save time and money—we still
didn’t have an actor cast for Barnabas at that point—we
used Doug Jones for both makeups. We tried to make them look different,
but I believe the director held on the train demon a little too long.
It should have been just a quick scare, but because we had the same
actor in both makeups, there is a bit of a resemblance.”
Copyright
© 2004 Todd Mackintosh
Doug
(the scabby one on the right) with
director P.J. Hogan and Marley Shelton
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