Why Brain­dead remains the pin­na­cle of gris­ly prac­ti­cal effects

From the abject ter­ror of see­ing what looks con­vinc­ing­ly like flesh pen­e­trat­ed in zom­bie flicks such as Dawn of the Dead and The Evil Dead, to the dis­turb­ing hybrid crea­tures cre­at­ed for the likes The Fly and The Thing which blurred the line between man and mon­ster, inge­nious prac­ti­cal effects marked the peri­od span­ning the late ​’70s to the ear­ly ​’90s as a peak era for hor­ror cinema.

Before CGI came along to pro­vide easy answers as to how to get ideas from the draw­ing board to the big screen, cer­tain film­mak­ers would use an assort­ment of syn­thet­ic make-up, pros­thet­ic limbs, pup­petry and all sorts of oozy organ­ic mate­r­i­al to cre­ate some of cinema’s most endur­ing­ly grue­some images. Most of these were designed to scare, but in 1992’s Brain­dead aka Dead Alive – an ear­ly Peter Jack­son film often cit­ed as one of the gori­est splat­ter films ever made – the inten­tion is to get laughs. Its effects are every bit as bril­liant­ly inven­tive, but are used as a means to cre­ate a glee­ful­ly deranged glut­tony of dis­gust­ing effects for audi­ences to both gawp and guf­faw at, rather than recoil in ter­ror from.

Tonal­ly, the film con­tains noth­ing like the mean spirit­ed­ness of Saw and oth­er entries in the tor­ture porn genre, nor does it have much in com­mon with know­ing­ly crud­dy made-for-TV-movies like Shark­na­do, where the joke is how bad the effects are. In Brain­dead, the effects are both out­stand­ing and the main appeal of the film. Per­haps its clos­est cousin is the sim­i­lar­ly goofy, effects-dri­ven Evil Dead 2, although even that film has a con­cern for build­ing ten­sion in the tra­di­tion­al hor­ror man­ner that Brain­dead all but dis­pens­es with. Plus, there’s some­thing unique about the New Zealand accent that lends a par­tic­u­lar kind of dead­pan camp to all the schlocky performances.

The plot isn’t espe­cial­ly impor­tant, but does pro­vide an amus­ing frame­work for all the blood-splat­ter­ing chaos. Set in 1950s New Zealand, Lionel (Tim­o­thy Balme) falls in love with a girl (Diana, played by Penalver Maria Sanchez), but is held back from pur­su­ing the romance by his over­bear­ing moth­er (Eliz­a­beth Moody). Their rela­tion­ship is com­pli­cat­ed when the moth­er is bit­ten by a Suma­tran rat-mon­key at a zoo, falls ill, and final­ly turns into a zom­bie, prompt­ing Lionel to keep her hid­den in his base­ment in the vain hope she’ll get bet­ter. But even­tu­al­ly he comes to accept that his moth­er is now noth­ing more than an evil flesh-eat­ing mon­ster, and sets out to destroy her and all the oth­er zom­bies that had spawned dur­ing his dithering.

All kinds of mod­els, typ­i­cal­ly made out of wax and oth­er pli­able mate­ri­als, were lov­ing­ly hand­craft­ed just to be dis­pensed with in an orgy of gore. The zom­bies are brit­tle, mean­ing that their heads, limbs and inter­nal organs are con­stant­ly fly­ing every­where as the des­per­ate human sur­vivors strike at them with what­ev­er objects hap­pen to be close at hand. And even these sev­ered body parts take on a life of their own, as dis­em­bod­ied heads skirt across the floor and, most out­landish­ly of all, ani­mat­ed small intestines grab hold and cling to the human char­ac­ters’ legs.

As well as mod­els, many of the effects are achieved using pup­pets. The set of Lionel’s house, where much of the action takes place, was built sev­er­al feet off the ground so that pup­peteers could oper­ate under­neath. Per­haps the best pup­pet is a baby zom­bie called Sel­wyn, who wreaks hav­oc while all the time gig­gling mock­ing­ly, and whose grotesque appear­ance looks like some­thing out of Spit­ting Image. In one of the film’s most hilar­i­ous­ly vul­gar sequences (where the pup­pet is sup­ple­ment­ed by oth­er shots of an actu­al two-year old wear­ing a body­suit), the baby is let loose in a park, forc­ing Lionel to beat, kick and throw it until it is restrained again, much to the hor­ror of onlook­ing mothers.

And then there’s the blood. Lots and lots of blood. Sub­stances like boiled apple slices and gold­en syrup were used as a sub­sti­tute, and by the end of the cli­mac­tic sequence involv­ing the revolv­ing blade of a lawn­mow­er, and a grotesque­ly lit­er­al rebirthing scene of Lionel out of his now giant-sized moth­er, the ground is cov­ered in it and the var­i­ous remains of the dis­em­bow­elled zombies.

The release of Juras­sic Park the fol­low­ing year her­ald­ed a tran­si­tion from prac­ti­cal effects to spe­cial effects, some­thing Jack­son open­ly embraced when mov­ing to the Mid­dle-Earth uni­verse at the start of the fol­low­ing decade. But Brain­dead retains a cer­tain tac­tile gross­ness that no CGI cre­ation has ever quite man­aged to replicate.