Who Was That Masked Man?

'Neath this mask there is a face
But the face is just a mask
‘Neath the mask there is a man
He is the horror that he seems
He is the phantom of your dreams

from the song "Phantom of the Opera" by Rupert Holmes
(not to be confused with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s "The Phantom of the Opera")

The importance of masks in drama is probably as old as theater itself. In Ancient Greece, classical masks, sculpted with exaggerated facial features and expressions, brought the characters closer to the audience. Some masks had wide, gaping mouths that hid brass megaphones to project the performers’ voices. Besides enabling one actor to reappear in different roles, a mask, as well, allowed the actor to vanish into his role (the Greek word for mask is "persona"). Artistic variations on the masks would help audiences distinguish sex, age, even social standing.

The use of masks and special-effects makeup has remained an essential component in the cinema of the fantastic from the first screen appearance of Frankenstein’s monster a century ago to the 2010 remake of "The Wolfman" (for the record, the title of the 1941 original is "The Wolf Man"). It’s our task in the moviehouse tonight to remove the masks and peel away the makeup from the most popular feature creatures.

Part I: The Machine Age

Born in 1865, the appropriately named Charles Ogle portrayed the monster in the 1910 production of "Frankenstein" (above), filmed at Edison Studios in New York. The son of a preacher, Ogle (below, out of makeup) appeared in nearly 300 films.

Our actual starting point has to be Lon Chaney Sr., timelessly revered as one of the most versatile actors of the silent film era. He became famous for his specialty in portraying tormented, often grotesquely disfigured souls. His unforgettable performances were accentuated by his groundbreaking mastery of film makeup, courtesy of a hand-held kit not larger than a fisherman’s tackle box.

As the child of deaf parents, Chaney learned pantomime early on, a skill that would benefit not only his later career in silent movies but also his early adulthood on the vaudeville stage, where he displayed his talents as a singer, dancer and comedian. The divorce from his first wife led Chaney from the theater to the movies, where he struggled for years as a bit player and extra, until his breakout role as a sham cripple in 1919’s "The Miracle Man."

"The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1923) earned Chaney a $2500-a-week salary and became Universal Pictures’ most successful silent picture, grossing over $3 million and vaulting Chaney to top star status in Hollywood. In preparation for the role of author Victor Hugo’s wretched bell-ringer, Quasimodo, Chaney talked with several individuals who lived with various physical abnormalities. His extensive makeup entailed a knotted wig, nose putty on his cheeks, a fake eye, false teeth and a device that prevented him from closing his mouth. A fifteen-pound "hump" of rubber or plaster was attached to a leather harness that prohibited him from standing upright. Over this, he wore a flesh-colored rubber suit covered with animal hair. Constantly drenched with perspiration, he endured this punishing getup almost daily for three months.

For his starring role in "The Phantom of the Opera" (1925), based on the 1910 French novel by Gaston Leroux, Chaney’s makeup was kept secret by Universal until the premiere. When the movie opened, audience members reportedly screamed and fainted at his character’s unmasking. Chaney created the skull-like visage by darkening his eye sockets, pinning the tip of his nose up with wire and enlarging his nostrils with black makeup, gluing his ears back, building up his cheekbones with cotton and collodion (an odorous liquid plastic) and inserting a set of protruding, jagged teeth in his mouth, to which small prongs were attached to draw back the corners of his lips.

In these films, Lon Chaney’s peerless ability to re-invent himself with his self-devised makeup earned him the nickname "Man of a Thousand Faces," while the actor himself called his specialty "extraordinary characterization." In his portrayals of two of fiction’s most disfigured unfortunates, Chaney painstakingly strove to draw pity, pathos and sympathy from filmgoers, beyond merely repulsing them with the deformities of people who were just victims of fate.

Ruth Waterbury, then a writer for Photo Magazine, offered an on-set description of Chaney’s passionate dedication by observing that in his "visible suffering, Lon Chaney was plainly an artist in the exquisite travail of creation. To endure pain for his work brought him a strange joy."

Chaney himself once said, "I wanted to remind people that the lowest type of humanity have within them the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice. The dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals…These are the stories I wish to do."

Off-camera, Chaney maintained a closely guarded private life, distant from Hollywood’s social scene, and, in fact, he fostered his mysterious image by doing very little promotion for his roles. He claimed he would make it difficult for biographers, insisting that "between pictures, there is no Lon Chaney."

Chaney was diagnosed with bronchial lung cancer in late 1929 and died the following year, age 47, seven weeks after the release of the only sound motion picture he starred in, "The Unholy Three."

Chaney’s personal favorite role was, ironically, one that didn’t take advantage of his makeup artistry. His portrayal of a tough drill instructor (above) in "Tell It to the Marines" (1926) earned him the undying admiration of the U.S. Marine Corps, who made Chaney their first Honorary Marine in the film community. The Marines provided a chaplain and honor guard for his funeral.

Reflecting the privacy he cherished in life, Chaney’s final resting place remains unmarked. His much-used makeup kit (below) was given to the Los Angeles County Museum. Chaney biographer Michael F. Blake, a makeup artist in his own right ("Spider-Man 3"), considered the case the central artifact in the history of film makeup.

Author Ray Bradbury once commented that Lon Chaney "was someone who acted out our psyches. He somehow got into the shadows inside our bodies; he was able to nail down some of our secret fears and put them on-screen. The history of Lon Chaney is the history of unrequited loves. He brings that part of you out into the open, because you fear that you are not loved, you fear that you never will be loved, you fear there is some part of you that’s grotesque, that the world will turn away from you."

Lon Chaney’s passing opened the door, in a way, for other special-effects makeup artists, first and foremost among them Jack Pierce, who found a home for himself at Universal Pictures, where he became renowned as the studio’s "monster maker," designing and creating the iconic look of Boris Karloff’s creature in 1931’s "Frankenstein," along with "The Mummy" and "The Wolf Man."

Born Janus Piccoula, Pierce came to the U.S. from Greece as a teenager. After a brief stint as an amateur baseball player, he worked variously as a cinema manager, stunt man and actor before answering his true calling. Like Chaney before him, Pierce preferred the laborious out-of-kit technique of movie makeup, building the face step-by-step using cotton, collodion and nose putty.

The stubborn and ornery Pierce was not liked on the Universal lot, but his relationship with Boris Karloff was exceptionally warm. For "Frankenstein," Karloff patiently sat for hours of makeup daily. The actor’s forehead was built up with cotton, collodion and gum, while green greasepaint (designed to look deathly pale on black-and-white film) was applied to his face and hands.

According to John Brosnan, author of The Horror People, "the best thing about the facial makeup was that it didn’t conceal Karloff’s expressive features and allowed him to give full rein to his talents as a mime. Almost the only changes Pierce made below Karloff’s forehead, apart from the texture of his skin, were to the eyes which he half-concealed with strips of rubber to give a sleepy, unintelligent look. Apart from padding, Karloff'’s physique was changed by the use of steel struts to stiffen his legs, huge boots to add to his height, and the sleeves of the coat were shortened to make his arms look longer."

As tedious as the makeup application was, the daily process of removing it was reportedly painful. One journalist noted, "It required an hour and a half of prying, pulling and coaxing, plus special oils and acids. First the eyelids came off - most painful, to say the least; and enough to inspire any quantity of questionable language!…from then on it was just one pry and push and acid soaking after another until Boris was himself again."

In the opening credits of "Frankenstein," Karloff’s name was replaced by a tantalizing "?" By the time he starred in "The Mummy" a year later, the actor’s star status was such that the posters simply stated, "KARLOFF…’The Mummy.’" After Pierce toiled over the time-consuming task of applying the title character’s wrappings, Karloff allegedly told Pierce, "You’ve done a wonderful job, but you forgot to give me a fly!" Years later, Karloff would praise Pierce as the greatest makeup man in the business.

As Pierce’s career as head of Universal’s makeup division advanced, the sessions in his chair became increasingly grueling for the actors. Pierce’s most contentious relationship had to be with Lon Chaney Jr. Although they worked together nearly a dozen times, including four Wolf Man pictures and three Mummy films, each loathed the other.

As the Mummy (above), Chaney suffered under Pierce’s insistence that eight hours of makeup daily was necessary for the end result. Pierce’s concept for Chaney’s transformation into the Wolf Man (below) involved meticulously gluing yak fur on the actor’s face and hands, then singeing it with a hot curling iron, while Chaney’s head and wrists were immobilized in braces. Chaney insisted that Pierce would intentionally burn him with the iron.

By the 1940s, most movie makeuip artists had dropped the out-of-kit technique for cheaper, faster and, for the performer, more comfortable foam latex appliances. Not surprisingly, cost-effective studio heads at Universal let the old-school Pierce go in 1948.

Pierce, who could not be blamed for feeling he never received the recognition he undoubtedly deserved, died, neglected and embittered, at the age of 79 in 1968. Thirty-five years later, he was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Hollywood Make-Up Artist and Hair Stylist Guild. His enduring work at Universal Pictures inspired a number of successors, notably Tom Savini (noted for collaborations with "Land of the Dead" director George Romero) and six-time Oscar winner Rick Baker.

Part II: The Atomic Age

Something political happened to post-World War II movies in 1950s Hollywood. Films such as "I Was a Communist for the FBI," "Big Jim McLain" and "My Son John" echoed a rising anticommunist sentiment which coincided with the Korean War. This pall of paranoia crept into the science fiction and horror genres, particularly in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "The Thing from Another World" (1951), the latter a chilling allegory, set at a remote Arctic outpost, that pitted American servicemen and scientists against an amoral, emotionless, single-minded enemy - an extraterrestrial that feeds on blood and is biologically more vegetable than human (one character calls it an "intellectual carrot").

Four years before maintaining law and order in Dodge City as Marshal Matt Dillon in "Gunsmoke," James Arness (who had costarred with his close friend John Wayne in the aforementioned "Reds-under-the-bed" melodrama "Big Jim McLain"), was cast as the otherworldly menace. Makeup artist Lee Greenway spent five months and went through 18 model sculptures of the "Thing" before the movie’s producer, "master American filmmaker" Howard Hawks, was satisfied with the design. Allegedly, Greenway tested each facial revision by putting Arness in full makeup and cruising the streets of Los Angeles. When one woman in a car alongside screamed and fainted, Greenway knew he had a winner (below).

The story goes that Arness was so embarrassed by his role that he avoided the movie’s premiere.

The year 1951 also gave America a "can’t-we-all-just-get-along" message in "The Day the Earth Stood Still’s" heavy-handed preaching against global conflict by intergalactic peacekeeper Klaatu (played by British actor Michael Rennie). Klaatu’s imposing "enforcer," a towering monolithic robot named Gort, was portrayed by Lock Martin (below), who was a doorman at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Martin’s 7’ 7" stature did not necessarily equate strength. He found it difficult to move in the robot’s heavy getup, which he could only wear a half-hour at a time. In scenes that required him to lift Rennie or costar Patricia Neal, he had to rely on the use of wires or lightweight dummies. He was nicknamed "The Gentle Giant" because he enjoyed reading stories to children, and he eventually hosted such a show on Los Angeles television. He passed away in his early 40s in 1959.

By the 1950s, Universal Pictures’ stock company of monsters - Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy and the Wolf Man - had pretty much worn out their welcome (even after a brief revival in a number of Abbott and Costello comdies), and the studio was anxious for a new creature, which is exactly what they got with "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" in 1954.

When the film’s producer, William Alland, was an actor, he portrayed the reporter investigating the life of Orson Welles’ character in "Citizen Kane." At a dinner party in Welles’ home, Alland met a Brazilian filmmaker who talked about a friend of his who supposedly vanished in the Amazon while shooting a documentary about a rumored race of half-human, half-fish beings. Inspired by the tale of "Beauty and the Beast," Alland eventually wrote story notes for what he called "The Sea Monster," picturing the title creature as a "sad, beautiful monster." He said, "It would still frighten you, but because how human it was, not the other way around."

Milicent Patrick (above), a former Disney animator, designed and developed what would become known as the Gill-man. (For several decades, Bud Westmore, of the legendary Westmore family of Hollywood makeup artists, erroneously claimed sole credit for the Gill-man’s conception.) Jack Kevan, who was an assistant makeup artist on "The Wizard of Oz" and later manufactured prosthetic limbs for World War II amputees, created the body suit, which was made from molded, airtight sponge rubber at a cost of $15,000. The underwater suit, colored yellow for better visibility in murky water, was worn by Ricou Browning (below), who performed the same function in the film’s two sequels and went on to work on the underwater sequences of "Thunderball" and "Never Say Never Again."

When the Creature was on land, the man in the rubber suit was Ben Chapman (below), a 6’ 5" decorated Marine veteran of the Korean War who was employed as a real estate executive when he was cast in the movie. He cited the Chaneys, Sr. and Jr., along with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, as inspirations for his performance. Stuck in the costume for 14 hours daily, Chapman was unable to sit down, and the overheated actor often asked to be hosed down.

Like the original, the 1955 sequel "Revenge of the Creature" was presented in 3-D (and featured a memorable bit part by a studio contract player named Clint Eastwood as an absent-minded lab technician with an errant mouse in his pocket). While Ricou Browning again played the Creature underwater, the Gill-man’s dry land ambling was performed by Tom Hennesy, a stunt man who had doubled such stars as Randolph Scott, Rock Hudson and Jeff Chandler. (Hennesy was also employed as an elementary and secondary school teacher in movie and TV studios whose students included Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Paul Anka and Annette Funicello.)

When the Gill-man became a surgically mutated, oxygen-breathing near-human in a suit tailored from sailcloth in "The Creature Walks Among Us" (1956), a hefty Don Megowan (below) played the land-bound aberration. (Movie buffs may recall Megowan as the cowboy shot by Harvey Korman for chewing gum in line in "Blazing Saddles.")

In 1987, the Gill-man was resurrected, in a manner, in "The Monster Squad." Something like "Stand by Me" meets "The House of Frankenstein," the film nostalgically reunited Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy and the Gill-man in a global conflict with a tree-house club of youngsters. Actor Tom Noonan, probably best known as the serial killer "Tooth Fairy" in director Michael Mann’s "Manhunter," steals the show as a sympathetic Frankenstein’s monster who befriends the club’s misfit moppet, Phoebe.

Due to licensing issues with Universal Pictures, the waterlogged creature could not be referred to as the "Creature." Likewise, the overall look of the monster had to be redesigned by Academy Award-winning special effects master Stan Winston to only suggest the original concept by Milicent Patrick. The man inside the Gill-man suit (above) was Tom Woodruff Jr., who worked for Winston as the film’s head monster-maker and later became a busy special effects supervisor himself, working on, among several others, "Aliens," "Alien3," "Tremors," "Starship Troopers" and the "Alien vs. Predator" films.

Part III: The Space Age

Speaking of all things alien, the titular creature in 1979’s "Alien" was portrayed in part by British stunt man Eddie Powell. Powell, who worked mainly for Hammer Films as a frequent stunt double for Christopher Lee in a number of Dracula movies, also appeared in 007 films and was Clint Eastwood’s stunt double for "Where Eagles Dare."

Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away, in filmmaker George Lucas’ original "Star Wars" trilogy, the formidable presence of Lord Darth Vader (voiced by the sonorous tones of James Earl Jones) was physically depicted by six-and-a-half feet tall David Prowse, a British-born bodybuilder whose earlier roles included the monster in Hammer Films’ "The Horror of Frankenstein" (above) and "Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell" (below left), as well as crippled Frank Alexander’s bodyguard in "A Clockwork Orange" (below right).

At 7’ ¾", Peter Mayhew (below) had worked as an attendant at King’s College Hospital in London before being cast as Han Solo’s hairy copilot, Chewbacca (a role originally intended for David Prowse), in the first three "Star Wars" films and in "Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith." Now residing in Texas, Mayhew is an avid woodworker and regularly appears at "Star Wars" fan conventions.

When "Die Hard" and "The Hunt for Red October" director John McTiernan started shooting "Predator," the alien hunter was portrayed by Jean-Claude Van Damme (below), the Belgian-born martial arts movie star nicknamed " The Muscles from Brussels." The filmmakers hoped that a physical action star would use his martial arts skills to make the extraterrestrial an agile, ninja-like assassin. A few scenes were shot with Van Damme, but the actor constantly complained about the monster costume being too hot and nearly causing him to pass out. He grumbled about not being able to appear on-camera without the suit.

It also became apparent that compared to the bodybuilder physiques of stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers and Jesse Ventura, a more physically imposing presence was needed to make the creature threatening. Van Damme was unceremoniously released and replaced by 7’ 2 ½" Kevin Peter Hall, who could satisfactorily dominate his costars. (Hall reprised the part in the 1990 sequel "Predator 2.")

Not only was the actor replaced, but the design of the creature was scrapped as well. The original costume (above) looked disproportionately awkward, with an elongated head that resembled either a dachshund or a duck. Director McTiernan consulted Stan Winston. On a flight alongside James Cameron, with whom Winston had worked on "The Terminator," "Aliens" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," Winston was sketching various monster ideas when Cameron made the comment that he always wanted to see a monster with mandibles, and that became part of the Predator’s singular look. (One of Winston’s last gigs before his death in 2008 was working with Cameron on "Avatar.")

Born in Pittsburgh in 1955 to a 6’ 6" father and 6’ 2" mother, Kevin Peter Hall (above) was the tallest of six brothers, none shorter than 6’ 5". He attended George Washington State University in Washington, D.C. on a basketball scholarship, where he majored in theatrical arts. He played basketball in Venezuela before he landed his first screen role as a pollution-mutated bear in director John Frankenheimer’s "Prophecy" (1979).

One of Hall’s most memorable roles was the friendly Bigfoot in "Harry and the Hendersons" (1987), a part he repeated in the 1991 TV series of the same name. While working on the series, Hall learned he had contracted AIDS from a contaminated blood transfusion. He died from pneumonia in 1991, age 35.

Part IV: The Computer Age

When he remade "The Mummy" in 1999, director Stephen Sommers "knew that doing ‘The Mummy’ in the ‘90s, it couldn’t just be a guy wrapped in bandages - I had to blow people’s socks off." Directors had come and gone, among them Clive Barker, George Romero, Joe Dante (from a script by John Sayles), Mick Garris and Wes Craven, before Sommers ultimately appealed to Universal Pictures’ concept of revisiting its franchises from the 1930s.

Filmmakers reportedly spent $15 million of the $80 million budget on the special effects provided by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). John Andrew Berton Jr., ILM’s Visual Effects Supervisor on "The Mummy," wanted the creature to be "mean, tough, nasty, something that had never been seen by audiences before." (An award-winning computer graphics animator, Berton garnered Oscars for his work on "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "Jurassic Park.")

"You can’t outrun him," Sommers envisioned. "You can’t unwrap him. He never stops. And it can’t look like a man in a suit." To achieve that effect, Berton used motion-capture technology, resulting in what he called "a menacing and very realistic Mummy."

In the title role, charismatic South Africa-born Arnold Vosloo (above) became a "synthespian," a computer-generated virtual actor created by combining live-action with computer graphics. The word "synthespian" was coined by Jeff Kleiser, a pioneer computer animator. Together with Diana Walczak, Kleiser (brother of "The Blue Lagoon" director Randal Kleiser) created the first digital actor for a 1988 short film, "Nestor Sexton for President."

Berton matched digital imagery with the prosthetic makeup on Vosloo, who described the filming as a "whole new experience," saying, "They had to put these little red tracking lights all over my face so they could map in the special effects. A lot of the time I was walking around the set looking like a Christmas tree." (Filmmaker James Cameron took the concept of synthespians to unparalleled heights in "Avatar," in which even the pores of an actor's skin were imaged in the facial screening.)

Makeup Effects Supervisor Nick Dudman produced the physical creature effects, including three-dimensional makeup and prosthetics, and designed the animatronic effects. (Dudman and his crew’s lengthy résumé includes makeup effects and animatronic effects for "Legend," "Labyrinth," "Willow" and the "Harry Potter" films.)

"The Mummy" grossed $415 million worldwide, which probably convinced Universal to revisit "The House of Frankenstein" by resurrecting Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and a werewolf (with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thrown in for good measure) in one over-the-top action spectacular, 2004’s "Van Helsing," with "The Mummy" director Stephen Sommers at the helm.

In Bram Stoker’s original novel, Dracula, Van Helsing was a kindly physician with an uncanny knowledge of vampire-hunting that ultimately leads to Dracula’s destruction. Middle-aged character actor Edward Van Sloan portrayed Van Helsing in the Bela Lugosi version of "Dracula," while stalwart British actor Peter Cushing appeared as Van Helsing (or a descendant) in the several Hammer Film productions featuring Christopher Lee as Dracula. When Frank Langella ("Frost/Nixon") starred in 1979’s "Dracula," 72-year-old Laurence Olivier doddered through the role of Van Helsing, and, for director Francis Ford Coppola, Van Helsing was depicted by the always reliable Anthony Hopkins in "Bram Stoker’s Dracula."

In writer-director Stephen Sommers’ vision, Van Helsing was transformed from what one British critic called a character "once regarded as a senile, sanctimonious prop" into a hunk of an action hero, portrayed by no less than "Wolverine" himself, Hugh Jackman (above). Writing in The Times, that reviewer, James Christopher, observed, "Hugh Jackman’s ultra-cool Van Helsing is 6’ 2" of beefcake. He is a Vatican bounty hunter, a Mad Max loner, and the 007 of the Spanish Inquisition."

Christopher summed up the film as "a fright machine that requires no imagination. Even so, it is shamelessly enjoyable." According to Roger Ebert, the movie "employs the ultimate resources of CGI to create a world that is violent and hectic, bizarre and entertaining, and sometimes very beautiful…‘Van Helsing’ is silly and spectacular, and fun." Although A.O. Scott, of The New York Times, noted that the "human actors are routinely upstaged by the special effects" in a production with "a blithe disregard for narrative coherence as well as a gleeful, chaotic sense of visual excess," not to mention "a rousing, generous dumbness," he admitted, "It is easy to be annoyed by ‘Van Helsing’ but hard to hate it."

One of the rare human actors not upstaged by computer-generated effects in "Van Helsing" has to be Shuler Hensley, whose portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster (above) involved physical padding, huge slabs of makeup and super-sized lifts in size 24 boots that boosted him to over seven feet tall. Coincidence or not, Henley played the monster in the Broadway musical production of Mel Brooks’ "Young Frankenstein" (below).

When "The Wolf Man" was remade as "The Wolfman" in 2010, Rick Baker was the go-to artist for the creature’s makeup. Baker forever changed the face of motion picture makeup in 1982 when the prosthetics and animatronic body parts he created for the long, painful transformation sequences in "An American Werewolf in London" inspired the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to come up with the new award category for Outstanding Achievement in Makeup, in which Baker became the first honoree. Baker was subsequently nominated ten more times, garnering five additional Oscars, for "Harry and the Hendersons," "Ed Wood," "The Nutty Professor," "Men in Black" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."

Baker, who works without an agent, actively pursued the makeup job for "The Wolfman," since it was movies like "The Wolf Man" and "Frankenstein" that originally motivated him as a child to become a makeup artist.

In an article for Entertainment Weekly magazine, Baker admitted that transforming the already hairy star, Benicio del Toro, into the title character was a difficult task. "Going from Benicio to Benicio as the Wolf Man isn’t a really extreme difference," Baker (above, right, with Del Toro and Emily Blunt) commented. "Like when I did ‘An American Werewolf in London,’ we went from this naked man to a four-legged hound from hell, and we had a lot of room to go from the transformation and do a lot of really extreme things. Here we have Benicio del Toro, who’s practically the Wolf Man already, to Benicio del Toro with more hair and bigger teeth."

Both Baker and del Toro (who co-produced the film) initially insisted that the makeup design should resemble Jack Pierce’s original concept. The daily makeup sessions, which took three hours for application and one hour for removal, involved foam latex appliances and loose hair. In addition, a number of extra dentures and wigs were created in case of damage. As for the computer-generated transformations, Baker was disappointed because he was not involved in the process and feared that they wouldn’t look realistic.

Despite the noblest efforts of Baker and del Toro, along with costars Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving and Geraldine Chapliln,, "The Wolfman" was itself a disappointment. A.O. Scott of The New York Times called it a "shaggyy-dog version" of the original, while Becky Sharkey, in the Los Angeles Times, claimed "the film has no teeth." Leaving no metaphor untouched, The Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Rechtshaffen dubbed it "a dull, defanged dirge," adding that it was "not so much howlingly bad as it is disappointingly lifeless."

Epilogue

The last stop in the moviehouse is a sidestep into a funhouse. Not just any funhouse, but "The Funhouse," the 1981 horror film made by Tobe Hooper between directing assignments on the TV miniseries "Salem’s Lot" and Steven Spielberg’s production of "Poltergeist." Initially dismissed as a substandard genre offering from the groundbreaking filmmaker who virtually reinvented film horror with the original "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in 1974, "The Funhouse" has since achieved deserved cult status.

In a twist on an old haunted house premise, four youths decide to spend the night in the funhouse of a traveling carnival, only to run afoul of a shady carny and his monstrous offspring. Director Hooper chillingly evokes the creepy atmosphere of a seedy carnival and tops it off with the jaw-dropping depiction of one of the screen’s most horrific aberrations (courtesy of makeup artist Rick Baker).

The deformed son, ironically first seen wearing a Frankenstein’s monster mask, was portrayed by Wayne Doba, a professional dancer, pantomimist and comedian. Since 2007, Doba and his wife, Andrea Conway, have been starring in a comedy tap-dance stage revue called "The Dik and Mitzi Anniversary Show" (below), described as classic vaudeville entertainment and an "amazing collision of Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers meets George Burns & Gracie Allen."

Doba himself has been performing for three decades. Asked about his inspirations, he cited "a lot of Donald O’Connor in my dancing." O’Connor himself once hailed Doba as a "throwback to the old vaudeville days." Doba also mentioned Jerry Lewis and Don Knotts as inspirations for their physical comedy.

During the 1984 baseball season, Doba was employed as "Crazy Crab," the anti-mascot of the San Francisco Giants. Parodying the mascot craze of the time, Giants fans were encouraged to throw beer bottles and batteries at the crab. The costume had to be reinforced with a fiberglass shell for protection. Doba successfully sued the San Diego Padres organization for $2000 after two San Diego players tackled and injured him. (A bobblehead figure of Crazy Crab was given away in 2008 to celebrate the franchise’s 50th anniversary in the Bay Area.)

The Grand Guignol finale of "The Funhouse" is nothing less than a staggering tour de force for Doba, making one wish he would have made more movies. Doba’s performance reached out beyond the hideous, cleft-faced makeup, eliciting the sort of pity and pathos once associated with Lon Chaney Sr.