The new horror movie, Todd Tucker’s The Terror of Hallow’s Eve, is the culmination of nearly 25 years of Tucker’s endeavors in special makeup effects, prosthetics, puppets, and all things filmmaking.
For Tucker and his Illusion Industries crew, the biggest challenge in pre-production of The Terror of Hallow’s Eve was ensuring that they came up with original designs: unique and new, but with the feeling of a 1980s-era character. One of the centerpiece creatures in the screenplay is The Trickster—played by the inimitable Doug Jones. “It was important that the Trickster was original but felt like that 1980s villainous character,” Tucker conveyed. “No one else could have played it like Doug did.”
To bring The Trickster to life in the finished film, Tucker’s team pulled background plates from pre-existing shots, shot Jones against a green screen, and used digital post-production tools to make the character four-feet-tall. “His performance makes the movie work in a lot of ways,” Tucker stated. “We wanted The Trickster to seem sympathetic enough for the main kid to make a deal with him—he had to make the kid trust him.”
In The Terror of Hallow’s Eve, there are over a dozen practically-photographed creatures in the film. “A good portion of them are puppets,” Tucker divulged. “I sat down with Martin Astles, my key artist at Illusion Industries—he has a great design sense and came up with some interesting characters. I wanted to make sure that they felt nostalgic and used the current technology to get us there.”
In point, computer graphics were implemented for rig removal and one fully-computer-generated spider effect. “We had a crew of about nine artists that built everything practical,” said Tucker of his design team. “One of the puppets is a 10-foot-tall fully animatronic creature called The Terror. Kevin Carlson headed up the puppeteering team for me and is one of the top puppeteers around.”
Additionally, Tucker was able to acquire genre legend John Carpenter’s original music for his film. “It is a nice additional thing for the fans – Halloween was the pinnacle of horror for me,” Tucker assessed. “Never in a million years did I expect that John would let me use his music in our film. I licensed the songs from two CDs called The Lost Themes of John Carpenter.”
After editing was completed in February of 2017, Tucker has been screening his movie for carefully selected audiences. “Our goal is to sell it to a studio,” he revealed. “It’s in that zone of Stranger Things and It with more monsters. I would love for this to come out theatrically. It played in two theaters at FrightFest; one of them was IMAX. I couldn’t wait to see it with fans for the first time. This was definitely one of the greatest things I’ve ever done, but one of the hardest.”