What’s splatstick? A gore master explains
Roger Murray, on the phone from the New Zealand set of Starz’s “Ash vs. Evil Dead,” has one simple way to describe his job as the show’s prosthetics designer and props supervisor: “I have to think about blood a lot.”
He is, after all, the gore master in charge of the tanker’s worth of fake blood — as much as 40 gallons for a big scene — required to bring Sam Raimi’s splatstick revival of “Evil Dead” to life.
“Generally when (my team) arrives on set, the (crew) all go, ‘Oh, no!’ and start gathering up all the brushes and pans and mops,” Murray says. “We do a lot of blood rigs, we do a lot of full-body dummies, body parts, decapitation, dismembering, chain saw action. … Most of my day I’m thinking about how we’re going to make it even more bloody than the last time. Everybody likes more blood.”
“Ash vs. Evil Dead,” a TV series extension of the horror franchise classic, is set 34 years after the first “Evil Dead” film and stars the same antihero, Ash, played as always by Bruce Campbell. The series, which premieres Oct. 31, ushers in a new era of splatter horror combined with absurdist humor — splatstick — as Ash and his newfound demon-slaying posse slaughter packs of invading Deadites.
Not to be confused with “The Walking Dead” walkers or George Romero’s shambling zombies, a Deadite is an entirely different class of monster.
“Typically, a zombie is a mindless reanimated corpse,” Murray explains. “They’ve been reanimated by magic or something like a virus. And their skin is rotting. They’re starting to break down like a regular corpse.” But a Deadite is a possessed person who becomes endowed with the superpowers of evil and all that that entails (strength, speed, a blood lust for the Ash character.)
While it can be confusing for the horror rube, there are easily identifiable markings that will help spot a Deadite in the wild.
“What ends up changing is their features,” Murray says. “Generally, the idea behind a Deadite is that their head becomes sort of expanded with evil. So they usually have a raised forehead, a raised cheekbone, sunken eyes. Generally, their teeth come out of alignment. And their eyes go white.”
In a sense, the creatures are so full of horror that their skin is bursting at the seams.
It’s Murray’s job to supply the extremities, bits and buckets of fake blood every time Ash takes out his weapon of choice: the chain saw. That means lots and lots of blood.
“We distinguish different types of characters with different types of blood.” He says. “We’ve got a whole mix of different types.” Not blood types specifically, but various vats of fake prop blood.
Murray’s work isn’t limited to just the grotesque and possessed. There’s a whole host of horrors he’s cooking up for the waiting audience. “We’ve been making some creatures,” he warns. “We’ve been making some puppets.”
And just like that, the odds of scaring the world just got turned in Murray’s favor. Because you can spend all day spraying each cast member with blood and constructing the scariest Deadite to ever contortrun at the screen, but there is nothing, nothing scarier than a puppet.