I’ve Created a Monster

I GREW UP WATCHING MONSTER MOVIES AND HORROR MOVIES on TV and at the cinema. When I was a little kid, there was a show called Creature Features that ran usually on Friday nights or sometimes early Saturday mornings. And I would just watch all the old Universal monster movies and the Hammer films from England. There was also a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland that came out monthly, and it was all about monster movies. That was the very first thing that got me excited [about makeup and special effects].

When I was a teenager in the ’80s, there was a huge wave of really cool sci-fi horror stuff. You had (1981), and (1981), and John Carpenter’s (1982), and (1982), and (1983), and (1982). One after another, it felt like all these amazing movies were coming out, and by that point I was really super absorbed by it all. In my mid-teens I was so inspired by that kind of stuff. I would see every horror/fantasy/sci-fi thing that came out in the theaters.