MSZ: What made it unforgettable?
GDT: I love urban exploration. I used to do it a lot as a kid in Guadalajara. And there’s a thing that you find in sewers, a white mucus that is really, really thick, and it hangs in stalactites in sewers, and it is literally like huge cultures, bacteria cultures, like a living mucus.
So in Prague, when we went, it was the biggest amount of mucus I’ve ever seen. Mike Mignola and I entered, and it smelled like old yogurt, and it was like they had shot a porn film with Godzilla. It was incredible, complex. There were, like, traceries and alcoves of mucus. And just going through the sewers and seeing the domes, the big areas, the small areas, the narrow areas, it was fantastic. I asked a sewer worker in Prague, I said, “Do a lot of people scout?” And he said, “No, nobody comes in here that doesn’t have to.” There was an area where they opened it up and he said, “We’ll wait for you outside.”
Concept of Priest’s transformation into a Reaper by Mike Mignola.
Del Toro’s concept for the Reapers, based in Eastern European vampire folklore, was carefully protected as the film moved toward production.
• GDT: This drawing [opposite] was made because we didn’t want to give any drawings to anybody, so when we were budgeting, I would show this drawing, or I would do a new drawing on a piece of paper for each of the makeup guys that were budgeting. Finally, the guy that did it was Steve Johnson. He’s one of the best. I think he did phenomenal work. Obviously my drawing is very similar to the final one, but very different. I think the final one is so much better.
MSZ: Why didn’t you want to give the drawings to people?
GDT: Because we thought that it was a really unique idea. It’s very hard to think of a unique vampire, and I felt that I had arrived at a really good idea with the Reapers. I didn’t want it to end up showing up six months later in Buffy. Like, “Oh.”
Makeup artist Steve Johnson created the final design, which revealed a nest of predatory organs accessible via a split in a Reaper’s jaw, here visible on Nomak (Luke Goss).
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE27 B
–Long lenses for the Sergio Leone–type moment in 27 and for bs c.up.
–Use wide-angle lenses (14 mm) for the deepest sets, hut with caution.
–Gabi suggests that the nights he amber and the days steel blue (confused?) and white. If we go ahead with this, how do we handle the flashback
–Reaper Design idea: avoid the lower teeth in the framing and the actor’s speech. Could we make the same micro tentacles that are on the tip of their tongues swell up or extend outward as if they were additional little tongues?
–Each time they shoot a pistol at point-blank range, we’ll use the flashes we create for the actors to wear inside their “vests.”
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 92
* Now that we have every reason to think otherwise, we hear a telephone conversation (only one side) and EVERYTHING has a double meaning (someone’s listening).
* Somebody always THINKS badly about the NATIVES of a certain country and about those of his own country.
* Tumor or parasitic heart that works opposite a normal heart. It has a modular or “NODULAR” structure
* With a dirty plan, “foul play” in mind, they tell the “don”: “It must be an error no doubt” and then after mulling it over for a long time, “… no doubt”
* Children playing in the waves, seen from behind.
* Somebody who knew ARTEAGA and made fun of him “REVEALS” to us his past.
* Object buried in his chest, when it’s pulled, it pulls his chest.
* Ernie is “given” (he inherits) the “key” with which everything in the M/M runs
* Ernie: Kiss and faint.
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 90
* If you love “meee,” make ‘er bleed.”
* The A/B/C from the Quiroga plan.
* The needle’s thread —>CHRIST.
* Everybody talks about the Devil’s evil, God’s evil.
* He is: a man of God † / Goat’s leg and I’m the virgin devil, pure evil.
* She is the devil/of the devil.
* CITY IN FIRE 1912.
* SAMURAI (police story)
* “How to MASTER U’R V. GOMES” Finger exercises
* PROOF: Move earlier
* I… you… I love your… the way you dress the way… your hubcaps…
* Somebody who’s deeply in love tells his loved one: (who is interested only in “X”) I trust you and I want us to be together but I don’t “X” you (or something like that). (She—or he—says “Yes”). or “aha” very simply, casually.
(A) When he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, a small thorn emerges from its tip and secretes a liquid.
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 91
(1) Extended arm
(2) Fist turns, arm shrinks.
Wrist changes position.
Natural “hinge” instead of a common human elbow.
(3) Pupil activates reptilian membrane in his eye
When the pupil dilates, a second eyelid slides up over the eye.
* Somebody tells him something tragic about his worst enemy and when he is alone: “THAT’S NICE”
• GDT: Now these pages [above, left, and opposite] are full of notes on vampirism that make it all the way to Blade II and The Strain. The stinger, the nictating membrane. It’s funny. These were done in ’93, years and years and years before. I write, “When he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, a small thorn emerges from its tip and secretes a liquid.” When I was a kid, I had a fascination with the origins of vampirism, and in eastern Europe, the vampire, the strigoi, have a stinger under the tongue.
MSZ: So you were actually designing your vampires back in 1993 in these drawings?
GDT: Yeah, yeah. These were ideas I couldn’t put in Cronos. I was making an inventory of vampiric stuff. Then this idea of the tumor, like a parasitic heart growing in the human heart, came to me at some point. My thought was, “Okay, how does it actually happen?” A vampire bites you, the virus spreads, parasitic organs grow next to your heart. They suffocate the heart. The patient dies, and then the vampiric heart starts beating and the vampire wakes up. That idea gave birth to The Strain.