One of the primary reasons for the great success of 2006’s The Hills Have Eyes was the mind-blowing contribution of Academy Award® winning (Chronicles of Narnia) K.N.B. EFX Group, Inc. Consequently, there was never any question as to whether K.N.B. would design the special effects make-up for THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2. Co- Producer Cody Zwieg attests, “K.N.B. is the best… They do an incredible job of putting it all together, and giving the characters their personalities [through make-up].”

K.N.B. and Wes Craven have enjoyed a long and unique partnership together creating iconic movie monsters that are not soon forgotten. “We’ve worked with Wes and Marianne (Maddalena) for a dozen years,” explains Gregory Nicotero. “Our first project for them was The People Under The Stairs…we’ve done all of Wes’ films since then. Wes has a good eye for the characters since he has lived with them for so long. Wes knows exactly what he wants so he can look at designs and go ‘love that, don’t like that’ and that’s it. We’ve worked with him for so long we’ve established a really great rapport. We’ve spent so much time together, I feel like I really know Wes. I know he trusts me and that means a lot to me coming from one of the premiere horror directors in Hollywood.”

K.N.B., director Martin Weisz, and the production team spent weeks creating the horrifying look of the mutant clan. Weisz remembers, “We met with K.N.B. and they made some sketches of what they had in mind when they read the script. We had meetings with [producers] Marianne [Maddalena] and Peter [Locke] to see those first drawings and decided to push it harder. We also took a new direction with “Chameleon”, to make him even more of a half-person, half-rock in a gorey way. We struggled a little bit with the “Hades” character because we’d started with “Chameleon”, “Stabber”, “Hansel”; “Hades” was the last one and he’s supposed to be the biggest one, and since the others were quite amazing already, we had to top that. I think they did an amazing job.”

For the actual design of the mutants, K.N.B. first turned to 3-D Photoshop design equipment—tools that allow traditional sculptors to sculpt and paint their characters on a computer—In order to forge models of each mutant clan member. From these digital models, molds were made of each horrific face. Finally, the makeup team took casts of all the actor’s bodies and heads so as to custom fit the resulting prosthetics and makeup.

For the shoot, K.N.B. entrusted the actual implementation of special effects make-up to artists Mark Killingsworth, Clare Mulroy and Ben Rittenhouse. In addition, K.N.B. selected Academy Award winning (Chronicles of Narnia) Tami Lane as key prosthetic make-up artist. “When K.N.B. approached me to do this job, I was really excited because I liked the first movie, I thought it evoked what violence should be,” explains Lane. “You wanted to look away but you couldn’t help but not look away. With the success of the first one I was very intrigued about doing the second one.”

Craven had very clear ideas of how he wanted to evolve the appearance of the mutants from HILLS 1 to HILLS 2. “I figured that this was the next generation. So they aren’t [irradiated] in the same way, but they are genetically modified…and they still have this enormous chip on their shoulders about what the government did….they have adapted to the necessity of living underneath the sort of mega culture that is on the outside.”

K.N.B.’s Gregory Nicotero talks about the difference between the mutants in the first film, and those in THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2: “We were really pleased with how the make-up turned out in the first one, so for this movie we had some big shoes to fill…In The Hills Have Eyes, the [mutants] were kind of clean. We wanted to go with a different look for HILLS 2 – especially because of the nature of the mutants: they are underground dwellers, they live in caves, so they are always dirty. So for this film, [we had to make them] a lot dirtier, a lot bloodier…There is more wear and tear.”

Tami Lane expands on the mutants revolting appearance “…they don’t really see the light of day too much. And so they deform and warp, with no sunlight, things can’t grow or things get distorted. There’s only a few of them so there’s this incestual element… so that helps with the mutations.”

K.N.B. performed extensive medical research in their design for the mutant “Chameleon”. “We had done a lot of research on a film we’d just done called Grindhouse and we had all this medical reference in terms of different skin lesions and tumors to make them look ulcerated,” explains Nicotero. “So when we did “Chameleon” we used a lot of that research to recognize if some of those ulcerations could look calcified—so he actually looks like a rock.”

Tami Lane explains how this look is incorporated into the film. “We wanted to have someone more evolved, someone like “Chameleon” having this freakish rock like skin who can meld into the background, so you don’t know he’s there. All the sudden, you see something move but you aren’t quite sure. It adds to the eeriness of the characters.”

next
VISUAL EFFECTS
Working alongside K.N.B. was innovative visual effects supervisor Jamison Goei (The Hills Have Eyes, Hellraiser: Hellseeker, Hansel and Gretl, Halloween: Resurrection) and his team of high-tech artists seamlessly crafted visual effects shots for the film.