The Designing Women of Horror

There are many exclusive pictures from the event covered in this article in the Horror.com "Secret Life of Sets" image gallery.

When we watch a really good horror movie, afterward we usually talk about the story, the actors, the direction, and sometimes the cinematography or the music. But one of the things that really brings a good scary scene to life is the decoration of the set. To see the inside of a character's home, office, or butchery is to see that character at a glance and learn about what makes him tick by looking at his surroundings.

A set decorator is one of the key members of the design team for film, television and commercials. Once the sets are built and painted (or the location chosen) the set decorator's job is to flesh out the space by selecting furniture, drapery, lighting fixtures, art and other odds and ends to "dress the set".

Although at first blush it may sound as fun and easy as decorating your own apartment, a set decorator has many, many responsibilities. First of all, he or she must meet with the production designer, producer, director, and cinematographer regarding the design and decoration, and color of the project. Then they have to break down the script page by page, explore the sets and locations, and organize the objects to be acquired. A good set decorator will analyze characters and take the back story into account, in order to layer the environments and bring them to life onscreen. They will also research the period and style, oversee the dressing of the sets in preparation for shooting, and finally, "open" each new set with the director, making last-minute adjustments as needed.

Still sound like a fun job? Well, how about negotiating and managing the set dressing budget? Spending endless hours shopping for furniture, fabrics, decorative objects, industrial items, rugs, and lighting fixtures? Still looking for more work to do? As a set decorator, you are also responsible for the design and fabrication of objects not readily available to buy; organize alterations; painting; working with illustrators, set designers, scenic artists, sculptors, propmakers, metalsmiths and other specialty craftspersons. After that, you get to hire and supervise your crew, assigning daily tasks and reviewing their work.

Horror.com had the opportunity to learn about "The Secret Life of Sets" at a special display at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in Beverly Hills. Reporter Staci Layne Wilson explored some of the spooky spaces, and got to pick the brains of three of the designing women of horror.

Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban

Everyone agrees that not only is the third book in J.K. Rowling's magical series the darkest of all of the stories, the movie is darker still. Veteran Harry Potter set designer Stephenie McMillan concurs, "It is much darker and has more intrigue."

Professor Lupin's classroom is one of the sets recreated on a smaller scale and put on display at the Academy. "This is the classroom we saw on the second film," McMillan said. "It was Guildroy Lockhart's classroom then, and in that set we had lots of photographs of himself in sort of sporting modes and lots of paintings of himself, because he was very narcissistic and self-centered. This time, it's Professor Lupin's classroom and he's a very friendly towards the kids -- but he is a werewolf. So, the script required that we had some very important props for that particular room. A big wardrobe that people emerge from, a hugely threatening jack-in-the-box that was about 9-feet high, and a projector which projects images of werewolves. To a certain extent, the rest of the dressing of the room was incidental. We thought the skulls, although they serve no purpose, were just nice to go under these glass domes."

Famous artwork comes into play when the projector is used in the movie. "The projector was practical. Actual images were projected onto a big screen as we shot. There's one scene with Professor Snape giving the children a clue about Lupin's real identity and [the projector was used for that]."

Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, new to the series, "was very specific about the images he wanted," McMillan said. In Professor Lupin's classroom, there are several works of art -- with a twist. For example, there's a George Stubbs' The Lion & The Horse slightly modified to reflect a werewolf attacking a horse instead of a lion. "There's a werewolfian Michelangelo, too. We had to clear that and about 20 others with copyright. Alfonso was a tremendous inspiration, he gave us lots of ideas. [This movie] will look quite a bit different. Much darker. It's a much darker story, and quite complicated. This one is quite psychological."

McMillan has, of course, joined the millions across the world who've read the Harry Potter books. "You have to read the book a movie is based on, I think. I haven't read the fifth Harry Potter book yet, but I am currently working on the fourth film. There is such a body of knowledge you gain from reading the books, and then there are things that come back in, in the next book or movie. You have to sort of keep up with it all."

It's rare for a set designer to get to work on a rapid-succession series of films. It's great job security, but "At the end of every film we think, 'Well, we must do something else,' but then you're sort of sucked into the next one. I've never worked on a series of four films before and it's quite special," said McMillan. "Who knows what will happen with the subsequent ones, but it's a challenge to keep finding new things. In the latest film we've got a huge campsite with 400 tents, and we're going to drape the whole of the Great Hall in fabrics for the Yule Ball. There's always something new -- yet, there's always something you don't see. Like, you don't see the whole of The Dursley family. I believe they are in the book a little, but you won't see them [and hence, the set of their home] in the next movie."

When there is a series of films like Harry Potter, all of which take place in basically the same locations, it's up to the set decorator to store all the props. "We keep everything in our studio, which is about 30 miles to the north of London. It used to be an old Rolls Royce engine factory, so there's lots of space. We have five huge prop rooms of stored props in 20 containers. They're all extremely well-catalogued so we can easily reuse things, and we do reuse things a lot. Obviously, we have the basic school equipment, like the desks -- those had to be made bigger for this film, though. The children have all grown. We put extension pieces in them for that."

Although she has been immersed in witches, wizards, werewolves, ghosts and dementors for years now, McMillan admits, "I'm not a great fan of horror films, personally. But my partner has written an encyclopedia about them [so he's a real help]. When we did the first film, we researched the occult symbols using his horror movie book. One of the scariest things I designed for the Harry Potter movies wasn't actually seen in the finished product. It was for The Chamber of Secrets, in a shop in Diagon Alley, one of spooky shops. It was sort of an iron maiden that Harry was supposed to hide in, with the spikes coming closer and closer, but in the end it wasn't seen. So now I've got an iron maiden looking for a home!"

Van Helsing

Horror.com and Van Helsing have been fast friends ever since our set visit in early 2003. There, we had the chance to meet and interview Allen Cameron, the set designer. The set designer is more like the architect of the buildings that house the interior sets. "I think there's 72 sets on this movie," he said. "Just the quantity and the scale of it is a difficulty. If you've ever had anything done at home by builders or architects, it's actually getting things done on timethat  is difficult, and when you've got 72 rooms to build and very specific schedules and dates to adhere to, that's the hard thing from my point of view. And then it becomes a quality control issue, because you can obviously get the sets built, then to get the finishes and refine each one of them is a difficult thing."

Filling them is difficult, too. That's where Academy Award-nominated set designer Cindy Carr comes in. "Allen was on board for several months before I started. He's already got a pretty good envisioning of the movie before I come on. I read the script first, we come together, and I'm the one who's actually bringing all the physical elements. I sort of bring his vision to life, so to speak. The construction department is, of course, a whole other thing. I loved collaborating with Allan. He was very open, respectful, fun. He's got so much experience, and a great relationship with Stephen Sommers. That's extremely important. It was their fourth movie together, and their interaction made my job go smoothly. This was the first time I'd worked with either Allan or Stephen."

While the movie was shot half in Prague, and half in California, Carr "didn't get to go to Prague. I would have loved to have worked in Prague. I'm sure it would have been incredibly interesting." When the set decorator doesn't travel with her sets, she sends along several detailed diagrams, including pictures and drawings, to show exactly where everything needs to go. "Still, working in the huge hangars where Howard Hughes built the Spruce Goose many years ago, was fun, too" she said. "They're the largest still-standing wooden buildings in the world. Universal turned them into these fabulous sound stages for a few months. I remember walking through the Frankenstein's foyer set, with Hugh Jackman, and his mother. She was a sweet, and very down to earth Australian lady and he is a doll. Very beautiful and down to earth. That really stands out in my memory."

When we talked to her, Carr had recently seen the completed Van Helsing film for the first time. "It was very exciting to see the movie on the big screen. But it was very fast and loud and boom, boom, boom. But I loved the way it looked. I was really proud of everything. My favorite set was Dr. Frankenstein's Laboratory. The desk that was in there was rented from Universal's Prop House, but it is definitely an antique. I'm sure it's been in a lot of movies. The books on the desk are the real thing; they're about 100 to 150 years old. The lamps are quite old, too. The rest we had made specifically for Van Helsing. We made the huge dining table, pulled all the chairs in there, and we oversaw the making and hanging of all those pods. That was all set dressing. What we call stanchions -- those huge things that were made out of railroad ties, big lighting fixtures that went on the walls -- pretty much everything that went in there was set dressing, except for the spider webs."

Carr agrees that the audience gets a major amount of information from just a glance. A set decorator really does have to tell a story with pictures. "My favorite part of my job is bringing the script to life. How little information you get when you first read a script, and then making it a whole, big visual extravaganza after that."

Carr is a fan of horror, especially (appropriately enough) movies with vampires. "My favorite horror sets are Werner Herzog's Nosferatu -- I loved the look of that. And I loved Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula -- I thought that was exquisite."

The Haunted Mansion

How would you go about recreating the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland that just about everyone knows and loves from their childhood? It was certainly no easy task for set designer Rosemary Brandenburg and her talented crew.

"The most challenging thing was making it much more elaborate," she said. "The house that's in the ride is wonderful, and fabulous, and classic, and everybody's in love with it. The truth is, we wanted something even more elaborate. We went back into research, big time into Victoriana, and looked into Renaissance revival style and just went crazy making sure every detail and layering of Victorian times was there. We had enormous draperies that had miles of fringe, and miles of detail and just tried to make it look like 'haunted elegance'. That was the watchword that the director, Rob Minkoff, gave us. He didn't want it to be too simple, and he really didn't want it to be just the classic mansion; he wanted it to be haunted elegance. So we brought things up a notch -- or two, or three, or four, or five, or six!"

Rather than going with a drab, dank haunted mansion look, "The colors that we used were really rich. I worked with the production designer, John Myer, who had great concepts in the beginning and then I brought in all the fabric and we talked about how the colors were going to interact with his sets, the architecture, whether it was the carved wood, or the stone, or the painted panels. We just worked together to make it really beautiful."

We couldn't help but wonder what was up with all the dead, stuffed animals decorating the set -- does the Humane Society know about Brandenburg? "Well, these are all antique, old animals," she explained. "No animals were harmed in the making of The Haunted Mansion, by any means. We have a wonderful supplier here in Hollywood called Bischoff's Taxidermy and Studio Prop Rental. They have all the animals from the old days. You can no longer kill and stuff owls, for instance. These are all oldies, but they have new life working with us. I like this one [see photo]. We call him the bald capybara. We think he's a capybara, but he's lost his hair. He looks old, and the whole point was that the library has been there for eons and eons, and only ghosts have been living there. The idea is that these stuffed animals and things have a lot of age and wear, and that's how we tried to pick out the items."

There are so many different items, "One of the things that was a real challenge was the scale of the mansion. It was enormous, so the fact that we had to have, in scale, enormous lighting fixtures, and numbers and quantities of them. That all had to be designed and specially made. Not just getting it made, on time and within the budget. That was complicated. And the draperies were another big challenge, because we had lots and lots of craftsmen working on those and finding fabrics, finding trim, and getting it all in time. The deadlines that we work on are kind of scary sometimes. That's the horror -- the deadlines!"

Still, it not all challenges and deadlines. "I love my job," Brandenburg said, "and something like The Haunted Mansion really only comes along once in a lifetime. Because you have layers and layers of stuff to do and it's all about making a fabulous collage. The Victorian times, when you do the research, you see how much they loved 'stuff'. They loved layers, they loved one thing on top of another thing, and they didn't really want simplicity. So everything's complicated and wonderful. When you step back and look at it and it all blends together and balances, that's the reward."

Brandenburg is a fan of spooky sets. "The original Psycho is my favorite horror set," she said. "I actually got a chance to do the remake of Psycho and examining the original was really fun. So you see, I've been around the block with taxidermy a few times!"

The next time you watch a horror movie, look at the letter opener on the desk -- while it may be there to slit someone's throat instead of an envelope, remember: a set designer put it there.

Coverage by Staci Layne Wilson for Horror.com.