Bloody-Disgusting spent an evening on the chilly set of THE CRAZIES April 7th in Fort Valley, GA at Peach County High School. During the windy, brisk night we had the chance to view a crucial scene involving a military attempt to contain the virus by dividing the infected from the healthy into large, fenced internment camps. The shoot is one of the biggest scenes in the movie and you can read more about it in our CRAZIES set report.

During the visit we spoke to makeup effects creator Rob Hall, the enthusiastic makeup maestro behind the impressive, grizzly work of QUARANTINE. Hall showed us a few shots of the veiny, diseased looking Crazies and even invited us to touch the sticky tongue on dead body of a grotesque fat man in overalls he and his team had created.

BD: What drew you to this movie?

Rob Hall: What I appreciated about the script of this film is that it extrapolates a lot on the themes that Romero had and makes it current, and not in a stupid, dumbed down sort of PG-13 way. It actually takes it and amps up the violence, amps up the infection and amps up the horror of it, which I think is kind of cool and needed. So I appreciate the tone of it. Its a lot darker than the original movie.

BD: Were you worried you’d be asked to replicate something like the work you did in QUARANTINE?

RH: The QUARANTINE connection was definitely a concern. I think it sort of helped me in my meetings with Breck originally and then it maybe worried him a bit because he wanted to make sure we were doing something completely different. Breck spearheaded [this]. He definitely came to the table with a year’s worth of research. He wanted to take a lot of these real viruses. Tetanus and Rabies, etc. There’s a lot of skin lesions and a lot of kind of weird stuff. He brought a lot of that stuff and said, ‘Can you do an amalgam and we’ll see what it looks like?’ There was not really a concern after I showed him, ‘Look, this is where we went with QUARANTINE and this is where we can take this.’

To be honest, I feel like the Rabies element of the Trixie Virus is downplayed in this a lot because QUARANTINE was pretty much, that’s what it was, a deadly strain of Rabies. There’s been a conscious effort here to really stay away from that movie and stay clear of zombies. Our guys aren’t dead. They’re full of this virus. It’s almost like they’re the opposite of dead, almost like there’s too much life in them so they’re bursting at the seams. Their faces are read and there’s blood blisters and there’s veins and they’re very vascular. It’s kind of the opposite of being dead. So that’s what we were striving to do.

BD: Was it always called the Trixie Virus even in the script?

RH: Yeah, its mentioned I think once in the movie here, in this version. Its mentioned a lot in the other one. They definitely took out [the Romero military angle], which I think was sort of wise.

BD: So you combined these three viruses into a virus that doesn’t exist. So how do you map that progression?

RH: Well, there’s a certain amount of medical accuracy that you have to have and then there’s a certain amount of cinematic expectation, so I think its sort of hovering between all that stuff. We did really try to take it and extrapolate on the real diseases and say, ‘If this disease has a little bit of this when it gets evolved, then we can introduce a little bit of this and a little bit of that.’ We pretty much kept it really consistent in terms of what the actual diseases that we mentioned before do. We combine it all and play with it a little bit.

BD: What’s the movement of the crazies like?

RH: It's definitely not slow and sluggish and it's not like the rage guys in 28 DAYS LATER. It's somewhere kind of in-between. Sometimes they are a full threat and they come after you with guns, but what’s cool about them is they retain a lot of the knowledge that the host had before. We had these characters who are these really redneck burly hunters. So when the shit hits the fan and they get infected, they’re still hunting. They retain whatever they did in their uninfected life and carry that through, which I think is one of the differences in this film.

BD: What kills got you most excited in the script?

RH: There was a lot of really cool set pieces in the script that I was more excited about than the kills. There’s a giant fat guy that doesn’t really have much to do with the plot, but he’s this disgusting fat dude that gets killed by one of the crazies. It was a great set piece that I was really excited to build. There’s some good sick kills in it though.

BD: Is there a different level of prep since this being shot on film versus digital?

RH: Not really. I mean, there’s some inherent differences between film and television that you always have to take into consideration. Film absorbs a lot more of the red, so if you put a lot of red onto someone’s face or onto a fake body, it gets absorb a lot more in film, where as HD kicks it back a lot so you can tone that down a little bit. There’s also certain things that will strobe and moire and certain patterns and things like that will buzz. Most of the times when you’re shooting an HD feature, you’re using the same kinds of lights that you would use on a film feature. Generally HD will pick up a lot more detail so you have to be a little bit careful.

BD: Was there anything in this you were excited to do that you’d never done before?

RH: There’s a really cool corpse that they pull out of the water. He’s a military guy and I think he’s sort of the beginning of how the virus got into the water. That was kind of fun because we had never made anything like super textbook bloater, tongue all hanging out and stuff.

BD: What’s the art of doing a dead body and making it look real?

RH: A lot of the final dressings and that kind of stuff, you’re totally beholden to the filmmakers. Its always important to capture the likeness of the person. If you don’t know who it is immediately, then you’ve got to fix it. That’s one of the hardest things. The Gary Cole body in PINEAPPLE EXPRESS was one of the hardest things because he’s got such a distinctive face, but its difficult when someone’s doing an expression. There’s a lot of finessing.

BD: Artistically, how much different work do you have to do with the make up in terms of different kinds of blood?

RH: We don’t put a whole lot into that, trying to chance the viscosity of the blood. Their veins are coursing with blood and there’s definitely a lot of that spraying around at times.

BD: How vicious is the film in that respect?

RH: Its not MARTYRS, but its not PROM NIGHT. I think its going to be a hard R creepy movie. Breck’s pretty clever about the way he wants to shoot that stuff and I don’t think he’s doing anything thats really gratuitous but he’s also not copping out.

THE CRAZIES hits theaters February 26, 2010 from Overture Films.

Full Crazies Report:

Click here for our set report
Click here for our interview with FX artist Rob Hall
Click here for our interview with star Radha Mitchell
Click here for our interview with director Breck Eisner