More from Matt Alt:
Under the mask, nobody can hear you scream. It's true -- that's the
first thing they told us when they handed out our gear. The masks
muffle 90% of the sound coming out of your mouth. I had the chance to
put this little truism to the test during our second day on the set of
Takashi Miike's "Yokai Daisenso" -- which, unfortunately, coincided
with the final day of filming. It would prove to be a grueling,
14-hour-long Bataan Death March of a shooting schedule.
Unlike day one, a fairly laid-back affair involving just one hundred
extras, the final day opened the gates to droves of college students
and horror-film fans. Fortunately, by this time, over a week into the
filming of scenes involving us unpaid extras, Miike's production
assistants and make-up team had honed their preparations into a
production line capable of turning some six hundred men, women, and
children into undead yokai within three hours. All the while, the
original 1968 "Yokai Daisenso" film blared on television sets to put us
into the mood.
This time around, the obsessive core cadre of extras who had worked for
a solid week straight had put "dibs" on all of the complex
three-dimensional masks for themselves, leaving the rest of us with far
less elaborate facial gear. And so we became the dynamic duo of
Hyottoko and Hiroko. In the shots, I'm the demented Japanese farmer on
the left. She's the undead peasant with a pallor startlingly
reminiscent of a Japanese sweet potato. Some of the stand-out costumes
this time around included an enormous dragon-head and a guy with what
appeared to be a rabid flying squirrel perched on a shoulder.
Halfway through the shoot, after the fifth or sixth take in an
hours-long session that consisted of nothing but us advancing ten feet
only to be shouted back to our cramped starting positions by Miike and
his trademark tiger-striped megaphone, I was ready to kill him and his
assistant directors slowly. But things rapidly picked up once Hiroko
and I pushed to the front of the mass of undead humanity. We got to see
a little wire-work as a stuntman -- stunt KID! -- in a yokai suit did a
backflip off a platform and "crowd surfed" atop his yokai buddies at a
festival. And the final shot, which came at the tail end of the ten
hours we'd spent on the set, was Miike's attempt to get six hundred
people dressed in monster costumes and horrific makeup to do the
"wave."
Once the shot was over -- it took two camera-moves and five
leg-cramping takes -- we shucked the heavier parts of our costumes and
waited in the studio for our turn to hit backstage and de-greasepaint.
Director Miike, ovbiously exhausted himself, inexplicably slipped on a
perfectly fitting mask of Zebraman, the title character of his last
film, perhaps in solidarity with his extras. Sitting in his director's
chair, wearing his mask, he quietly surveyed his surroundings and
signed paperwork -- a perfect and surreal end to the day.
Link to new pics from the set...
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