The result of the head cast, the severed head, is sitting on the cabinet behind Pete as I make him up for a day’s shooting on Gravewalker. The look of the zombies is very much inspired by the Hammer horror Plague of Zombies.
perhaps two years, it was, without doubt, the maddest project of them all! Pete’s homage to Hammer, filmed with an anamorphic lens gaffer-taped onto camera and then shown with the lens gaffer-taped onto the projector, but throwing this amazing great image that filled the entire wall of the Jackson living-room.’
Peter’s ambition was still that of an aspiring special-effects man as opposed to a director, and he was already devising ideas for using forced-perspective in a way not unlike that in which it would later be used in The Lord of the Rings. Ken remembers Peter plotting a scene that would feature adults in the foreground and school children (as adults) in the background in order to create an illusion of distance. Make-up experiments were, on an amateur scale, as ambitious as some of those that would be eventually created for the occupants of Isengard and Mordor – with as much discomfort for those involved! Pete O’Herne recalls: ‘Do you know how I’d spend my Saturdays and Sundays back then? I’d go round to Peter’s house and he’d say, “OK, mate, I’m going to put Plaster of Paris over your head today, and you’re going to have to breathe through drinking straws up your nostrils until it sets!” God knows how many nights I’d be coming home tearing bloody tissue-paper off my face; or, worst of all, trying to get latex rubber out of my eyebrows!’
Peter shot ‘day-for-night’ using a blue filter on the camera lens to give the impression that the film had been shot by the light of the moon when vampires might be expected to prowl. He also experimented with dry ice in order to create the obligatory misty atmosphere typically found in woods frequented by zombies. ‘We went down into the forest,’ recalls Pete O’Herne, ‘dug a pit and filled it up with dry ice so that I could lie in it and rise up out of the grave in a spooky way. The problem is that dry ice is comprised of CO2, and if you’re going to be stupid enough to lie in a lot of it, you have to be very careful not to inhale! My only consolation was that Peter had already discovered the dangers through experimenting with dry ice in the bathtub at home!’
The making of Gravewalker was clearly an ad-hoc process and Peter was undoubtedly the engine driving the project; nevertheless, his approach was also – as it would often be on Rings – collaborative.
LEFT: Occasionally the holes were faked, as this interesting pair of shots reveal. I’m firing my zombie-killing crossbow into the bottom of a grave, and this was the way we faked it in our garage, which also doubled as a sound-stage on a number of occasions.
Ken Hammon recalls: ‘Peter was a spontaneous film-maker: open to other people’s ideas and not in the least protective of his own ideas – which probably sometimes accounts for the jagged rhythms of his first experiments.’ Despite all the work that went into the film, the results were, for Peter, disappointing…
Towards the end, I was getting kind of dispirited, because I was pouring a huge amount of effort into the project – making stuff for it, shooting it at the weekends – but, however much work I did, it never seemed to look quite how I saw it in my mind’s eye…
Pete O’Herne understands Peter’s frustration: ‘The problem was that the limited equipment available to us for effects meant that whatever we achieved fell short of what was going in Peter’s head. With The Curse of the Gravewalker he probably would have liked to have seen all those things he loved in the movies – the horse-drawn carriage galloping along in the dark, down an old road in a dense forest – and of course he had to make do with us guys, doubling up and playing all the parts and not being particularly good at it either. We couldn’t even manage decent fight sequences because there weren’t enough of us. With someone always having to operate the camera, just about every encounter was inevitably limited to one-on-one. So, I think Peter began to get bored by just how frustrating it was.’
Eventually, Peter reached the conclusion that, in their current form, his film experiments were going nowhere.
I realised that nobody was ever going to see the vampire film since Super 8 was a format that had no ability to be copied and no means of ever being professionally screened anywhere…What, I asked myself, am I ultimately doing all this for? I knew it was time to move on – to put the 8mm camera away and start filming on 16mm. I was going to have to figure out how to make films in a more professional format.
My twenty-first birthday cake, decorated by my mum.
In 1982, around the time that Peter’s ambitions were focusing on pursuing a more professional approach to film-making, he and Ken Hammon took a three-week trip to Los Angeles, his first close-up experience of the movie-Mecca – Hollywood.
The lads packed a lot into their time in ‘tinsel town’: going to horror and sci-fi conventions (at one of which they met Dave Prowse, the man under the Darth Vader mask in Star Wars) and attending a talk by Frank Marshall, an associate of Stephen Spielberg who had recently served as a producer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Poltergeist and whose next few films would include The Goonies (the cast of which included the young Sean Astin), two more Indiana Jones titles and three Back to the Future movies.
Peter and Ken watched a taping of the then-popular TV comedy, The Dukes of Hazard. Although an interesting experience, it was a series that neither of them followed or particularly liked and Ken remembers their disappointment that the recording had not been of the contemporary show, Fantasy Island. Set on a mysterious island resort where any fantasy requested could be fulfilled, the show starred Ricardo Montalban as Mr Roarke, the island’s urbane, whitesuited host, and Hervé Villechaize as Roarke’s diminutive assistant, Tattoo.
‘We visited the set of Fantasy Island,’ says Ken, ‘but we were really frustrated that we weren’t able to see the show being recorded because it was unique in that it not only featured a former Star Trek villain – Montalban was Khan Noonian Singh in The Wrath of Khan – but also an ex-James Bond villain, since Villechaize had been Nick Nack, Christopher Lee’s side-kick in The Man with the Golden Gun. You have to remember that we were real movie-buffs!’
Neither Ken nor I had our driver’s licence – that’s a kind of necessity to be a real geek – and we somehow thought that everything in LA was
After my twenty-first birthday, Ken and I travelled to LA to attend a sci-fi convention. Getting an autograph from Dave ‘Darth Vader’ Prowse was a thrill, especially since he was also in some of my beloved Hammer horror movies.
within walking distance! We discovered that was not quite the case. We had absolutely no money to hire taxis or drivers.
They visited all the Hollywood tourists sites and several less well-known ones: ‘We took long foot tours,’ recalls Ken. ‘We walked miles and Peter never got lost, though he’d never tell me where we were going until we got there! One route march ended outside St Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank with Peter announcing, “That’s where Walt Disney died”!’
They went to the rather better known Disney memorial, the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim where Peter was sufficiently delighted by the mix of fantasy and futurism to immediately decide to make a return visit on the following day, while the less-enamoured Ken opted, instead, for a day by the swimming pool.
The Hollywood trip was perhaps the final spur needed to goad Peter Jackson onto the course that would eventually determine his career. The dream factories that produced the films and television shows that he loved were now real places as opposed to being part of some remote other world on the other side of the globe. He returned to Wellington and his photoengraving