The Chill Factor

When film pioneers Louis and Auguste Lumiere first unveiled their tiny strips of moving images to unwitting audiences at the turn of the last century, they became the first movie makers to scare people with a special effect. “Arrival of a Train,” of 1895--a now-innocuous straight-ahead shot of an engine pulling into a station--had French theatergoers terrified at what they believed was their imminent flattening by an oncoming locomotive.

Of course, the effects of film projection alone as devious trickery wore off pretty quickly, but audiences’ desire to be thrilled and scared didn’t. From Lumiere peer Georges Melies’ inspired photographic cheats--whether turning off the camera between takes so an actor could be replaced by a beheaded dummy or layering images to suggest ghostly apparitions--through stop-motion apes, Linda Blair’s above-the-neck gyrations and vivid computer-generated dinosaurs, the art of illusion has been chilling us to the bone for cinema’s entire century of existence.

This summer, the challenge of jolting audiences with effects both physical and animated belongs to a handful of eagerly anticipated movies. Some revisit horror classics (DreamWorks’ “The Haunting” and Universal’s “The Mummy”), while others rethink the genre entirely (Artisan’s “The Blair Witch Project”). Some offer ferocious creatures (Warner Bros.’ “Deep Blue Sea” and Fox’s “Lake Placid”), while others offer more of a mind trip (Columbia’s “The Thirteenth Floor”). But for the following films, the ultimate goal is the same: Tap into our fears and, for two hours in a dark theater, make them disturbingly real.

‘The Haunting’

Four years after “Twister,” Jan De Bont is once again looking at dust clouds. Over a video-conferencing setup at his Blue Tulip Productions office in West Los Angeles with Berkeley-based Phil Tippett, visual effects supervisor for “The Haunting,” De Bont is checking out a digitally created shot of his movie’s Gothic/Victorian house doing decidedly un-homey things with a velvet-covered wall. “It needs more violent dust particles coming out,” offers De Bont.

“More violence, OK,” responds Tippett’s disembodied voice. Such are the effects particulars of DreamWorks’ $80-million version of Shirley Jackson’s classic novel “The Haunting of Hill House.”

“It’s a very fine line,” De Bont says later. “The moment you go the slightest bit over the top, it becomes silly.” Although the book was memorably filmed once before in 1963 by Robert Wise, De Bont’s version isn’t a remake, he quickly points out, it’s a retelling--albeit an effects-updated one. In any case, “The Haunting” brings together four individuals--played by Liam Neeson, Lili Taylor, Owen Wilson and Catherine Zeta-Jones--for a sleep-disorder study in a crazily huge mansion built 130 years ago by a man who seems to still be hanging around, and may have otherworldly designs on the fragile, possibly delusional Taylor. Computer-generated work is an integral part of this “Haunting,” but for De Bont, “anything you can do physically you should try first, because it’s so direct.” Hence production designer Eugenio Zanetti’s hyper-detailed, massive interior house sets, with walls that could each be manipulated thanks to separate hydraulics (overseen by physical effects expert John Frazier).

Speakers were then strategically arranged throughout so De Bont’s and Oscar-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom’s painstaking pre-production sound effects wrangling could provide the actors genuine aural weirdness to react to before the cameras.

Tippett’s crew, working under a breakneck schedule that saw principal photography wrap only three weeks ago, is laboring over the computer work he calls “threshold events,” moments that create “a ghostly, subjective kind of effect right on the edge of perception. It might be breath condensation on a glass, or a slight [ripple] in a curtain that’s more than just wind.”

While there are more overtly horrific set pieces in the film--manifestations of murdered children materializing from sheets and pillows, for example--it’s the small stuff, the sanity-questioning effects (Did that . . . ? Naaah), that are the most challenging and gratifying.

Says Tippett, “It’s a tremendous amount of effort just trying to figure out what the essence is of somebody’s hair moving as though it’s being touched by an invisible entity,” he says, referring to one effect with Taylor. “We’re trying to be eerie and creepy and ghostly rather than shocking. There’s not a lot of things jumping out and decapitating people--although there’s a little bit of that.”

For De Bont, who hopes he has an “adult, classy, supernatural thriller” in store for audiences, the blunt description is best. “It’s all very freaky.”

‘The Mummy’

Whatever you do, warns John Berton, Industrial Light & Magic’s visual effects supervisor for “The Mummy,” don’t assume Universal’s $80-million update of the Boris Karloff classic is your father’s (or grandfather’s) monster movie.

“When people start thinking about ‘The Mummy,’ they think about the bandaged guy who anybody can run away from,” says Berton, by phone from his offices in San Rafael, Calif. “When you see our guy on screen, you’re really gonna go, ‘Oh man, this is amazing stuff.’ ”

To bring to life summer 1999’s “Mummy”--a vengeful, mobile, plague-brandishing high priest named Imhotep played by South African actor Arnold Vosloo--a combination of computer graphics and live action was carefully intertwined throughout. “I think we’ve created a new standard for human motion in a digital character,” says Berton.

It started by taking careful “motion capture” readings--sensing technology that helps digitally re-create human movement--of actor Vosloo’s body, instead of the common standard of whoever’s available that day.

“Acting should be done by actors, so we captured [Vosloo’s] performance, which gives continuity to the way the mummy performs.”

The final result is a character that is initially computer-generated--”a walking corpse,” as Berton puts it--but who evolves into a grotesque combination of the real Vosloo and digitally grafted decay. “You can see all the way through to his guts,” says Berton. “There’s a gigantic hole in his head, and there are his brains jiggling around. It’s believable and unbelievable at the same time, and definitely something you wouldn’t want to see in your dreams.”

‘The Blair Witch Project’

Sometimes, amazing effects are achieved with no effects.

“What kind of Blair Witch could we have created on a computer that would have satisfied the audience?” asks Dan Myrick, co-director with Ed Sanchez of the low-low-budget creeper “The Blair Witch Project.”

“Everyone has their own boogeyman. We said, ‘Let’s let the audience leave the theater with that in their mind.’ ”

One of the few talked-about hits to emerge from Sundance this year, “Blair Witch” is a mock documentary of “found” footage recorded by three filmmakers who become lost in Maryland’s Black Hills Forest searching for a local legend, the Blair Witch, and are never heard from again.

Of course, when you don’t have the bucks to conjure a little techno trauma--the movie was made for “the price of a car,” says Sanchez--you’re stuck with suggestion. So the two Orlando, Fla., filmmakers simply embraced the cost-friendly notion of implied terror.

While little is actually seen in their stark movie shot on High 8 video and 16-millimeter film, the eerie sounds, shaky camera work and occasional total blackness--augmented by the audible fear in the besieged trio--create their own illusory dread.

“What would you see with a video camera at night in the woods if you heard sounds? Nothing,” says Sanchez, who notes that the overriding concept was to look real. “With the blackness, you’re expecting something to jump at you, and that’s what makes the film frightening.”

Technology isn’t entirely absent from this “Project,” however. A “Blair Witch” Web site, which features the story’s elaborate mythology and one character’s journals and was created months ago by the filmmakers to stir up interest, has given the movie spine-tingling life ahead of its run in theaters.

“It’s a whole new experience, which is what we wanted to do with the film,” says Sanchez. “We already have a couple of fan sites, and most of the fans haven’t even seen the film.”

‘The Thirteenth Floor’

With the hot topic of virtual reality getting the kung fu kamikaze treatment currently in the blockbuster hit “The Matrix,” it’s left to the sci-fi thriller “The Thirteenth Floor” to take the less showy route, if not the more insidious and noir-ish.

A murder-mystery set in enigmatically parallel universes, this Centropolis-produced (“Godzilla”) film from director Josef Rusnak shifts between a modern-looking world in which a business magnate (Armin Mueller-Stahl) with an obsession for virtual-reality recreation is murdered, and Los Angeles of 1937, where it appears every character involved in the investigation has a digitally created doppelganger.

According to Centropolis digital effects supervisor Steffen Wild, the $16-million movie’s wizardry is mostly unseen, hidden in the fantastic re-creations of ‘30s Los Angeles. The suspense comes from the mystery’s labyrinthine layers of reality and unreality--if this world isn’t real, where does it end?--and the notion of being able to “download your consciousness into a virtual person.” Interviewed at his West L.A. facilities, Wild says, “These are some of the eerier effects, getting scanned by lasers and having a computer take over while your consciousness gets swapped out with a program.”

‘Deep Blue Sea’

“You’re going to see the biggest, scariest sharks doing the most incredible things anybody’s ever conceived,” is how “Deep Blue Sea” visual effects supervisor Jeffrey A. Okun modestly describes the knuckle-whitening contingent of director Renny Harlin’s latest, which stars Samuel L. Jackson and Saffron Burrows. “These are ferocious, thinking sharks.”

Twenty-four years after Steven Spielberg shook up moviegoers with a single great white (and plenty of suggestion), Harlin (“Die Hard 2,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight”) unleashes a whole slew of perturbed 25-foot makos that, following the “Jurassic Park”-style ill-fated attempts of scientists to genetically alter and breed them (for an Alzheimer’s cure), start outsmarting their captors. The action unfolds on an isolated ocean facility, which is damaged in a violent storm, and becomes a human buffet once it starts to sink.

Creating the typhoon itself was an “envelope-pushing” computer graphics project, according to Warner Bros.-based Okun, who also worked on the underwater thriller “Sphere.” “It’s very difficult to make water look right. In ‘Titanic’ they used a lot of [computer-generated] water, but it was nice and calm. It wasn’t the raging, stormy stuff, which is the biggest challenge we’re facing.” As for the real stars, the toothsome predators required effects work both mechanical and digital.

A sophisticated animatronic version was built by “Free Willy’s” Walt Conti. “It was phenomenal,” says Okun. “I don’t think anybody has ever made a free-swimming 8,000-pound anything before.” But for highly choreographed behavior in close quarters, such as one of the sharks taking someone in its mouth for use as a battering ram, computers came to the rescue. Okun hopes that “Deep Blue Sea” is the right mix of the macabre, the action-packed and the scary.

“If we succeed in what we’re supposed to be doing, ‘Jaws’ is going to look like a walk in the park and what was their problem?”

‘Lake Placid’

David E. Kelley, creator of “Ally McBeal” and “The Practice,” may seem like the last person in the world to write a creature feature, but even celebrated lawyers-turned-TV-impresarios get spooked sometimes.

According to director Steve Miner (“Halloween H20”), Kelley was in a canoe in Maine once when he began to wonder, “What if there was something down in this scary, black water?”

Cut to the $30-million Kelley-scripted, Miner-directed “Lake Placid,” with its blend of Maine eccentrics (think “Picket Fences”) and a man-eating 35-foot crocodile that has fish and game warden Bill Pullman, paleontologist Bridget Fonda and town sheriff Brendan Gleeson more than a little worked up.

“Our movie is scary and funny,” says Miner, who was interviewed in an office in West L.A. where he’s working on his next film, “Texas Rangers.” “But the creature has no sense of humor.” For the chomp-chomp factor, though, Stan Winston (“Jurassic Park”) handled the animatronic duties, creating full-body crocs as well as bits and pieces for more suggestive moments, such as a pair of eyes ominously rising above the water’s surface. Where digital work was needed--”You can’t make [an animatronic crocodile] that’ll run around on land,” admits Miner--Digital Domain (“Titanic”) took over.

And just for the record, what’s the difference between crocodiles and alligators, aside from the horror movie implausibility of them showing up in Maine? “Crocodiles have their teeth on their lower jaw that protrude outside, so they look like they’re always smiling. On alligators, just the upper jaw teeth protrude. So as they’re eating you, get them to close their mouth, then you’ll know.” Miner grins. “And they’ll both eat you.” *