Feel their pain

To hear Stephen Sommers tell it, all he wanted to do after cavorting through Egyptian tombs with the digital undead for “The Mummy” and “The Mummy Returns” was make a small, personal film about two people chatting on a beach. And most who knew the 42-year-old director responded: “Suuuuuure.”

What Sommers actually did was plunge headlong into writing and directing “Van Helsing,” an epic horror adventure shot in Prague, Rome, Paris, New Zealand and L.A. that features Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolf Man, Dracula’s brides and Mr. Hyde, all squaring off against superheroic monster hunter Gabriel Van Helsing (played by Hugh Jackman) and vampire stalker Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale).

Even though the “Mummy” franchise, which includes the 2002 spinoff “The Scorpion King,” reaped a pharaoh’s treasure for Universal, Sommers says the idea to revive more of the company’s classic monsters was his, not Universal’s. “They didn’t think about it.”

The $150-million-plus question is whether the old nightmares still have enough bite to scare audiences in the era of Freddy, Jason and Aliens. Maybe not in their original forms, but Sommers and the monster makers at Industrial Light & Magic have confidence in their computerized takes on the classic fiends.

Still, “Van Helsing” has many echoes of Universal’s original “Dracula,” “Frankenstein” and “The Wolf Man” films. Many are visual -- notably the film’s black-and-white opening scene -- but some are philosophical, such as treating the monsters as characters instead of props.

“This movie is not about monsters; it’s about humans,” Sommers says. “The Wolf Man could be your best friend, your brother, your neighbor, but it’s like being an alcoholic or drug addict: At night he becomes somebody completely different. I always looked at Frankenstein as something like the Elephant Man, or Lennie in ‘Of Mice and Men.’ And Dracula is a man but has these other problems.”

As played by Richard Roxburgh, Dracula may have his problems, but he also has greatly increased powers. For example, this Drac does not change into your ordinary belfry-variety bat but into the Hellbeast, a man-bat creature with an 18-foot wingspan. Dracula’s three brides, meanwhile, slip from glamorous to ghastly and back in the blink of an eye.

“We have a half-dozen creatures that transform,” says creature supervisor Tim McLaughlin, “and that’s the real challenge and the fun.” For the brides, ILM used a “hybrid” technique that marries the actresses’ faces to a digitally created body, employing motion-capture data, which is the recording of an actor’s body movements as the basis for animation.

Although the sudden shift from babe to vampire is a little unnerving, it is the treatment of the Wolf Man that breaks new ground -- not to mention skin. Like the Hellbeast, the lupine half of the Wolf Man’s split personality is computer-animated, but the transformations are nothing like the lap dissolves of old.

“Stephen was adamant that he wanted to do something different for the werewolf transformations,” visual effects supervisor Ben Snow says.

In “Van Helsing,” the agony of the full moon curse causes Velkan, the Wolf Man (played by Will Kemp), to rip off his skin, literally, to reveal his inner beast. The primary challenge for the creature crew was to develop a procedural animation program -- which essentially animates itself following set parameters -- that would allow the character’s surface skin to break randomly when stretched by the body’s changing skeletal structure underneath. “The way we approached the shot was to say, ‘Let’s not restrict ourselves in terms of where the rips occur,’ ” McLaughlin says. “Instead, let’s allow those splits and rips to be driven as we develop the shot.”

Flesh-ripping transformations may sound grotesque, but the filmmakers were careful not to let things descend to the level of an Italian zombie movie.

“We wanted to keep the pain and agony, but there’s always ratings to think about,” says visual effects art director Christian Alzmann, adding that Sommers also mandated that blood be muted in color. (The film’s rated PG-13.)

“That was well used in all of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies, where there were lots of decapitations, but if you have [the blood] black or gray, it looks like oil coming out of there and it’s not as gruesome.”

That might be the only area of restraint from the director who is renowned for wanting things big to the point of defying credibility. Some of the film’s sets, for example, were so large that only the Playa Vista hangar where Howard Hughes built the Spruce Goose could hold them.

“There’s only one soundstage in Los Angeles big enough for one of my sets,” Sommers admits, and it’s at Sony Studios, not Universal.

Whether bigger will be better remains to be seen, but the director’s colleagues at ILM have a term for such scale: “We call it ‘Sommers-sizing,’ ” says Alzmann. “At first it was a bit of a running joke -- ‘Is this big enough for his movie?’ ‘Did we Sommers-size it enough?’ -- but after a while it really did help us key into the aesthetic he was going for.”

The film’s most conventional creature, at least in terms of presentation, is Frankenstein’s Monster, portrayed by Shuler Hensley, late of Broadway’s “Oklahoma!” with Jackman, in an elaborate body suit and prosthetic makeup created by Captive Audience makeup shop. There may be a few trappings of the classic Karloff vision -- chiefly the flat head, neck bolts and asphalt spreader’s boots -- but, visual effects editor David Tanaka says, “It’s Frankenstein for the Computer Age.... He’s designed in such a way that we actually see all the tendrils of electricity going off in his head.”

Although “Van Helsing” is not a record-breaker in terms of the number of effects shots -- with about 800 it is roughly equivalent to “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” -- those at ILM contend it has no precedent in terms of complexity. Special attention has been given to the animation of secondary action, details such as the movement of clothing or hair or the reins of a runaway digital horse.

“Take each of those elements out of there and it would be stiff,” McLaughlin says. “If you don’t have all the little jingly bits, it takes you out of reality, which is where we would have been five or six years ago.” And now that Sommers has delivered another summer tentpole epic with franchise potential, he is free to go back to fantasizing about that film about two people on the beach. Just don’t be surprised if the Creature From the Black Lagoon emerges on shore to keep them company.