Growing up in small town Alabama, Hall’s imagination was sparked by watching horror flicks like Dawn of the Dead and Alien, as well as his inherent desire to just plain scare the crap out of people. “I loved
jumping out of the bedroom closet and scaring my brother, making my own masks and freaking him out,” Hall recalls. So how did he translate that early taste for terror into a career? with great difficulty. “I grew up really poor in the South and I was basically living in poverty in my mom’s trailer trying to learn how to be a special effects artist,” he laughs. But Hall pursued his passion undeterred and grabbed on to any resources he could find. He refers to Fangoria Magazine as, “his bible,” and explains that, “I would go to Wal-Mart every year on Nov. 1 because they would have everything half off. I’d stock up on Halloween makeup and then make people up all year long.”
Using that kind of determination, Hall soon found himself with a self-taught skill set and, when he was only 18, landed a job on the movie Body Snatchers. He explains that after that experience, “I was bitten and I couldn’t wait to get out to L.A. and that’s what I did.”
Cut to 16 years later and Hall has become one of the most sought-after special effects makeup artists in the industry. His makeup effects studio Almost Human employs a staff of around 20 people who are currently working primarily on FOX’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Needless to say, working with Stan winston’s iconic Terminator endo-skeleton design is pretty damn cool but came with one major problem: “Stan winston’s company created all the stuff for the films but because of rights issues everything had to be changed. we essentially had to start everything from scratch.”
Considering all the cool creatures he’s created, we have to ask: which is his favorite? “A lot of effects guys are really big into dinosaurs or gorillas or weird stuff like that but I would rather do a realistic old age makeup or a realistic fat makeup or something very character-y because that’s a lot more challenging than a monster.”
In contrast, his least favorite part of the whole process is the business side. He readily admits that his job is, “A weird collision between art and commerce. I didn’t think about filing corporate taxes and all of that stuff. I probably could have benefited from some formal business training but I didn’t do it and so I’ve just been learning that end of things as I go.”
As well as the creative versus business balancing act, Hall must also divide his time between the workshop and the set. He half-smiles when we ask him to describe a typical day at the office. “Days can get very tricky. Sometimes I have super early calls to be on set to do a 3 to 4 hour makeup on Terminator, then I go back to the shop and work with the guys for a few hours and prep things for the movie. Then I have to approve stuff and send emails to directors and make sure everything is on track…And then I go home and try to sleep for four hours.”
On top of all that, Hall has recently taken on the role of writer/director, borrowing the two lead actors from Terminator (Thomas Dekker and Lena Headey) to star in his second feature film, Laid to Rest. The movie releases this month and is Hall’s, “love letter to 80s slasher films.” we ask what advice Hall has for aspiring make-up effects artists and he sounds a little jealous of the endless instructional YouTube videos that were not around when he needed them. He also wisely points out that in his craft there is no substitute for experience. He recommends, “interning at a place nearby. Learn from them, over their shoulder, in the trenches and figure out how to do things that way.” Indeed, Hall’s long and still evolving career certainly proves that Hollywood can be mastered with the right application of blood, sweat, tears…and maybe some fangs or claws.
By Carla Thorpe
Bookmark with:
As a scultpure who made monsters i now would like training on alpying that to the fx makeup industry.