Thing King
By Penina Spiegel
A coronary victim’s chest splits open. Giant jaws leap out. They snap shut. Bloody stumps of severed hands spray gore across the screen. The body shrivels up. It’s head plops off the table, emitting a piercing death scream. Soon the head is running across the floor!
As the audience shrieks in delicious terror, a shaggy giant of a man watching the sneak preview lifts his head…and laughs.
"When I heard those screams," recalls Rob Bottin, "I knew I had earned my paycheck." At 24, Bottin’s the youngest—and hottest—special-effects makeup wizard in Hollywood.
Bottin was born to make monsters. By 9 he was illustrating his own fantasies. At 14, he started working with Rick Baker, later an Oscar winner for AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. During his apprenticeship on low-budget films, he did double duty as an actor. Bottin was the lead ghost in THE FOG and played a 500-lb. Rat in ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL.
In THE THING, a remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks classic, he set out to break grisly new ground after his last year’s success, THE HOWLING. THE THING is actually several things--a shape-shifter, able to assume innumerable disguises. The horror comes from the realism of Bottin’s creations. He builds his creatures from the skeleton up, using false flesh taken from molds of real people.
"I’m deathly afraid of the dark," admits Bottin, who lives in El Monte, Calif, "I still don’t like to hang my feet over the side of the bed at night. I think my motivation for doing these movies is to find out what’s in those dark closets that threatened me as a kid."
