The Make up FX of Zombieland

It’s all about zombies. Zombies, zombies, zombies, and not just for the screenwriters, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, of Zombieland or the film’s first time director, Ruben Fleischer, zombies are on the mind of the FX and make-up team. What would a zombie film be without a FX team? Whatever fun, or themes, or stories filmmakers want to tell with the zombies, it always comes down to the gore, and the look, and the blood. Killer Film catches up with (or should I say shambles up with?) Toby Sells, one of the men behind the slew of undead in this month’s Zombieland.

Getting the Job

“I have a shop here in Atlanta and we do more work than people realize we do. You would think you would have to be in Los Angeles to be a big shot, but that’s furthest from the truth,” says Toby Sells. He has an Atlanta based FX studio-Toby Sells Creature Make Up FX Shop LLC, and he has worked on a bunch of films, from different genres, but of course, mostly horror. You have seen his work in such features as in Dance of the Dead from last year’s Ghost House Productions, The Signal, Laid to Rest, and even in Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All by Myself. He got his start in an uncredited gig on Phantasm II. “Bob Shelley, a good guy and a friend of mine, called me up “saying we’re coming to town, you might want to look it up.” At that time we were doing smaller films. So I gave them a call, and the production designer Tony Gardner who I knew back in the day, said he would throw our name in the pot and see what happens. Having a shop here, and them shooting here in Atlanta, really helped us get our foot in the door.”

Sometimes, it’s all about who you know, and Toby agrees. “That’s how we get most of our work actually, is through word-of-mouth.”

On-Set of Zombieland

Ruben Fleischer is a first time director, but Toby Sells noticed how different and cool he was on-set. “As for working with Ruben, I could never tell that he was a first time director, if I didn’t know that fact before hand. He knew what he wanted, and everything was very personal. A lot of times directors just treat us like glorified craft service people, and don’t understand how important we can be. Ruben would come to our trailer and talk to us. He was just very personal. He knew everyone on the crew and that was important to me. The other thing is that he knew what he wanted on the screen and I thought he did a great job. Plus, he beat me at pool, so I owe him for that!”

Toby Sells was the Special Make up Effects artist on the film, and what does that really entitle him to do? “I did everything from hero zombies to background zombies. There was no one guy doing the hero zombies, or one doing the background zombies,” he explains. “It just depended on what the script called for that day. It was weird at the theme park since we were filming for a month, seeing us spray blood on them from the gallons and gallons we had.” Toby laughs, “we kept taking turns on that, keeping it fun for us.”

But what wasn’t fun was the weather in Atlanta during the shoot. “I think every one of us got the flu every other week. I still had to come in to work, and even though I put in eight hours of work in, they sent me home so nobody else got sick. I felt really bad too, because that meant someone else was pulling my weight for another eight hours. These were like 12-16 hour shoots. The rain had a lot to do with that, and that we had a lot of fake blood, darker bloods that looked like teriyaki sauce that would crust on the actors. So we had to go back over them and spray them down with more blood in 27 degree weather. They weren’t happy about that, so when you’re working with the cold and zombie, it wasn’t fun.”

Outside of that, there was something special about the work in Zombieland for Toby, as he recalls: “it was like doing what we did as a kid in our backyards, only getting paid really well. One day, we would be working on the grocery store zombie doing his hero make-up, then immediately afterwards doing the background zombies.”

So, what about those zombies?

And now, the zombies!

One thing you notice about the zombies in the film, is the look. Each one is different, even though there are some individual looking zombies. Some of the more memorable ones are the stripper zombie, with tassels on her nipples, the clown zombie later in the film, and one of Toby’s favorites, the fatties in the grocery store. “I think my favorite zombie, next to all of the really hot stunt girls, there this scene you see in the trailer we’re Woody and Jesse walk into this grocery store, and you see this really, really heavy set guy, Woody smacks him on the head with a banjo! That was one of my favorite zombies to do because the actor was a real cool guy, a local actor here in Atlanta. It was just the final look that I was really pleased with, and how it looked on screen. Of course, I did 500 other zombies just like it, but it was just a good subject who brought something different to the table.”

“Way before I got involved,” Toby tells me, “Tony [Gardner], Ruben [the director], the art department, and producers really locked that look of the zombies down. But even right before we started, they were still doing screen tests on the actors to lock the look down with Ruben. We had these parameters that we had to stay in, but while zombies are zombies, we wanted them to be a little more realistic than the zombies I’ve done in like Dance of the Dead.”

The classic zombie look was created by George Romero and FX mastermind Tom Savini in arguably the zombie jewel in which all other zombie films will be measured too, 1978′s Dawn of the Dead. But Toby goes on to say this about that benchmark work. “No offense to these guys, but we had this term saying if it looked like a Tom Savini zombie, that it was the last thing we wanted to see.”

While Savini’s zombie would improve from the blueish paint used to make them look dead, to the groundbreaking (and in this writer’s opinion best zombie work) in 1985′s Day of the Dead, seeing the zombies in Zombieland, one gets a sense of decay and violence in them, even though the film plays them for laughs. “The more zombies you see, the more there’s a lot of wounds and disease. They’re not so cartoonish. In fact, they the best zombies I’ve been a part of so are in my career.”

That’s very true. Toby Sells is currently working on yet another zombie picture, and even though he’s having a blast, it noted that he’s ready for a different monster to do. “I’m doing a movie soon and it’s shooting in Iowa. It’ll be my ninth zombie film in the last few years, so I’m kind of zombied-out.”

I want my Twinkie!

“27 years ago,” Toby remembers, “I was told I should just become a doctor, and look at us now!” He laughs. “I’m a glad it happened. They sent me the script and I just loved it. The Zombieland script is hilarious! Woody Harrelson is going to make it fun [for the audience] in my opinion, he’s just funny as hell.” I couldn’t agree more.

If you have anything you would like to add about Toby Sells, Zombieland, or your favorite kill, feel free to comment below and/or email me at jon@killerfilm.com