The zombies were actually actors on the set, buried beneath Rick Baker’s make-up and Mona May’s tattered costumes. Then the visual effects artists digitally erased pieces of skin and bone to further enhance the illusion that the corpses were rotting away to nothing. However, most of the wispy spirits and banshees that streak through the graveyard are computer-generated.
The spiders that populate the mansion are both real and manufactured. Under the watchful eyes of wrangler Jim Brockett, 150 pink-toed tarantulas (also known as bird-spiders) from Guyana, South America, participated in a night scene in the graveyard. “They’re one of the few spiders,” Brockett explains, “that doesn’t try to kill and eat other spiders, which because we have a big group of them in this shot is an important thing. And you can put them on actors and they don’t bite,” he smiles warmly. “They’re very gentle.” The spiders are described as more of an ambush type hunter as opposed to a fighter. They build funnel-shaped webs and wait. In addition to these, Redd was responsible for adding dozens of CG arachnids to their real-life counterparts.
The cobwebs created by Dan Sudick and the Special Effects Department were designed to show the extensive webs created and then abandoned by spiders over the years that the mansion had been deteriorating. Heated glue guns with air pushed through them send out a translucent spray creating the webbing effect. Then colored dust is added to give the web some body, allowing the webs to show up better on screen.
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