Terry Michael King

Brainiac (2004) director Terry Michael King has done just about everything in the entertainment industry over the past 24 years. He began as a "gofer to a gofer" in Hollywood, then rose to become a syndication manager and film restorer for MGM. After awhile, he quit and started over, eventually moving into crew and stunt work. Once, he stuffed his pants with raw beef and was stabbed in the thigh for a fight scene with Christopher Walken. He grew up in the golden age of creature features, when scores of hastily thought-up beasties piloted toilet-paper-roll spaceships and battled nightly at the drive-in. King made visits to his cousins in New Jersey with copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland in tow. Brainiac began a few years ago as a backyard homage to its namesake, a sixties era Mexican horror movie called The Brainiac (1962). At the time, King was managing a film production lighting house and working on documentaries and shorts on the side. He was also getting a little restless. "I'd always wanted to work on my own productions," he says, "but when you're doing Hollywood feature films and episodic television and tens of millions of dollars are swirling around, it seduces you away from your own projects." He and cousins Matthew J. Bayan and Greg Bayan, started toying around with the idea of making a movie on their own. "Our original conversations went like this: `Why don't we create a monster?' And then there was much laughter," King recalls. And then it started to evolve. But before they could make a serious monster movie, King needed to find a serious monster. An Octoman costume procured from a Halloween shop was considered, purchased, and ultimately rejected. And CGI was out due to budget considerations. Besides, King says, "we wanted to create something that existed in the real world, not on a computer monitor. Without sinking to the depths of Edward D. Wood Jr., we wanted to invent things using what we had available." In the spring of 2003, King and Greg Bayan went to a horror convention in Cleveland to find out how plausible it was to get a "real" monster. At the convention, Greg worked up the nerve to ask horror makeup-and-effects legend Tom Savini for help. The man behind Friday the 13th (1980) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) agreed, adopting the Brainiac as an educational exercise for students at Tom Savini's Special Make-up Effects Program at the Douglas Education Center in Monessen, Pennsylvania. King and company then also gave the film a more modern pretext: Addiction drives their monster to brain-slurping, rather than the occult. Should Brainiacs II through V come to fruition, King expects to have a problem on his hands: "It broke our hearts to kill off so many characters, so we might try to resurrect a few of them." "If Alien Resurrection (1997) scripter Joss Whedon can bring back Sigourney Weaver after she makes a swan dive into a pit of molten steel," King adds, "we can certainly bring back a few of our characters."