Ryan Nicholson’s Flesh & Fantasy puts Vancouver on the makeup-FX map with Final Destination gore

Nicholson, bottom middle, with some of his FX crew

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FANGORIA MAGAZINE, MAY 2000

By Steve Newton

In the world of makeup FX, companies like KNB, Steve Johnson’s XFX, and Stan Winston Studio are genre household names that have built solid reputations after years of hard work in the horror field. Flesh & Fantasy, the burgeoning FX business based out of Burnaby, British Columbia, hasn’t quite entered the big leagues yet, but it’s making serious headway in that direction.

Th mass moviegoing public got its first chance to see Flesh & Fantasy’s work in a big way when director James Wong’s Final Destination opened in March. Next, it’ll get even more of an eyefull when F&F’s gruesomely comical efforts for the Wayans brothers’ slasher comedy Scary Movie are splattered across theatre screens in May.

Led by 27-year-old president and founder Ryan Nicholson, Flesh & Fantasy actually sprang from his involvement with aforementioned FX great Johnson, whom Nicholson first worked with on the B.C.-shot Thirteenth Warrior in 1997.

“We took over his Vancouver shop, “explains Nicholson, “just due to the fact that we’re Canadians working in Vancouver. He had so much going on in L.A. at the time that it was a good move on both our parts, really.”

Flesh & Fantasy isn’t connected to Johnson’s FX group in business terms, but Nicholson claims that he and his crew are quick to help out Johnson, one of his longtime FX idols, when the situation calls for it.

“I’ll do a favour for his shop, like mold somebody up in Vancouver,” Nicholson says, “and their shop will mold somebody for us in L.A. if we need it. So we’ve got that sort of a relationship.”

Nicholson’s crew is currently composed of key sculptor (and first-year medical student) Frank Crymbl; key FX artists Mike Fields, a veteran of The X Files, and Holland Miller; mechanical designers Geoff Redknap and Jeff Staaf; lab technicians Harlow MacFarlane, Chris Stanley, and Corey Adams; and shop managers Patrick Bartolo and Roy Nicholson (Ryan’s father).

“It’s a bunch of young guys,” says Nicholson, “but they’re seasoned effects artists who have been working in Vancouver, and basically came together to have artistic freedom in a very open environment.”

Flesh & Fantasy earned its first cinematic credit on the Leslie Nielsen black comedy Camouflage, directed by James Keach and written by Billy Bob Thornton. But it wasn’t until an executive producer from The Outer Limits–to which the shop had contributed–referred them to the makers of Final Destination that the company’s promise was fully displayed. Nicholson says it was a dream come true working with X Files alumni Wong and Glen Morgan, the film’s respective writer/director and writer/producer.

“They’re basically horror movie fans making horror movies,” he says, “and they’re making them the way they’ve always wanted to. James Wong’s directing was amazing, and he was totally open to ideas. Flesh & Fantasy had a great amount of creative input, working with production designer John Willett, who is a veteran of many movies–Lake Placid was one of his design credits. He was very familiar with makeup effects, and working with him, we would come up with something awesome to show James, who would essentially give a thumbs-up, so we’d go out and shoot it.”

One of the Final Destination FX scenes Nicholson is most proud of involves the severe head-lopping of the Billy character played by American Pie‘s Seann William Scott.

“That was a decapitation which was sort of done in a two-step process,” the artist explains. “We did a full head that was cut in half, and then we had a hero head that was rolled into frame, and it was pneumatically rigged to explode when it was severed, to create the look of a really nasty hit. And there was also a CGI effect where we used the real actor and blue-based part of his head for his body collapsing. So it was a big collaboration with Ariel Shaw, who’s a major visual effects guy in Los Angeles.”

Billy’s shocking end was one effect that Nicholson was certain would make it to Final Destination‘s final cut.

“They really wanted to leave the audience with a strong image,” he says with a chuckle, before voicing concerns about losing some of the film’s other explicit FX to ratings trims. “We lost some gore in the decomposition scenes that we made some heads for,” he notes. “I think the maggots and actual head-rotting were a little too much, and they wound up lost somewhere on the editing floor. It was a shame, because we did a lot of work on those heads.”

Flesh & Fantasy created a few larger-scale FX for the film’s other death sequences, among them a full-body mockup for the strangulation of Tod (Chad E. Donela) and another for a literally explosive scene in which Terry (Amanda Detmer) is obliterated by a bus.

They also contributed some basic blood–gallons of it, in fact–for the demise of Ms. Lewton (Kristen Cloke), who perishes in a hail of blades and glass shards.

After Final Destination was filmed in Vancouver, the filmmakers returned to L.A. to do some reshoots, though none involved Flesh & Fantasy’s FX work.

“They decided to not actually kill the guy,” confides Nicholson, referring to main character Alex, played by Idle Hands‘ Devon Sawa. “Test audiences didn’t like him dying. So that was a situation where they actually shot his death scene, and then they wanted to shoot him alive. But we weren’t involved with that [death] anyway. It was a burn stunt, and I’ve wanted to stay away from that, just due to safety reasons and whatnot.”

A card-carrying gorehound from way back, Nicholson doesn’t much cotton to the idea of test audiences being able to decide who lives and dies on screen. Or how much fake blood should be splattered around. He thinks filmmakers put far too much credence in what the test audiences decide.

“Why does every story have to have a happy ending?,” he ponders. “I mean, with Final Destination, that death is something that was in the script, it was something that was the writer’s vision, and I don’t think test audiences should always have the final say. But I guess that in that respect, Final Destination unfortunately lost out.”

Even with its new ending tacked on to suit more sensitive tastes, Final Destination–with its hot young cast and skilled filmmakers–was poised to make a splash with young audiences upon its release. The same could be true of Scary Movie–a retitling from Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween–for which Nicholson’s company created all the gore FX, along with body parts of a different kind.

“We did a whole whack of basically sexual, uh… [chuckles]…just sexually explicit FX, with fake human anatomy. We did huge balls [for a bit involving a hormonally frustrated young man] and animatronic penises. It’s a complete spoof on Scream 2, like where the guy goes in the toilet stall and the knife comes through his ear. Well, in this version we have a a penis coming through his ear–and killing him! And then instead of blood coming out of mouth, you can imagine what it is. This is like NC-17-style effects. Those Wayans brothers are definitely over the top.”

Nicholson points out that there is a unique challenge in doing makeup FX for a comedy as opposed to a straight horror flick. First off, the grotesque has to be made funny.

“Even with the gore effects, we had to somehow make those work in a sense that the audience is gonna laugh instead of being appalled. Like, we did some great effects with Shannon Elizabeth from American Pie. Her death scene is just outrageous–there are intestines, her head gets cut off–but the audience will be laughing!”

If indeed the audience actually gets to see it. Nowadays, it’s hard to say which explict scenes will be allowed to be shown in a widely released Hollywood film. But while he may have lost some decomposition in Final Destination, Nicholson feels confident that Scary Movie‘s nasty bits will make it into theatres.

“According to [distributors] Miramax and Dimension, this is something that will be in the movie,” he says. “They say they can get away with it, so I hope so.”

Once Flesh & Fantasy’s efforts on Final Destination and Scary Movie are put out there for all to see, there’s plenty more work on the horizon for the Vancouver shop. While most people in the movie biz are sensitive about detailing possible future projects for fear of jinxing their chances, Nicholson is the kind of upfront guy whose enthusiasm for his job overrides the will to keep unconfirmed assignments under wraps.

“We’re in talks with a film called Doppelganger 224,” he reveals, “which stars [Playboy model and wresting babe] Sable–who I’m looking forward to working with [chuckles]. It’s an Eve of Destruction-type movie, but hopefully it’s a little better.”

The shop also created a little girl corpse for The Pledge, a Sean Penn-directed thriller starring Jack Nicholson and based on the same Friedrich Duerrenmatt novel that inspired Rudolf van den Berg’s The Cold Light of Day.

“There’s also a Gene Roddenberry sci-fi series coming to Vancouver that we’re hoping to get, called Andromeda. I don’t know if you want to put it down, because it’s still in talks, but it’s 44 episodes, and that’s something that would be excellent to get.”

Flesh & Fantasy is not unaccustomed to working for the small screen. In addition to their Outer Limits work the shop toiled on season three of TV’s Stargate: SG1, as well as numerous movies of the week.

“We did a a TV movie called Runaway Virus,” says Nicholson, “which was based on the Spanish flu, and we did numerous stages of disease makeups, as well as frozen bodies. We went down to Mexico to shoot that, and just that continuity of the actual makeup was a challenge for us.”

While Flesh & Fantasy is mostly making its name through its gore FX, Nicholson doesn’t want to limit his company to genre assignments. They will also be working on the upcoming season of the Vancouver-shot dramatic series DaVinci’s Inquest. The show, which last year won several Genies–the Canadian equivalent off the Emmy–stars Nicholas Campbell, whom Fango fans will recall as the serial killer from David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone.

“We’ll be doing the bodies and the effects on that,” says Nicholson, “which is similar to stuff that you’d see in a film like Seven, where it’s human remains. That’s a really good challenge because there are always real police officers and coroners on the set, looking at our work and comparing it to the real thing.”

While Flesh & Fantasy seems to have carved a bloody niche for itself in the bustling Vancouver film biz, Nicholson notes that there’s still heavy competion for FX work in the Great White North.

“The Canadian shops want to take the work coming from the States,” he says, “and we don’t want U.S. effects shops doing the builds–we want to do them up in Canada. I’d say that most of the competition here is from U.S. shops.

“But in recent years Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver have developed effects shops that have gained good reputations. Montreal’s Adrien Morot–his Maestro FX studio is where I actually worked and got my breakthrough–has a great reputation for quality, and so does Toronto’s Gordon Smith. And with Flesh & Fantasy, we wanted to put Vancouver on the map as well.”

So what do the upstart Canadian companies have that the established American ones don’t?

“The Canadian dollar!,” laughs Nicholson. “The Canadian dollar is something that American producers like to see. And I think that there’s a definite style to Canadian makeup effects that we’ve developed. It’s just like Canadian television shows–there’s an artistic style to those that’s different from the U.S. Canadian effects shops have their own style and flavour, and that’s something that American producers like.”

Sadly, Ryan Nicholson died from brain cancer in 2019 at the age of 47. May he rest in peace.