Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/686925
P E R S P E C T I V E | J U LY / AU G U S T 2 0 1 6 35 places throughout the film, as decals on the trashcans, on signage and as components of the games in the midway. Set pieces were used over and over again as if there were seventeen green broken carnival wagons, or twenty- seven red aged trunks or three of the same tattered loose carousel horses. I had to keep reminding myself that we were in hell and I could literally make up my own rules...I could be the god of hell and the leader in its creation. The final scene in the film was the last set shot, the Carnival Funhouse, and it needed to have a strong psychological impact, as the character John faces his grief at the loss of his son, Daniel. Throughout the film, the audience has seen a prop photo that John carries, showing Daniel with a red balloon on a swing, missing one shoe. I knew I wanted to use a collection of funhouse mirrors from the location as a "facing your fears" metaphor, and I decided to use them to create a segmented pathway through the funhouse. The scene is a song lasting 2 1 / 2 minutes so the space had to pace the actor moving through the set for the duration of the performance. Each separate segment or room had an element in his visual memory of Daniel. The first room had a series of hinged, flat cutouts of hand-painted dark trees that showed his entrance into the forest of hell. The two-dimensional cutouts acted like saloon doors, swinging back-and-forth, reminiscent of theater sets and the cardboard set pieces created for the film The Forbidden Zone. One room was Top, left: The carnival set in the past was seen as an incomplete vision, a work in progress, a not-yet- fully-realized carnival made up of white-and- black carnival pieces arranged in a torn, decayed, Swiss cheese of a tent. Below, left: In stark contrast to the saturated red and yellow hues in the present-day carnival, the monochromatic past really shows another side of Lucifer's world. Right: Lucifer himself is played by Terry Zdunich, the film's writer. an almost impassable space full of red balloons, another a black multifaceted space with forty wooden rope swings, all hung at different heights, making it difficult passage. Once the swings started swaying and a strobe light effect was lit, the scene became absolutely haunting. Next came a labyrinth of distorted carnival mirrors, like the scene from Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai, and finally, for the last room, the green bathroom where John had succumbed to grief and committed suicide, sending him to hell in the first place—a forced perspective mini-set, sideshow style. "Set pieces were used over and over again as if there were seventeen green broken carnival wagons, or twenty-seven red aged trunks, or three of the same tattered loose carousel horses. I had to keep reminding myself that we were in hell and I could literally make up my own rules...I could be the god of hell and the leader in its creation."