Not that I've ever really felt divorced from special effects; the child's wonder I felt at ten, watching Ray Harryhausen's flying saucers demolish the Capitol dome, the pillars in front of the Supreme Court, and the Washington Monument differs not at all from the child's wonder I felt at thirty-four when I saw JoBeth Williams go floating up the wall in Steven Spielberg's POLTERGEIST, or that head crawling away on spider's legs in John Carpenter's brilliant remake of THE THING, or the fellow in CREEPSHOW who comes lurching out of the grave to get his cake.
And from a practical standpoint, I found I wasn't quite as divorced from all those bugs as I thought I was going to be. After you've given an interview or two with drugged roaches crawling sluggishly all over your "Disco Is Dead" t-shirt, you tend to lose most of your artistic impartiality.
We had a couple of ''bug-wranglers7' from New York's Museum of Natural Science who handled the bugs on the set, Tom doesn't even like bugs. And yet he was involved, because in a lot of the shots, those aren't bugs at all. They're painted pistachio nuts. Whose idea? Tom Savini's, And when all those bugs come bursting out of E.G. Marshall's chest, that isn't Mr. Marshall at all, of course- It's an almost hellishly perfect cast. The tradition of the trade suggests that actors must suffer for their art, but nowhere is it written that they must explode for it...