Tom Devlin Interview

The foundation of the sci-fi and horror genres are built on the innovative and hard work of special makeup effects artists. Of the many who practice this art, a small number use their abilities to make the fantastic a reality, and apply it into their own visions in the form of feature films. Even rarer than that do they create a museum you can visit which celebrates the two best genres in film. The man I’m honored to have chatted with has accomplished all of this and continues to push himself. For your reading pleasure, Tom Devlin…

When I got to visit Tom Devlin’s Monster Museum, you were kind enough to walk and talk us through much of the impressive work I’ll ask you more about shortly, paving the way for it all. What moment in your life did you realize special makeup effects was your calling.

I really found makeup effects pretty early. I knew I wanted to do something with characters and monsters like as a kid I love He-Man and Ninja Turtles and stuff. And which segwayed to Toxic Crusaders and then the Toxic Avenger and Friday 13th. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a comic book artist or I didn’t really know the ropes until about like, maybe 9th or 10th grade, I met Bill Frezetta who’s Frank Frazetta son. And he had a Halloween store in my town where I grew up. And I really learned all about like Tom Savini and makeup effects. There’s probably back then, like, just at 14-15 that I I really decided this was the path for me.

That’s amazing. And from that moment, what steps did you take that you would say were the most valuable to you as you began to pursue your career?

Well, I through Bill Frazetta I found out about a horror convention called Chiller Theater in New Jersey, in like 1997. And I went there and I met Tom Savini at the at the convention and I kind of told him, I was like, “I really want to do what you do”. As you know, I’m sure 1000 People have told him last week. He kind of pointed me in the direction he’s like, “Well, you’re gonna have to move to LA and you should go to this school and he told me about a makeup school called Joe Blasco Makeup Center West. It’s funny because Tom Savini ended up opening a school in Pennsylvania where I live, but he hadn’t had that yet. So he kind of just told me go do a Blasco and take pictures of your work and yadda yadda yadda. So from that point on, I started saving money to move to California. And I ended actually dropping out of high school and moving to LA and going to Joe Blasco. And at Joe Blasco I took a makeup course like the beauty makeup, and character, but they didn’t have the makeup effects and prosthetics. They didn’t have enough students lined up so they basically told me no go on it by the time I got finished with all the beauty makeup. So I I was gonna go to another school and they just try to keep me as a student, they offered me an internship at a place called WM Creations, which is owned by Matthew Mungle. And at WN Creations, I was an intern starting on X Files. After about two weeks, they hired me on full time, and then I stayed there for two years, and I worked on some of the biggest movies ever. Like Scorpion King, Red Dragon, Terminator 3, like huge movies. Also television, like, two seasons of X Files, three seasons of CSI Miami. It’s funny because at some point, the school called me back and we’re like, “we’re ready for your prosthetic class”. I was like, “I’m on the backlot at Fox”. I’m on X Files right now. It was crazy. So I didn’t go back to makeup school.

July 10th of this year marks the 5th anniversary of Tom Devlin’s Monster Museum’s birth in Las Vegas. Could you tell me a little bit about the inception of that beautiful landmark?

The Monster Museum is just one of those things. It’s a weird “if you build it, they will come” story. I was really burnt out on Hollywood. I had moved to Florida. Previous to moving to Florida, I was burnt out on making movies. I worked really hard on low budget stuff. In Hollywood, I had a big shop that we had to pay for by doing like three movies a month, and it was just exhausting. I never felt like I was moving up the ladder. I was just kind of narrow where I was at. I had this really great conversation with John Carl Buechler. I was just kind of telling him, “I love Full Moon and I love working on low budget movies”. Because the funny thing is I didn’t move to LA to work on those big movies like Terminator and Scorpion King. I moved to LA to work for Full Moon, Troma, and punk rock horror. That’s what I love. It’s cool if you worked on the last Avengers movie, but that’s not my goal. You know? I don’t want to be a small brick and a huge wall. I want to be the wall. I want to be the guy that from concept to reality, creates creatures, and comes and saves the day on set. I like it all. I don’t like being just a small piece of the process. So I had really fallen in John Buechler’s footsteps. I was telling him, “I love Charles Band productions, Full Moon, and low budget movies, but I’m having a hard time making a living at it no matter how much I do”. He said, “you know, the goal is to find a way to make money with your art, and then you can do as many Charley Band movies as you want. Forever”. Oddly enough, that’s kind of what inspired the Monster Museum. I racked my mind. How can I make money? I already was selling masks. I just wanted to do something that would actually bring in money that wasn’t as labor intensive. So I could work for Full Moon or low budget movies in general. It’s cool because the Monster Museum does pay the bills while I I entertain my low budget horror film fantasies. I’m now directing. That’s even cooler because I don’t have to worry about getting paid as a director like I get paid for the Monster Museum. It’s a weird thing. But that kind of inspired building the Monster Museum. Making it, originally I had designed it to be like a Planet Hollywood or something with screen use props and things like that. Out of poverty, I had sell off most of my screen use props just to open the building. Then I decided I would just make everything in it and make it unique to my art. That I think was the best decision ever because that’s what sets me apart from other great establishments that do similar. I created everything in there. So it’s kind of an art gallery rather than just prop display.

1,000%. I love physically going to museums. What’s the process like of curating what we, the visitors get to see?

My big thing is altering it. Constantly altering… At least three times a year change it 10%. Because I want the same customers to come back. I mean, you’re a horror fan, you’ve come out, you’ve seen it. The next time you’re in Vegas for a licensing expo or whatever you might be there for, I want you to come back and see it again, and it’d be different. So you feel like you need to see it every time you’re in Las Vegas. So that’s really the tough part for me. Although it is kind of a business where you pay the admission, I receive money, and I don’t have to do a lot for keep up because it’s there. I do alter it all the time. I change it all the time, I redecorate it or move it around, or add characters and take away characters. You’ll get people that come through and they’re like, “Where are the Ninja Turtles?” And I’m like, “Oh, they were there for a year. They’re gone now”. You know? I think that’s the most important part for me is just keeping it fresh for everybody that comes through.

Absolutely. The addition of the movie theater was really amazing to me.

Yeah. The next big change, I’ll move the museum so you exit through the theater. But the theater is cool, because we get to play these documentaries that speak about the importance of makeup effects to the point where after these people walk through the museum, sometimes they still don’t get it. But then when you can sit down and watch these documentaries with people like John Chambers, and Tom Burman, or Rick Baker. Whoever. Talking about the importance of this art form. It’s cool. It really helps set in what what we’re doing. We want to produce some documentaries of our own to play in there that focus more on my work as well.

Amazing. Leading up to me seeing this place in person, I’d come across various images and videos of the museum taken by fans and spectators alike throughout my web surfing consistently. And in relativity to the monster museum being recognized among the best in Vegas, did you anticipate the success and the turnout?

The funny thing is I didn’t NOT expect it to work because otherwise I wouldn’t have opened it. But I didn’t know that it would be such a covenant thing for horror fans, because the crazy thing is more of our business is tourists going to the Hoover Dam than actual horror fans. But it’s definitely a bucket list destination for horror fans. So it’s a really cool thing. And also the celebrities that wander in, it’s just amazing. There’ll be some fans in there buying patches and stickers and stuff. When they leave, I’ll just be like that was CJ Graham. That’s Jason Vorhees from Part Six, he was just standing next to you. I don’t usually blow them up while they’re in there unless they do it to themselves. We get wrestlers and horror icons and people that just wander in because they love this genre, or they heard about the museum. It’s so fun to see these tourists that are just here unknowingly. Then, you know, Andre Gower from Monster Squad is standing in the middle of the room with them. They have no idea or sometimes they do. Sometimes they’ll recognize them. And it’ll be like, “Oh, wow, you’re so and so!”. It’s pretty incredible. I never expected something like the Best in Vegas. There’s huge museums involved like the Mob Museum, the Neon Museum, and we beat them. We’re this little homegrown grassroots roadside attraction. That’s pretty crazy.

One of the most inspirational things I find in you is that, in addition to having a museum that celebrates sci fi and horror, you have a production studio where you actively engage with the two genres. And they’re like, both next door to each other. Was it always the plan to accomplish that?

No. At one time. Yes. But I really walked away from making movies when I opened the museum. Somehow it invigorated my love for movies so much that I’m back with a vengeance. You know it’s like, we we produced a bunch of films me and my wife. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and we got really burnt out mostly because LA is brutal and whatnot. But we’re just having so much fun again that it just made sense. We opened a haunted attraction next door to the museum. In the offseason, it’s a full blown movie studio. We’re about to start production on our second film, Las Vegas Frankenstein here on August 16th.

I did see a post a little about that on Instagram and I was wondering if you could tell us about that film.

Yeah, it’s my second directorial outing. I just took two things that I love so much, Las Vegas and Frankenstein, and we’re shooting it all on location here at our little ramshackle studio. We have a great cast of Full Moon alumni. John Karyus from Killjoy Goes to Hell, we have Vincent Cusimano from Blade the Iron Cross, and Victoria Strange from Weedjies, Halloweed Night. What I loved about the Full Moon movies, we’re making that. There’s puppets and Frankenstein monsters and a great cast. It’s really fun.

Well, it’s crazy to me because I put the hat on as a director not as an effects artist. So I focused on the effects, like it’s a slasher movie. It needs good deaths. But as I said in the panel, the character wasn’t in heavy prosthetics. The deaths are bloody and fun, but there’s not a tremendous amount of difficult or intricate makeup effects, which I’m not used to. That’s my job. So I’m trying to change that in the Frankenstein movie, there’s gonna be all kinds of makeup and puppets and stuff that I’m known for. But definitely putting the director hat on, took away from that a little bit. Although every review and every person who has seen it loves the gore and the effects. So I guess like me, it’s 75% was great, because hopefully we can do a sequel and they can see it at 100%. Because I think that’s what’s the tough part is just trying to do both the effects and then direct a coherent film. But it was. There was a lot of fun and people seem to get it. I’ve been getting some really good chatter. So hopefully we find some decent distribution.

Absolutely. During your time on the most prominent show about makeup effects I can think of, Sean Cunningham provided the creative challenge on the steps of the Psycho house that led you to Teddy’s challenge winning creation. If there was ever like a planetary alignment giving rise to Titan, that’s it. Right?

THAT was it. That’s also why, like, when you mentioned that people been asking when this movie is gonna get made for 11 years now. I always knew there should be a movie of it. Sean Cunningham knew there should be a movie of it. He’s the guy that created franchise craziness. You know what I mean? And I love all of the Friday 13th movies so much and it’s always been a career goal to be in that wheelhouse. I do work with a lot of the guys that play Jason putting them back in their costumes for the photo ops and stuff at conventions, and I have a very strong working relationship with Kane Hodder, CJ Graham, and also Warrington Gillette. We’re all buddies. I get to be part of this world. But to create my own slasher character that I already knew Sean approved of, it’s a cool thing. I hope he can see the movie and I would love I would love to hear his opinion at some point because what we did is just good old fashioned fun freakin movie.

Without giving too too much away, how has Teddy evolved the most for his upcoming features since his televised birth?

In the televised version, he was a younger guy in full prosthetic like kinda like burnt gnarly makeup. Teddy has evolved in that there’s several versions of him in the movie. You get a little bit of everything. But prominently, he’s an old guy. Kind of that Old Man Logan thing. And I think it’s fun. He’s got his big grizzled beard. It’s different than what it was on Face-Off, but it’s obvious that it’s the same character.

The stories of you finding your cast from each of their perspectives on the panel was kind of touching the listen to at the Arizona panel. The connective tissue with them being that you made dreams come true and casting them. What was your overall approach with the casting?

The thing is, I wanted people that really want to do this. I didn’t want to have to babysit anybody or make sure somebody’s not slumming it for what we’re doing. So I had to find cast members that love the horror genre, and that love slasher films in general. That’s what we did. On that panel, we had a handful people there. We had a ton of cast members in this movie. There’s I think 30 people. Although there is three leads, there’s really an ensemble and I feel like even right down to having my kids in it, it really was a cool experience. I brought in wrestlers, I brought in porn stars, and I brought in all my friends and family. Those wrestlers and porn stars on my friends and family too. We’re making a movie about a haunt family. If you’re involved with haunted attractions, people understand what I’m talking about. When you when you open a haunted house, and you work the month of October together. Every year you become this twisted little dysfunctional family. We did that to make the movie. So a lot of the actors did work in the haunt through October just to stay in character and to be part of it. Michael Shields who plays Teddy, he played Teddy every night in the haunted house. He never stopped being Teddy. So it was pretty cool. And I would like to retire the character from the haunted house next year, but I don’t know that he’ll let me. He IS Teddy. So it’s very, very difficult to to convince him otherwise. You know, I mean, and he’s scary *laughs*

With that in mind, the voice in my head was telling me that “I got to see this movie”. You mentioned wrapping it in it’s entirety in January and earlier just now with the film festival submission process. When is the soonest we’ll be able to see it, and will Teddy be there in person to scare us.

Teddy will be there. I don’t know if he’ll be in costume. We do have a mascot Teddy that we bring around with us though. I don’t know because we’re we’re waiting on the festivals to give us official “welcome to the festival” notes or whatever. So we’re out to about 19 different festivals. I do know that there will be a top secret screening that I might be involved with. Cross your fingers that it might have a Teddy bear.