The Making of The Massacre
By Dean Rose

For characters that we had some original pictures for, as much as possible, we wanted to keep them in the correct costumes throughout the story. This proved difficult, but not impossible. The most challenging of these was for Gaston (played by Eric Thompson). There are two authentic photos that show Gaston and both of these are show him almost in profile. With a new source of visual material for him it was tricky to try and produce a body that could be used at a variety of angles. We toyed with many different ideas for this. I produced a few test composites that showed Gaston in a very different costume, which included a collared ruff. I spent quite some time developing these composites and was very pleased with them and was quite disheartened when Derek condemned their use. On reflection he was right, the costume was more akin to a courtier rather than Gaston and looked very odd when mixed with original photos of him. I managed to track down the original costumiers in London and was hoping to search through their wardrobes looking for costumes that were over 35 years old. However, I was not allowed access, which was quite a shame. At one time we even considered making replica costumes either full sized or scaled down for use in the recon but decided that this would be far too much work. As my skills in Photoshop grew, I discovered that you could produce some quite convincing composites by copying an arm from here, stretching a body, mirroring, etc. Gaston soon had bodies that looked like the correct costume in some quite surprising poses. Similarly, other costumes such as Nicholas and Steven soon had a variety of new bodies from just a handful of original photos.

In many ways absence of authentic photos made the work of producing costumes relatively easy. Most of the costumes for the other characters came from historical productions, such as Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Elizabeth R (1971). Some surprises are also embedded into the recon, keen eyed viewers may recognise the costume used for the old lady character. Guards and guard bodies too came from a variety of sources such as The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Mary Queen of Scots (1971), The Adventures of Don Juan (1948). In fact, dozens of different sources were used for the various costumes and props that feature throughout the recon.

The body for the Landlord came from The Creeping Flesh (1973) and was actually the body of a tavern landlord in that production. This was quite useful as it aided some of the composite material as the character in this film was often behind a bar or handling bottles.

One of the costumes that I thought would have been relatively easy to find was a costume similar to the one that Anne wears, basically a white, low-cut blouse. Surprisingly this proved to be one of the most difficult to find. It is the sort of costume that you are sure you have seen a heroine wearing in a typical Hammer horror film, but when you come to look for it, it proves virtually impossible to find. Months of searching could not find anything appropriate and once again we were discussing making a similar costume and getting one of our wives to wear it. Then one afternoon the film a Tale of Two Cities (1958) came on TV and noticed that one of the leading female characters was wearing a costume very similar to Anne's. I hastily grabbed a blank tape and was pleased to see her feature throughout the film. This allowed us to produce composites of Anne showing her in a long shot in many of the set photographs.

There are also a few surprising sources of material such as Blackadder II and even Fawlty Towers but you'll just have to look out for those.