(Video Above: Making monsters in Montgomery with Jonathan Thornton from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.)
In a modest East Montgomery neighborhood, a single-level home holds secrets no one passing by could ever imagine.
Random human body parts are displayed as if they were library books on shelves. Heads without bodies, hands, feet and plastic storage boxes of hair, eyes and teeth with gory labels announcing their contents.
There are other things here, too. Strange creatures and zombies not from this world. Bright yellow aliens and green monsters.
One thing is for certain. Everything here is lifeless. Except for the figure moving around this small shop, a powerfully built bald man who slightly resembles a goateed Uncle Fester from “The Addams Family” television show from the 1960s.
This man is not a monster, though. He’s Jonathan Thornton, a special makeup effects artist who created the scary stiffs and remains strewn about the shop that was once a two-car garage, including the headless torso that stands outside the small exterior door leading into his laboratory.
“I work in both the movie industry, the television industry, commercial industry, I’ve worked on plays, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival when they did Dracula, I had to create a silicone mask for the evil version of Dracula and I also work in the haunt industry,” he says “making masks like my gut muncher guy here and props and creatures and all kinds of goodies, mainly for Netherworld Haunted Attraction in Atlanta.” Netherworld is a walk-through, dark, haunted house filled with terrifying live actors, special effects and monsters.
“I’ve been fascinated with monsters since I can remember. When I was little kid, I was always reading the ‘Famous Monsters of Filmland’ magazines,” Thornton says. “Even monsters that scared the Boogens out of me. I then later would be excited about finding out how to make that. I used to love Halloween and still do.” (“The Boogens,” for the uninitiated, is a 1981 horror flick featuring scaly monsters.)
The furniture store manager turned monster maker recalls his first venture creating most of the special effects for a movie called “Blood Feast 2” that was released in 2002.
“That was the first movie I ever worked on. I was as green as can be. The movie effects were horrible. … That got a lot of notoriety. … My career just built and built,” he says.
Thornton started going to conventions and meeting other effects artists. He eventually met Bill “Splat” Johnson, whose many film credits include working on Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot.” Johnson became Thornton’s mentor and helped him pursue his dream of creating special effects for films.
Thornton has worked on low-budget films as well as one project that carried a $30 million budget. He recently worked on a Western that starred Woody Harrelson. Other actors he has worked with include Dee Wallace, Lance Henriksen and Kevin Sorbo.
But one of his proudest accomplishments came from working on a film that more people have heard of.
“I was very privileged to have made some bodies for the movie ‘Lincoln.’ Yes, the movie ‘Lincoln.’ Steven Spielberg,” Thornton says. “I’m still pinching myself. Didn’t meet him. Didn’t go to set. I just made stuff that’s in his movie and I’m very proud of the fact that I did that.”
Though monsters and dismembered bodies are what Thornton does, they are not who he is. His voice softens as he speaks of his 5-year-old daughter, Bella, who he sings to sleep every night. He says she sometimes comes to his shop and carves into clay with him, the first step before making a mold and eventually an effect for a project.
“Halloween is every day for me,” he says in a booming voice. And in another voice several octaves higher, he impersonates the David Hedison fly character in the horror film “The Fly” by saying, “Help me, help me.”
The lights go out as he makes his way past the carnage he has created over the years. As he closes the door to his shop, he looks around at some unfinished props and smiles at the headless torso and leaves the land of make believe.
