REVIEW

Nightmare Factory

Posted: January 6, 2012
Category: Almost King
Nightmare Factory is a documentary by Donna Davies and I can’t think of a better name for it than Nightmare Factory. The documentary is about Greg Nicotero and his company KNB EFX Group. And for those of you that for some reason don’t know who Greg Nicotero is I can tell you that he is the man behind the makeup effects in more than 900 movies. Just do a search for him and for KNB EFX Group online and you can see for yourself. There aren’t many horror movies that they haven’t been involved with.

In Nightmare Factory we get to hear his story and how he and Howard Berger and Robert Kurtzman created KNB and how their careers took of. It’s a mix of very hard work and a bit of luck but let me tell you, they do deserve everything they have achieved. We get to tag along behind the scenes to see how some of the things where done in movies like Evil Dead 2, Inglorious Bastards and The Mist and it’s amazing. As a personal note I can reveal that I was actually invited to the set of The Mist but living in Sweden it wasn’t possible for me to go but even today that is something I still regret not being able to do. That would have been an experience of a lifetime and much of it would have been because I would have gotten a chance to see Greg work.

It’s also amazing to see how many people Donna and the team have managed to interview. We get to hear from names like George A. Romero, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Elijah Wood, John Carpenter, John Landis, Frank Darabont, Robert Kirkman, Norman Reedus, Laurie Holden, Tom Savini and many more. And they all have great stories to tell. Besides these known names we also get to hear stories from Greg’s wife, brother and father. Greg’s father originally wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor but as we know he didn’t. His father seems to have accepted it though and it’s with pride he tells us how Greg called him while filming Evil Dead 2 asking what would happen to a person’s eye if his head was put in a vice.

Nightmare Factory is definitely a documentary that every fan of horror movies and special effects needs to see. The only problem is that so far it’s only aired on the movie network in Canada and as far as I have heard it’s not being released on DVD any time soon. So, if you have any power at all that you can use to get this documentary aired somewhere, use it. Your viewers will thank you, believe me!

Lilja's final words about Nightmare Factory:

As, I said. Greg and his team deserve everything they have worked so hard for and one of the reasons they have succeeded is because they live by this motto [from Greg himself] “A makeup fx artist is never further than 4 feet away from their victim”. For more info about this documentary and a trailer, head over to Ruby Tree Films.