I recently spent a day with Canadian Special F/X artist James “Jimmy Claws” Gawley who related to me his work on the cult horror movie “Jacob’s Ladder”. One of the haunting images from that film involves people with rapidly moving, faceless heads, a trick he achieved through a mechanical prop called “Vibro-Man”.

Jacob’s Ladder remains a unique horror film, one that deals with a state of mind, where the nightmare involves psychological demons instead of supernatural ones and a loss of control at the hands of the government rather than a killer in the woods. It’s human madness portrayed with visions that, in 1990, were experimental and new in cinema – faceless, shaking heads, hospitals dilapidated by war, prisoners with black hoods, malformed humans moving with broken bodies – imagery that explored the idea of confronting audiences with something that was in plain sight, but obscured and confusing. The result was something that you sensed was ghastly and horrible, but you couldn’t get your mind around. It’s a language of horror that has since flourished through Asian cinema, with movies like “Ring”, “Pulse”, “Ju-On The Grudge” and the “Silent Hill” video games.

Tim Robbins plays a Viet Nam soldier named Jacob who comes home to the United States and tries to lead a normal life. He loses his family and chooses a simple job working for the U.S. Postal Service. As time passes he finds himself suffering from a paranoid-schizophrenic state, gripped by hallucinations that suggest demons are pursuing him in some kind of battle against heaven.

Mixed in with the confusion are a series of flashbacks from the war that suggest Jacob was air-lifted to a secret army hospital where strange experiments were performed on him. As he explores these possible revelations, other members of his Viet Nam outfit contact him to share that, they too, are now suffering from the same kind of hallucinations and together they believe they were part of a secret government drug program.

As the details rush in, the nightmare escalates and the philosophical puzzle takes a new turn that leaves audiences gasping to understand what is real and what is imagined.

Central to the movie’s success is its signature use of a rapidly shaking head, a chilling visual suggesting a ghastly person or apparition that, for unknown reasons can’t be grasped or understood. It was a new technique to horror movies, one that had never been done before. At the heart of the illusion was a mechanical prop called “Vibro-Man”.

Vibro-Man was Jimmy’s first mechanical prop. As someone who had never worked in the movie business before, Jimmy was originally hired to create metal framework for the prosthetic dummies and body parts being created by Canadian make-up wizard Gord Smith.

“I built a lot of stuff that you didn’t see, framework things, stuff underneath the skin,” explains Jimmy. “Five months in Toronto doing pre-production and then four months in New York City shooting. That was my first film”

In the middle of production, Smith had noticed that Gawley was capable of doing more than creating aluminum frames and decided to give him a chance to prove his work as a full-on mechanical F/X man.

“There was an idea that Gord had, he said ‘Let’s make a vibrating guy, we’ll go show it to the director’” Jimmy says, showing me the surprise he felt at the time.

Smith was inspired by the paintings of Francis Bacon, which featured blurred figures that had lines running through their faces as they were being ripped or torn apart.

"Head IV" by Francis Bacon, 1948

“We built this vibrating guy, had a counter-weight on a flexi-shaft, put it on the inside of a rubber head and put it on a dummy’s body. The head went b-brrah-b-brrah-b-brrah (vibrated like a paint mixer). That was entirely Gord’s idea. We went out on a limb on it, we built it and they brought us down to New York for a camera test, and we presented it and they liked it. “

With Gord Smith lending his make-up skills to give Vibro-Man a realistic human body and skin, the results were very effective and director Adrien Lyne liked it so much he added the prop to the cast. Its most prominent scene is in the hospital where it sits in a steel frame, a black hood placed over its rapidly shaking head.

“Vibro-Man ended up being on the call sheet every day of the movie. ‘I want Vibro-Man, just in case’ and they popped him in here and there. We did the Vibro-Man in the burning car, and we burned him up entirely, so there was nothing left but a bunch of charred remains. That was my great gag on the film.”

To apply the Vibro-Man effect to the characters of the main cast, director Adrian Lyne had the actors shake their heads back and forth while filming them at four frames per second instead of the usual twenty-four. He then printed the footage to run at normal speed and intercut split-seconds of the resulting blurring footage with the fast-paced vibrating of the prop itself.

Jimmy was also asked to create a hypodermic needle effect that was used on Tim Robbins during the hospital scene, but more ambitiously was the request for a complex hallucination sequence that was later cut from the movie, but is now available on the DVD as an extra.

“Jacob goes to a real sleazy hotel to meet Michael” Jimmy explains. “Michael gives him the antidote to what’s causing his hallucinations. He’s lying in bed, Michael’s giving him the antidote and all of a sudden, the ceiling starts to bleed. Then this crack travels the length of the ceiling. Have you seen the movie? Remember the creature at the party? That – what was that? Well that thing’s starting to come through the ceiling and the hallucination builds to the point where he starts freaking and then all of a sudden… it’s a calm lake. “

“Everything’s beautiful, tranquil, he’s cured. So then, Jacob goes to visit Michael to say ‘Hey man, it’s great, I’m all fixed now’ and he goes into Michael’s apartment and finds him decapitated, I don’t remember which room it was, but he finds him decapitated.”

As with all movie effects, the solution to creating the sequence involved an approach most wouldn’t think of.

“We built four rooms. We built one normal room, fully equipped – walls, floor, bed, décor, everything. We built three replica rooms, 50% over-sized, but only from the elbows up, because the camera was always looking up. All rigged with breakaway. I had screwjacks in the ceiling, breakaway plaster, a pre-broken joyce, so we broke the ceiling joyce and then re-assembled them, got ‘em on hinges with screwjacks so they would crack the ceiling and break, and we had nine puppeteers up there cranking on these jacks, because they wanted it to break sequentially. It was a big, big deal for me, worked on it for months. They shot it and they never used it. Now I’m told it’s in the outtakes on the DVD, which I haven’t seen yet.”

The sequence is included on the DVD, but missing are the visuals of the lake and the moment with Michael’s decapitated body. Instead Jacob wakes up in the hotel room and simply thanks Michael before leaving.

There’s a chilling, memorable moment during the sequence where the creature above fights its way through the cracks in the ceiling. A single eye peers down through a hole, pushes its way through and looks around.

Director Adiran Lyne doesn’t explain why the sequence was cut from the movie, in fact in a documentary included on the DVD describes it as the “finale and crescendo” of the story.

For James Gawley it was the beginning of a new career, one where a machinist looking for a change in his life found one after simply knocking on doors in the industry.

“It was my first film man,” says Jimmy. “I didn’t have film set savvy. I was green, I was a machinist. I was good at what I could do, but I had to learn how to apply what I know to an industry I know nothing about.”