By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: special effects and make-up artist and director John Carl Buechler, who helmed Troll, Cellar Dweller, Friday The 13th VII: The New Blood and Curse Of The Forty-Niner.
As we have previously posited in this column, the horror genre is so marginalised when it comes to mainstream film commentary that pretty much every filmmaker who plies their creepy trade in this dark-hued cinematic field could likely be considered an Unsung Auteur, outside of obvious big names like John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, Dario Argento, Sam Raimi, George A. Romero and so on. Even when working within this metric, however, there are many horror directors who don’t receive even a fraction of the attention and praise that they truly deserve.
One of these is the sadly departed John Carl Buechler, who did much of his work under the creative umbrella of auteurist producer Charles Band, whose production company Empire Pictures was something of a minor powerhouse on the crazed landscape of 1980s horror cinema. Empire Pictures very much had a house style – wild horror with comedic flourishes and plenty of inventive, low budget practical special effects – which has seen many of the directors who worked for the company (Luca Bercovici, George Pavlou, Tim Kincaid) become somewhat lost in the shuffle over the years, with the lion’s share of the attention going to main man Charles Band rather than individual filmmakers.
A special effects maestro, a make-up wizard, an imaginative creature designer, and a talented writer and director, John Carl Buechler was essential to the popularity of Empire Pictures. His extraordinary gift for creating creature effects gave the exploitation-ready company’s horror films a unique and distinct look that set them apart from the bloody abundance of horror content that lurched and lashed its way through the gory 1980s. A truly singular talent, John Carl Buechler was born in 1952 in Belleville, Illinois, and became obsessed with film from an early age, funnelling a variety of interests into the field, and eventually making the move to Los Angeles after creating a number of his own largely unseen short films.
“I am a classically trained filmmaker and have learned everything necessary for this,” Buechler said in a 2011 interview. “I have degrees in art history, cinema and theatre. Among other things, I made special effects for my own small films. When I came to California with my student film under my arm, I tried to apply. It doesn’t work like you get there and can just say, ‘Hi, I’m a director. Give me a job.’ But I had my mostly self-taught skills as a make-up artist. My father once told me something very, very clever about this. He said: ‘Children are rewarded for being loved. Adults for being useful.’ When I arrived in LA, Star Wars had just come out and so special effects were a big hit. With my existing talents, I looked for jobs in this sector. I then worked with Rick Baker and Stan Winston. After that, I started designing special effects for films on my own. I then made a lot of them to make a name for myself quickly.”
After making his debut with the special make-up effects for Charles B. Griffith’s 1980 horror comedy Dr. Heckyl And Mr. Hype, Buechler was quickly tapped by the director’s friend and mentor Roger Corman, the famed independent and exploitation producer with an uncanny eye for talent and an even more uncanny knack for ingeniously utilising it. Corman brought Buechler over to his company New World Pictures, where the burgeoning special effects and make-up wiz worked his wonders on films like 1982’s Sorceress and Forbidden World, and 1983’s The Prey and Deathstalker. Buechler then began his association with Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, where his vivid mix of inspired puppetry and practical make-up effects super-charged films like 1984’s anthology The Dungeonmaster (on which he also directed a short segment) and the sci-fi franchise starter Trancers, 1985’s creepily hilarious Ghoulies (much, much more than its Gremlins-rip-off status would suggest), and 1986’s slamming sci-fi double of Eliminators and the deliriously strange and monster-filled TerrorVision. Buechler also became a favourite of infamously demented Empire Films director Stuart Gordon, whose wonderfully crazed films Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986) and Dolls (1987) made wilfully splattery use of the make-up maestro’s monsters, creatures, and body-horror mess.
In amongst his almost non-stop special effects and make-up work, John Carl Buechler also directed a selection of films that made especially strong use of his practical SFX. Buechler made his feature directorial debut in 1986 with the cult fave Troll, a keenly intelligent mix of horror and kid-flick which also weaves in elements of fantasy in its tale of a young boy called, yes, Harry Potter (Noah Hathaway from The Neverending Story and Battlestar Galactica) who battles an evil troll in contemporary San Francisco. As well as the freaky eponymous creature, Buechler also created a stunning collection of goblins, nymphs and elves, all of which combine into one bizarre, fantastical whole, while his casting of Michael Moriarty, Shelley Hack, Noah Hathaway, Sonny Bono, June Lockhart and a young Julia Louis-Dreyfuss showcased the director’s taste for diverse, off-kilter acting talent.
Though the wildly enjoyable Troll still stands as Buechler’s most complete and stylistically inventive film, he directed a number of other strong titles in the horror field, including 1988’s Cellar Dweller and Friday The 13th VII: The New Blood, 1991’s Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go To College and 2002’s inventive monster-slasher flick Curse Of The Forty-Niner, which featured the mind-blowing cast of Karen Black, John Phillip Law, Richard Lynch, Vernon Wells, Martin Kove and Jeff Conaway. For John Carl Buechler, directing and special effects were part of the one larger whole. “I don’t distinguish one from the other,” Buechler told Horror News in 2010. “I mean, take for example Jason Vorhees from Friday The 13th. When you make a Jason like I made Jason…he tells a story. When you design a character, you have to think, ‘Is it from another planet? Does it breathe air? Does it have stereoscopic vision?’ It’s storytelling. And movie making is storytelling. Much of my prowess as an effects artist was enhanced by my ability to come up with storylines. I knew how to create it…I know how to write it. The next obvious step, the transition to directing was straight. I’ve always loved writing and I’ve always loved directing. Makeup effects are part of the tools that I use.”
John Carl Buechler sadly passed away from cancer at the age of just 66 in 2019, but his bloody fingerprints remain all over the horror genre of the 1980s right through to 2021, with his practical nightmare monster creations and make-up (in everything from A Nightmare On Elm Street 4 and Halloween 4 to Red Rock West and Demonic Toys) a true feat of imagination and hands-on skill that could never be supplanted by any amount of hi-tech CGI.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
