The man who built Slimer gets the documentary treatment

If you’ve never heard the name Steve Johnson, you’ve still seen his work. He built Slimer for the original “Ghostbusters.” He created Doctor Octopus’s mechanical arms for “Spider-Man 2.” He designed the alien forms for the climax of “The Abyss,” worked the special-makeup-effects crew on “An American Werewolf in London,” and did creature work across “Poltergeist II,” “Fright Night” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4.” For a stretch of the 1980s and ’90s, Johnson’s name on a call sheet meant the monster was going to be real, not rendered.

“Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson” is a documentary built from Johnson’s own two-volume memoir series, “Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX” — a title that signals this isn’t packaged as a highlight-reel tribute. Bloody Disgusting, which has covered the project since its announcement, describes Johnson as “extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.” Director Nick Taylor, who wrote the film with Joseph Krings, told Bloody Disgusting the production ran “almost seven years”; Bloody Disgusting’s own earlier coverage rounded that up to “over seven years in the making.” He lets Johnson do most of the talking, but the film brings in Linnea Quigley, John Landis, Tom Holland and Oscar-winning makeup artist Bill Corso to fill in the era around him.

The film premiered at Fantasia in Montreal this summer, per EyeCrave’s coverage, and screens next as an East Coast premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, which Horror Society reports runs October 15 to 22 with all screenings at Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg.

What we don’t have, as of this writing: any review of the finished film from anyone who saw it at Fantasia, and no word on distribution beyond the festival circuit. A nearly-seven-year production, sourced from the subject’s own written account of his career rather than a tidier outside retrospective, is at least a different kind of practical-effects documentary than the genre’s existing entries — but whether it holds together as a finished film is something nobody on this desk has seen yet.

That gap is worth naming rather than glossing over, on a beat that covers practical effects seriously: the honest version of this story is that a respected effects artist is finally getting full-length treatment, built from his own account rather than someone else’s nostalgia reel. It screens next in Brooklyn this October — worth watching for a review, and for whether it travels beyond the festival circuit after that.