By Stacee Sledge
When Langley West was 3 years old, he caught a double feature on television one afternoon that firmly planted a lifelong passion.
“I saw Oliver Reed in 1961’s ‘Curse of the Werewolf‘ and the Ray Harryhausen epic, 1958’s ‘The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,'” he says, smiling at the memory. “Both really put their hooks in me and I just fell in love with monsters.”
At the time, Langley didn’t understand that people and movie magic created the monsters onscreen; he simply thought of them as his buddies.
“Then, as I got older, I saw all movies with scientists in them, like ‘Frankenstein,’ and I thought those were the guys who made monsters, so I wanted to become a mad scientist.”
Growing up in rural Southern Illinois, Langley eventually realized people made films and that special effects were used to create all the cool stuff he’d long loved.
When a young man living in a town with the population of 800 starts talking about working in the movies, he might as well tell folks he wants to move to Mars.
“It was beyond the scope of everybody’s experience,” Langley says. “But I devoured everything I could find about how things were made and what people did.”
In these pre-Internet days, Langley worked hard to find the materials he read about so he could experiment; he often channeled his love for special effects into more traditional art. Langley eventually entered a career in security and law enforcement, which eventually landed him in Las Vegas, all the while maintaining an interest in doing pieces of his own.
“It’s really hard to change gears,” he says, “but in my 30s, I realized I wasn’t getting any younger.” With easier access to learning about special effects and acquiring the necessary tools and products, Langley made a big leap.
“I wanted to do what I always wanted to do, which was to make monsters.” He went back to school and got a degree in visual effects and motion graphics.
The distinction between special or practical effects and visual effects is that visual effects are computer-generated effects. Langley landed a job at an NBC affiliate in Las Vegas.
“I was making way less money than I had as a security supervisor at the Palms,” he says, “but I was doing computer-generated work on various projects, and that gave me the opportunity to also use all the things I’d learned on my own with practical effects.”
Eventually, Langley and his wife were ready to leave Las Vegas. “Logic would say move to Southern California, but I hate Southern California,” Langley says. And I had no illusions — I didn’t believe I was going to go get involved in the Hollywood industry. I was in my 40s and didn’t want to play that game; I just wanted an opportunity to do the cool stuff I like to do.”
Having never been to the Pacific Northwest — but in love with the idea of rain, clouds and trees — Langley and his wife opened a map of Washington State, closed their eyes, and dropped a finger. Bellingham, it was. They’ve now lived here for nearly seven years.
Langley initially worked in security at Skagit Valley Casino, but also landed his first practical effects gig in Bellingham within two weeks of moving here.
“Bellingham is relatively small, but has such a thriving, vibrant, alive film community,” he says. “I got that first gig doing blood and gore on a little movie and I’ve never not had a gig since.”
Like a lot of people in Bellingham, Langley wears a few different professional hats, also working at the public library and teaching at an occupational therapy clinic. Some of his special effects assignments make a lot of money, while others very little.
“One month you may work on something that pays thousands of dollars,” he says, “but you may not see that type of job again for another year.”
Every project Langley takes on is different and he never knows what to expect next.
“You’ll get a phone call: ‘Hey, can you make a guy’s head explode?’” he says, laughing. “And even if you’ve never made a guy’s head explode, of course the answer is yes — and then you set about figuring out how to do it through a lot of testing and experimenting.”
Langley has been involved in two popular Bellingham events in recent years: Trailer Wars, in which he’s worked on winning entries, and Bleedingham, a short horror film festival he helped dream up along with local filmmaker Gary Washington.
Bleedingham grows larger each year, giving local filmmakers the opportunity to create whatever scary, crazy things they can conjure up. “They can win monetary prizes and see their stuff on a big screen,” Langley says.
The annual festival takes place at Pickford Film Center. “The Pickford has been great,” he says. “They’re fantastic partners in this and we wouldn’t be able to do it without them.”
Another favorite project for Langley was a Mackie speakers commercial he worked on with Hand Crank Films, shot in Mount Vernon with 160 actors made up as zombies.
“I pulled together a team of 10 makeup artists and we made an assembly line of zombies,” he says. “Everything on that shoot went great and it’s pretty epic.”
Langley is quick to point out that filmmaking is never easy. There are always unexpected challenges and frustrations, with the inevitable moment of deciding to never do it again. But in the end, the final product is always worth it.
“Seeing what you’ve created is the drug that keeps you coming back,” he says, “I see the monster come alive and now I am that mad scientist I wanted to be when I was just a kid.”
