script for the pilot and the 12 additional episodes. The producer liked what he read and convinced Gordon to shoot the film in Hollywood, because of all the special effects involved. Yuzna made a distribution deal with Charles Band's Empire Pictures in return for post-production services. However, after viewing the initial dailies Empire became involved in the actual production, making a number of suggestions, including the recruitment of Mac Ahlberg as cinematographer. According to Paoli, the first draft of the script contained no humor whatsoever, and the film's comedic elements only came out over further revisions and during the actual production. Yuzna described the film as having the "sort of shock sensibility of an Evil Dead with the production values of, hopefully, The Howling." Gordon cited The Revenge of Frankenstein as a major inspiration for the film. John Naulin worked on the film's gruesome makeup effects, using what he described as "disgusting shots brought out from the Cook County morgue of all kinds of different lividities and different corpses." The morgue set was based on the aforementioned Cook County morgue, which was newly built and featured cutting-edge technology; Gordon opted for this look since he felt old morgues had been overdone in horror films. Naulin and Gordon also used a book of forensic pathology in order to present how a corpse looks once the blood settles in the body, creating a variety of odd skin tones. Naulin said that Re-Animator was the bloodiest film he had ever worked on: in the past, he had never used more than a couple of gallons (7.6liters) of blood on a film, but on Re-Animator he used twelve times as much. Jeffrey Combs was cast as Herbert West. Combs had never read any H. P. Lovecraft before his casting and was taken aback by the script; he later said he only took the role because he needed the work and assumed the film would never reach a large audience. Principal photography began on November 28, 1984, with a six-week shooting schedule, though Gordon has boasted that they finished shooting the film in just four weeks. The biggest makeup challenge in the film was the headless Dr. Hill zombie. Tony Doublin designed the mechanical effects and was faced with the problem of proportion once the 9–10 inches of the head were removed from the body. Each scene forced him to use a different technique. For