I was eight years old the first time Evil Dead II broke my brain.
I shouldn’t have been watching it. I was, and it was fine, and it made me who I am. The deadite transformations, the possessed hand, Ash running from his own severed limb while it made rude gestures at him, all of it was gooey and wrong and alive in a way that no CGI effect has ever quite replicated, because the gooey wrong thing was actually there, in the room, on the set, made by human hands in a workshop somewhere. I didn’t know that at eight. I just knew it was the most exciting thing I had ever seen.
A few years later, watching end credits roll on something I can no longer remember, I saw three letters: K. N. B. Then I saw them again. Then I started looking for them. They were everywhere, in the credits of the films that were doing that thing to me, that specific thing where the monster or the wound or the transformation felt like it had weight and texture and consequence. KNB. KNB. KNB.
I wrote the name down. I started pulling at the thread.
What follows is everything I found.
1963
March 15th, 1963: Greg Nicotero is Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The N in KNB arrives in the city that will, five years later, produce Night of the Living Dead. His family are movie people, his parents are film buffs who take him downtown to the Gateway and Warner theaters, and his uncle Sam Nicotero is a working actor with Romero credits. Greg grows up making Super 8 films in his backyard, dissecting how every effect works, obsessing over Jaws and Dawn of the Dead with a particular intensity. He has described watching Jaws as a kid and thinking: “How the hell did they do that? How’d they build a big giant shark that could eat people?” That question, how did they do that, becomes the engine of his entire career.
1964
November 25th, 1964: Robert Kurtzman is Born in Crestline, Ohio
The K in KNB comes from a small town in Ohio. Robert Kurtzman discovers horror through monster magazines (Famous Monsters of Filmland being the gateway drug for essentially every practical effects artist of this generation) and develops an obsession that eventually overrides every other plan. He briefly attends art school before dropping out at nineteen and heading west to Los Angeles to make it happen whether it makes sense or not.
December 20th, 1964: Howard Berger is Born in Los Angeles, California
The B in KNB is a Southern California kid with horror in his blood from the start. By age eight he has found Famous Monsters of Filmland. His parents let him run with it. As a young teenager he attends a science fiction convention in Los Angeles and hears Rick Baker speak, and that is it, that is the moment. He has three idols: Dick Smith, Rick Baker, and Stan Winston. He calls them his holy trinity, and he means it the way Catholics mean it.
1977
Thirteen-year-old Howard Berger attends another convention and meets Stan Winston in person. Winston, apparently recognizing something in the kid, makes him a promise: keep your grades up, pay attention to detail, and there will be a job waiting at Stan Winston Studio after high school. Howard keeps his grades up. He pays attention to detail.
1982
The original Creepshow premieres: George Romero directing, Stephen King writing, Tom Savini on effects. A teenage Greg Nicotero visits the Pittsburgh set and meets Savini for the first time. He has said of that visit: “I was able to look behind the curtain of filmmaking, and it changed me forever.” Romero offers him a job. Nicotero, who is about to start college as a pre-med student at Westminster, turns it down. He has called this the moment that “began a lifelong friendship.” It is also, in retrospect, the moment the fuse was lit.
1984
Three people, three cities, same trajectory.
Howard Berger graduates high school and walks into Stan Winston Studios exactly as promised. He works on Predator, Aliens, and Pumpkinhead, then later moves over to Rick Baker’s shop. He is learning from his holy trinity, up close, every day.
Robert Kurtzman, nineteen years old, makes the move from Crestline, Ohio to Hollywood. He has decided this is happening regardless.
Greg Nicotero receives a second invitation from George Romero, this time for Day of the Dead. This time he says yes. He moves to Pittsburgh, sets aside the pre-med plan, and steps onto a film set as an apprentice to Tom Savini.
1985
Day of the Dead: Where the Bloodline Begins
On the Pittsburgh set of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, two people meet: Greg Nicotero, Savini’s apprentice, and Howard Berger, a young Stan Winston Studios artist. They become, in Berger’s own words, “fast friends.” Nicotero appears onscreen as a soldier named Johnson. Robert Kurtzman, meanwhile, fills a slot on John Carl Buechler’s effects team that opens up when Berger moves over to Savini’s crew.
The three future founders of KNB EFX Group are now working on the same film without yet knowing what they are going to build together.
I cannot overstate what this year means. Day of the Dead is where the Savini apprenticeship becomes a lived education, Nicotero watching the master every single day, absorbing not just technique but philosophy. The idea that a well-made practical effect is not a trick but a truth. That if you build it correctly it does not lie to the camera. That the audience’s nervous system will respond whether they want it to or not, because the thing is real and the camera knows it.
I thought about getting into effects myself around this age. I had the obsession but not the patience for sculpture, and I eventually figured out that writing about monsters was its own kind of making them. But I still watch every behind-the-scenes documentary I can find, and every time I watch footage from the Day of the Dead set I feel that specific thing you feel when you are watching an origin story and you already know how it turns out.
1986
Kurtzman earns his first feature credit. Nicotero and Berger are both in Los Angeles now, working freelance across a run of genre films. By the end of the year the three of them are roommates, sharing a place in L.A., working gig to gig, building something that does not have a name yet.
1987
Evil Dead II: The Prototype
Sam Raimi calls. The three of them work together for the first time on a single production: Evil Dead II. None of them yet has KNB on a business card. This is technically pre-KNB freelance work. But it is the spiritual founding job of the studio, the film that proves the three of them together are something different than any of them apart.
Nicotero is hands-on in more than one sense, his actual hand appears onscreen playing Ash’s severed, possessed hand in several shots. He also brings a camera to set and shoots six hours of behind-the-scenes footage at his own expense, on his own equipment, because he is that kid. He will always be that kid.
This is the film that breaks my brain at age eight, watching a tape I found in a place I will not specify. The deadite faces. The stop-motion Henrietta. The sheer physical invention of every single frame. I have no idea at the time that the people who made those effects are roommates in a Los Angeles apartment, barely a year away from going into business together. I just know that the thing on the screen has weight.
Howard Berger also does effects this year on Romero’s Creepshow 2, making him a second-generation Creepshow artist before the franchise is even a franchise.
1988
Spring 1988: KNB EFX Group is Founded in Los Angeles
They sign the papers. Kurtzman, Nicotero, Berger: KNB. The name is the initials of their last names in alphabetical order, and it is the simplest possible declaration of what they are. Three friends who have been orbiting the same films, living in the same apartment, and doing the same work, deciding to make it official.
Robert Kurtzman has compared the L.A. makeup effects scene of the mid-1980s to a local bands scene, a community of artists who influenced each other. The three of them had already been roommates and frequent collaborators. Making the partnership formal was almost a paperwork formality.
The company’s first official film is Intruder, directed by Scott Spiegel, the same Scott Spiegel who co-wrote Evil Dead II. The bloodline could not be more direct.
Their studio is based in the San Fernando Valley, and it is small. It is just them.
1989
Year One: Doing it Themselves
KNB jumps headfirst into the late-1980s direct-to-video and franchise-sequel boom. Their first wave of credits is a checklist of horror brand-name sequels: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Kurtzman supervises Freddy’s head effects), Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, DeepStar Six, The Horror Show, and several more. The budgets are tiny. According to the company’s own histories, these films were so cheap that the three founders had to do almost all the work themselves, sculpting, molding, painting, and applying every gag personally.
They have always pointed to this as the secret of KNB’s early reputation. When you have no money and no crew and you have to do everything yourself, you learn very fast. And when the gag works anyway, people notice.
1990
Misery: The First Big Credibility Check
Two films come out this year that matter. Bride of Re-Animator and Tremors both feature KNB effects, and both do well. But the watershed moment of 1990 is Misery.
Rob Reiner initially turns KNB away. He is deemphasizing the novel’s gore, he says, and he does not need a makeup effects house. KNB pitches him on a different idea entirely, not gore, but realism. Subdued, psychologically precise effects. The hobbling sequence, in particular, done with the kind of care that makes you feel it in your own ankles. Reiner hires them. The result is one of the most agonizing prosthetic gags in film history, and the first major mainstream credibility check for the company.
Around the same time, George Romero recommends KNB to producer Debra Hill for Gross Anatomy, a comedy about medical students. Romero recommends them specifically because he remembers that Greg had been a pre-med student. The realistic cadavers KNB builds for that film cost them more money than the job pays, but they catch the attention of Kevin Costner, who hires them to build animatronic buffalo for Dances with Wolves.
That last sentence is the one that keeps surprising people. KNB making animatronic buffalo for Kevin Costner is how a horror effects shop breaks out of the horror ghetto and into mainstream Hollywood. They are more versatile than anyone realized, and now everyone knows it.
A note on the 1990 Night of the Living Dead remake: Tom Savini, Nicotero’s mentor, directed that film. But the makeup effects were handled by John Vulich and Everett Burrell of Optic Nerve, not by KNB. The Savini-Romero-Nicotero relationship is the throughline of KNB’s entire story, but KNB itself was not the effects house on that particular picture.
1991
City Slickers comes out. KNB does the calving sequence, including animatronic calves, and it is the kind of effects work nobody expects from a horror shop, gentle, warm, convincing. Wes Craven hires them for The People Under the Stairs. KNB is now working simultaneously in prestige comedy and in horror, which is exactly where they want to be.
1992
Army of Darkness and the Tarantino Deal
Sam Raimi calls again. KNB reunites with him on Army of Darkness, the Evil Dead II sequel, supervising the skeletal army effects. The KNB website calls it one of the studio’s “crowning achievements,” and they are not wrong. It is gleeful, inventive, physically extraordinary work.
The other enormous development of 1992 is invisible at the time. Robert Kurtzman hires a then-unknown video store clerk named Quentin Tarantino to write a screenplay from a treatment Kurtzman and John Esposito had developed, a vampire-Western-crime story called From Dusk Till Dawn. Kurtzman pays Tarantino $1,500. Tarantino has openly credited this as the money that let him quit his day job. Kurtzman and Esposito were the first people to ever pay Quentin Tarantino to write a screenplay.
In return, Tarantino agrees that KNB will do the effects on his own directorial debut. That debut turns out to be Reservoir Dogs, and KNB handles the ear-cutting torture scene.
The film that becomes From Dusk Till Dawn will take four more years to reach theaters. The relationship it creates will last decades.
1993
Jurassic Park Hits and Everyone Panics
Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park opens in June. The dinosaurs are digital, they are extraordinary, and every practical effects shop in Hollywood spends the summer quietly wondering if they are finished.
KNB’s response, in Howard Berger’s own words, they decide to “just ride it out.”
They continue working. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, Dr. Giggles, and other genre titles fill the calendar. Kurtzman later said he did not hesitate to take on the Jason job despite the franchise’s complicated reputation. You take the work. You do it well. You keep going.
1994
Pulp Fiction: Escaping the Genre Ghetto
This is the year KNB’s reputation officially escapes horror. They do effects on Pulp Fiction, the blood splatter in Jules’s car after Marvin’s accidental shooting is a KNB job, and remains one of the most-referenced gore gags in modern cinema. The effect is so clean, so specific, so perfectly calibrated to the tonal register of the film around it, that it becomes almost invisible as an effect. You just believe it.
They also do Wes Craven’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, beginning a Craven relationship that will continue for over a decade.
1995
Martin Scorsese’s Casino comes out, and the head-in-the-vise scene is a KNB job. So is John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. KNB is now working with Scorsese and Carpenter in the same year, which is not something most horror effects shops can say.
1996
From Dusk Till Dawn and Scream: KNB Conquers the Year
The screenplay Robert Kurtzman commissioned in 1992 finally reaches theaters. From Dusk Till Dawn, directed by Robert Rodriguez, written by Tarantino, story by Kurtzman, effects by KNB. The vampire transformation sequences and the monster massacre in the Titty Twister are pure KNB, and they are extraordinary, funny and disgusting and physically inventive in a way that only gets better on rewatch.
Then in December, Scream opens. KNB designs Ghostface mask prototypes, which Wes Craven rejects as too gargoyle-ish in favor of a Fun World mask he finds on location. But KNB handles everything else, the Drew Barrymore gut-and-hang sequence (Howard Berger uses a hollowed-out body double rather than prosthetics on Barrymore), Steve Orth’s chair-eviscerated corpse, and the rest of the film’s effects work. Scream changes American horror, and KNB is in the middle of it.
1997
Wishmaster: Kurtzman Steps Behind the Camera
Robert Kurtzman directs Wishmaster, his first major feature as a director, with KNB handling the djinn effects. He takes an uncredited cameo as piano wire guy. The film is gloriously grotesque in the way only a KNB-effects production directed by one of the three founders of KNB could be.
Other 1997 credits include Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson; KNB builds the prosthetic appendage that needs no further description) and Spawn.
1998
John Carpenter’s Vampires, Dean Koontz’s Phantoms, Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, and The Faculty. The slate of collaborators is now genuinely extraordinary: Raimi, Carpenter, Rodriguez, Craven, Tarantino, Anderson, Costner, Scorsese. KNB has become the house that everyone calls.
1999
The Green Mile: The Darabont Friendship Begins
Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile is released, with KNB handling the effects. This is the film that cements what Nicotero would later call one of his most important creative friendships. Darabont and Nicotero will work together for years, and it is Darabont who eventually hands Nicotero the project that changes everything about his career. But that is still eleven years away. For now they are just two people who have made something good together.
2000
Frank Herbert’s Dune: The First Emmy
KNB wins its first Emmy Award for Outstanding Makeup on the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune. Robert Kurtzman is credited as Animatronic Creature Effects Supervisor. This is the moment the television industry understands that KNB can deliver large-scale prosthetic and animatronic work on the small screen as well as anywhere else.
2001
Thir13en Ghosts, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars, and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (Tom Cruise’s mangled face). Berger and Nicotero are simultaneously running horror, action, and prestige drama effects. There is no longer any category they do not work in.
2002
Robert Kurtzman begins quietly winding down his involvement at KNB. His head is increasingly in directing and producing. The formal separation is still a year away, but the direction is clear.
2003
Kurtzman Leaves: The Company Becomes Two
Howard Berger has said in print that Kurtzman wanted to focus on directing and raising his family. Kurtzman moves back to Crestline, Ohio, and founds Precinct 13 Entertainment. KNB EFX Group continues as a Berger-and-Nicotero operation. The name stays. The founding partnership of three becomes two, and has remained two ever since.
This is also the year Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is released, with KNB handling some of the most operatic screen violence in modern American cinema: the House of Blue Leaves massacre, the Crazy 88s, the geyser-spray of blood that Tarantino uses as punctuation throughout. The Tarantino partnership is now an ongoing institutional relationship.
2004
Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Continued work on Showtime’s Masters of Horror. The Tarantino collaboration continues to deepen.
2005
Land of the Dead, Sin City, and the Closing of a Circle
George Romero releases Land of the Dead, his follow-up to Day of the Dead twenty years on. KNB handles the effects. At Nicotero’s suggestion, Tom Savini, now working as a director, appears in a cameo as a zombie. The Pittsburgh apprentice is now the Hollywood studio head, and his old teacher is in the makeup chair. If you want to understand what KNB means to the people who built it, this is the moment to look at.
Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City also comes out this year. KNB transforms Mickey Rourke into Marv, Benicio del Toro into Jackie Boy, and Nick Stahl into the Yellow Bastard, building a yellow-skin appliance and a distended-belly prosthetic that have no precedent in the makeup effects catalog. Nicotero personally coaches Stahl on how to perform through the dense makeup.
Also in 2005, KNB convinces production on Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to go practical rather than digital. Tami Lane leads a team of 42 makeup and prosthetic artists. Howard Berger is makeup department head and creature effects supervisor. They do not yet know what is about to happen.
2006
March 5th, 2006: Howard Berger Wins the Academy Award
At the 78th Academy Awards at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Howard Berger and Tami Lane win the Oscar for Best Makeup for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Will Ferrell and Steve Carell present the award. Berger’s acceptance speech thanks his partners in crime at KNB EFX Group by name, dedicates the award to his late parents, and ends with a reference to Where the Wild Things Are, he calls himself their “little Max who is still playing in the forest with the Wild Things.” The same film wins KNB the BAFTA for Best Makeup and Hair.
2007
The Mist: Nicotero Gets a Director Credit
KNB handles effects on both halves of Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse double feature, Planet Terror and Death Proof. They also do Frank Darabont’s The Mist, with Nicotero serving as second-unit director. Darabont will later cite this credit specifically as the proof that Nicotero is ready to direct. The seed is planted.
2009
Inglourious Basterds. The swastika-carved-into-the-forehead sequence at the film’s end is a KNB gag, and Tarantino has called it one of his favorite effects shots in any of his films.
2010
October 31st, 2010: The Walking Dead Premieres on AMC
Frank Darabont calls Greg Nicotero. KNB is going to design the zombies for a new AMC series based on Robert Kirkman’s comic. Nicotero has described this as the moment everything in the previous twenty-two years was prologue for. He personally runs zombie school, teaching extras how to move and hold their bodies. The legendary Bicycle Girl walker, half a torso dragging itself along the grass in the pilot’s opening sequence, is a KNB build. Nicotero has called her his all-time favorite zombie creation.
The series premieres on Halloween night. It becomes the most-watched show in cable television history. By Season 5 it is regularly outperforming NFL games in key demographics, with 17.3 million viewers for the season premiere. There is a generation of people for whom the words “practical effects” mean, before anything else, the zombies of The Walking Dead.
KNB’s decision to just ride out the CGI wave in 1993 is vindicated in the most spectacular way possible.
2011
The Pacific Emmy and Nicotero’s Directorial Debut
KNB wins an Emmy for HBO’s The Pacific. The documentary Nightmare Factory, about KNB EFX Group, is released and screens at festivals.
Frank Darabont asks Nicotero to direct an episode of The Walking Dead Season 2. Darabont reportedly puts it to him as a trick question: do you want a zombie-light episode or a zombie-heavy episode? Nicotero takes the zombie-heavy episode. He never looks back.
2012
Hitchcock: Berger’s Second Oscar Nomination
Howard Berger receives his second Academy Award nomination for transforming Anthony Hopkins into Alfred Hitchcock in the FOX Searchlight feature Hitchcock. The portrait makeup is precise and deeply strange in the way the best transformation work always is, you know it is Anthony Hopkins, and you also completely believe it is Hitchcock, and those two things should not coexist but they do.
KNB also wins another Emmy for The Walking Dead this year and handles Django Unchained, continuing the Tarantino partnership into its third decade.
2013
A third Emmy for The Walking Dead. Nicotero is now firmly the producing director of the series. He also designs the Governor’s zombie-head aquarium for the Season 3 Blu-ray special edition, because of course he does. He is that kid with the camera on the Evil Dead II set, and he will always find a way to go deeper into the thing he loves.
2014
Spider-Man, Lone Survivor, and Breaking Bad
Howard Berger handles the Electro makeup for Jamie Foxx in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. He also becomes makeup department head on Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor, the beginning of an ongoing relationship with Mark Wahlberg that eventually leads to Berger becoming Wahlberg’s personal makeup artist from this point forward.
KNB also handles the prosthetic age makeup on Bryan Cranston for the final season of Breaking Bad, earning Berger another Emmy nomination. Making someone look older is one of the most technically demanding things in makeup effects, and Cranston’s work is among the best examples of the form.
2015
The Hateful Eight
Tarantino’s snowbound chamber piece relies on KNB for its climactic splatter, the exploding-head moments in the film’s back half are Berger and Nicotero’s work. Critics described the violence as comic and splatterpunk-ish, which is precisely the register Tarantino was going for and precisely what KNB delivers. Thirty years of working together, and the collaboration keeps getting better.
2016 to 2018
KNB continues across the broader Walking Dead universe, Fear the Walking Dead, and a run of features. Nicotero’s title on the flagship show expands to executive producer. Robert Kurtzman, now working in Atlanta with partner Marcia King under the name Robert Kurtzman MUFX LLC, takes the makeup department co-head position on Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. He builds as many as thirty hidden ghosts into the show’s backgrounds and shadows, some of which viewers are still finding years later.
2019
September 26th, 2019: Creepshow Premieres on Shudder
Greg Nicotero gets to take over the franchise that changed his life as a teenager. Shudder picks up Creepshow as its first long-form original series. Nicotero is executive producer, showrunner, and directs the pilot, an adaptation of a Stephen King short story starring Adrienne Barbeau, Tobin Bell, and Giancarlo Esposito. KNB handles all the creature and makeup effects. The premiere season scores 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and becomes the most-watched program in Shudder’s history.
Robert Kurtzman, working independently, handles effects on Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, including a certain bathtub sequence that this column will not describe in detail because some things should be experienced without warning.
2020
The Walking Dead‘s eleventh and final season is announced. A Creepshow Animated Special drops on Shudder on October 30th, followed by A Creepshow Holiday Special in December. KNB supervises makeup effects on HBO’s Watchmen and Lovecraft Country.
2021
Creepshow Season 2 premieres April 1st. Season 3 premieres September 23rd. Nicotero is now running his own horror anthology franchise while simultaneously producing and directing the most popular cable horror drama on television, which is a sentence I enjoy very much.
2022
November 20th, 2022: Nicotero Directs the Walking Dead Finale
After eleven seasons, 177 episodes, and twelve years, The Walking Dead ends with “Rest in Peace,” directed by Greg Nicotero, his roughly 37th episode on the series, written by Corey Reed and Jim Barnes from a story by showrunner Angela Kang. The finale brings back Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes and Danai Gurira as Michonne. As is tradition, Nicotero cameos as a walker one final time, a striped-shirted zombie in Norman Reedus’s closing shot. He has been killed onscreen by Laurie Holden’s Andrea three separate times across the show’s run.
The kid from Pittsburgh who watched Jaws and asked how they built the shark has just directed the finale of one of the most-watched television series in history. He built some very good sharks along the way.
2023
Creepshow Season 4 premieres October 13th. The Walking Dead: Dead City and The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon both premiere. KNB continues to supervise effects across the Walking Dead universe. Nicotero also designs a bespoke Leatherface character skin for the 2023 Texas Chain Saw Massacre video game, because he is constitutionally incapable of not going deeper into the things he loves.
2024
Fallout, Swan Song, and Twilight of the Dead
KNB handles the prosthetic makeup design for Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout, including the Walton Goggins ghoul makeup and the wasteland mutations that define the show’s visual world. Nicotero earns an Emmy nomination for the work.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, the Rick-and-Michonne miniseries, airs. KNB is on it.
Two projects are announced that deserve attention. The first is Swan Song, the television adaptation of Robert McCammon’s post-apocalyptic 1987 novel, with Nicotero directing the pilot and serving as executive producer. The second is Twilight of the Dead, the seventh and final film in George Romero’s Living Dead franchise, to be directed by Brad Anderson with Milla Jovovich and Betty Gabriel starring and KNB leading the effects.
That last one stops me every time I think about it. Nicotero apprenticed under Tom Savini on Day of the Dead in 1985. Forty years later, he will be the effects lead on the film that closes Romero’s Dead cycle forever. He has called it a full-circle moment in his career. I don’t have a better word for it than that.
2025
Creepshow Ends After Four Seasons
In September, Variety reports that Creepshow has been canceled at Shudder after four seasons and 23 episodes, plus the two specials. A complete series Blu-ray box set is released November 11th.
Nicotero’s new Shudder reality competition series Guts and Glory premieres September 9th, with Nicotero hosting and executive producing. KNB continues on Daryl Dixon Season 3 and Dead City Season 2. Nicotero redesigns Jason Voorhees for A24 and Peacock’s prequel series Crystal Lake.
Robert Kurtzman continues working in Atlanta, selling original oil paintings based on his old concept sketches for Wishmaster and From Dusk Till Dawn, and appearing on the convention circuit as one of the most eloquent living voices for the analog tradition in practical effects.
2026
Where Everything Stands
KNB EFX Group is in its 38th year, operating out of its 20,000-square-foot facility in Chatsworth, California. Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger still co-own it. Over 800 film and television credits. One Academy Award. Multiple Emmys. A BAFTA. A legacy that runs from A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 to Fallout with almost nothing in between that does not bear their fingerprints somewhere.
Nicotero is currently in production on Daryl Dixon Season 4 (the final season, confirmed at San Diego Comic-Con 2025, with a fall 2026 premiere targeted) and Dead City Season 3 (summer 2026 on AMC). Twilight of the Dead is still securing its financing, and Nicotero has said he has already met with director Brad Anderson and done some designs. The closing of the Romero circle is coming.
Howard Berger serves as a Governor of the Makeup Artists and Hair Stylists Branch of AMPAS. He continues as Mark Wahlberg’s personal makeup artist. He has described makeup effects as a discipline rather than a craft, borrowing the word from a production designer he admires, and I think he is right. Discipline is the right word. It implies rigor, devotion, and a kind of vocation that has nothing to do with career calculation and everything to do with what you cannot stop doing.
Robert Kurtzman runs Robert Kurtzman MUFX LLC in Atlanta. He has 144 makeup department credits and 45 special effects credits on IMDb, plus his directing, writing, and producing work. He is scheduled as a guest at Days of the Dead Atlanta in late February 2026.
There is a thing that happens when you watch the behind-the-scenes footage from a great practical effects sequence, a moment when they pull back and show you the workshop, the molds on the shelf, the foam latex curing in the oven, the painter going over the appliance with a brush so fine it might be used for watercolors. The monster is there in pieces, not yet assembled, and it looks absurd. It looks like the kind of thing a child might make on a rainy afternoon. And then they put it on, and they light it, and the camera rolls, and it becomes real.
KNB has been doing that for 38 years. Three kids from Pittsburgh, Ohio, and Los Angeles who found each other in the middle of a decade when everyone was building monsters and decided to build them better than anyone else. They survived the CGI panic. They survived the franchise-sequel grind. They survived one founding partner leaving to chase a different dream. They won an Oscar for a Narnia movie. They defined what a zombie looks like for an entire generation of television viewers. And somewhere right now Greg Nicotero is designing a creature for a George Romero film that will never have George Romero in it, and Howard Berger is in a makeup trailer somewhere putting a prosthetic on someone’s face, and Robert Kurtzman is in a workshop in Atlanta building something that will frighten people in a theater in the dark.
The thing they are all still doing, decades later, is the same thing Greg was doing when he was a kid with a Super 8 camera in Pittsburgh. The same thing Howard was doing when he heard Rick Baker speak at a convention at thirteen. The same thing Robert was doing when he drove from Crestline, Ohio to Hollywood because what else was he going to do.
“How did they do that? How’d they build a big giant shark?”
You ask the same question long enough and eventually you become the answer.
💜 Now if you’ll excuse me, I have fog to walk into.
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