In this feature for Letterboxd Journal, I talk to Wētā Workshop artist Greg Broadmore about the creatures that populate Peter Jackson's (still underrated) 2005 remake of King Kong. 

According to an on-screen title, the opening sequence of Peter Jackson’s third feature, 1992 zombie splatterfest Braindead (released in the US as Dead Alive), takes place on Skull Island, which film fans of many stripes would have recognized as the canonical home of a certain giant gorilla.

While such Easter eggs have long since become de rigueur in big genre movies, this endearing shout-out was an early indicator of Jackson’s lifelong obsession with King Kong: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 film with an assured position on the list of the most iconic movies ever made.

Jackson was famously inspired to become a filmmaker when he saw King Kong on television as a nine-year-old, and his fervent fandom saw him later acquire one of the Kong metal armatures used by stop-motion animation pioneer Willis H. O’Brien during filming. Jackson also went on to remake the film in spectacular fashion in 2005—and that wasn’t even his first attempt.

In the mid ’90s, when Hollywood was first starting to pay proper attention to Jackson after his  Oscar-nominated breakout Heavenly Creatures, he and collaborator Fran Walsh were commissioned by Universal Pictures to write a new King Kong film, but the project was shelved when the perceived failures of the Mighty Joe Young and Godzilla adaptations made the studio think that monster movie rehashes weren’t the vibe.