The Trickster's House of Style

Finding the right look for a horror icon is not an exact science. I mean, look at Jason. The burlap sack he rocked in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) had its charms but it wasn't until he donned a hockey mask midway through Friday the 13th 3D (1982) that the character took off into the horror stratosphere. Who could've guessed that'd happen? There's just no telling what an audience will connect with.

For instance, I'm sure that during the making of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) more than a few people must've questioned the wisdom of putting a dream-stalking boogeyman in a red and green striped sweater but look how well that paid off.

Successfully designing a horror villain seems to be as attributable to happy accidents as much to deliberate artistic design. The classic example of which would be Michael Myers.

Would Halloween (1978) have become the classic that it is had Tommy Lee Wallace not included the unlikely option of a Captain Kirk mask among the choices he presented to John Carpenter in determining what disguise their villain should wear on his rampage through Haddonfield? Probably not. Sometimes fate just intervenes and provides the right inspiration at the right time.

And, sometimes it doesn't...

The Trickster (played by stage actor T. Ryder Smith), star of 1994's Brainscan, is far from the only would-be franchise player that failed to win the hearts of horror fans. But he remains the one that looked the most ridiculous. From head to toe The Trickster is a catastrophe.

I mean, Dr. Giggles never made it to a Part 2 (a crime, in my opinion) but you can't fault the way Larry Drake looked as the mad medico in that movie. Similarly, Clint Howard really did look like an Ice Cream Man in, uh, The Ice Cream Man (1995). The Trickster on the other hand, well...where to begin?

To be fair, coming to a consensus on how a demonic jester spawned from a CD-ROM ought to look couldn't have been easy. I mean, just looking at the results tells you that much. But man, we have both a mohawk and a mullet going on. I'm no expert about hair but is that what they call a pompadour? Look, all I know is that when designing your hopeful horror star to be, it's a bad idea to model him after '80s pop singer Howard Jones.

Seriously, you don't want your movie's embodiment of evil to look like he should be jamming on a synthesizer. An even worse move was giving him an '80s "rock" wardrobe (complete with leather pants) to match the big hair.

And in a post-Hellraiser world, what was a nose-ring supposed to do for The Trickster's look? Dee Snider looked laughable in Strangeland (1998) but at least you could say he was really in the game.


It's too bad for Brainscan that The Trickster is a walking joke because the movie itself is, well, the movie itself is pretty bad too.

Director John Flynn was responsible for some great movies, like the legendary action fave Rolling Thunder (1977), the James Woods thriller Best Seller (1988), and one of Steven Seagal's best, Out For Justice (1991) and Brainscan's script was by Andrew Kevin Walker - who proved he knew how to write the hell out of a horror movie with Seven (1995) but things just didn't come together for these guys on Brainscan.

A movie about cutting edge technology should've had a villain with a cutting edge look. Instead, The Trickster was a evil genie that took his cues from an earlier decade's most unfortunate fashions. After sixteen years, everything else about Brainscan is long since dated (in some ways, endearingly so) but its villain's look was already dated the day they bought his clothes.

And unlike Jason, The Trickster never got a sequel to retool his look.