How’s that for mothballs? The moment where Billy cuts his mouth open, letting out a blast of putrified air and fluttering moths, is brief but memorably disgusting. In an interview with Empire Magazine, Jones, Ortega, and legendary Hollywood “bug guy” Steven Kutcher revealed how they pulled the effect off. It involved putting a plastic shelf with air holes in Jones’ mouth, which was then filled with Fuller’s Earth (a clay-like powder) and three cabbage white butterflies. As Kutcher explained, moths move “like bullets,” so they went with butterflies to ensure they could be properly caught on-camera when they went flying.
Unfortunately for poor Jones, he had to do the shot twice. As he explained to E! News in 2020:
“[…] The first take they get it all set in there, cameras were rolling, [mimes holding the butterflies in his mouth], and then a light burns out. I got my mouth open and out comes mud and the [butterflies] are kind of going, ‘Ahhh!’ [mimes butterflies falling out of his mouth anticlimactically]. That was a ruined take. Take two is where we got it right.”
Nowadays, most filmmakers would probably (and understandably) save themselves a whole lot of stress and uncertainty by simply animating the dust and moths digitally. Still, I have to tip my hat to Jones, Kutcher, and the rest of the “Hocus Pocus” crew. The sight of Billy coughing up whatever gunk he’s amassed in his throat from 300 years of being dead has been burned on my memory ever since I saw the movie as a kid. It’s the sort of tangibly gross visual effect that you just can’t match in CGI, like so many of the other strange and twisted creatures that Jones has played over the years.