Leading FX wizard who first attracted attention for his makeup design on David Cronenberg's "Scanners" (1980) and Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981). In the mid-1980s he formed Chris Walas Inc., the company responsible for creating beings such as the "Gremlins" (1984) and the over-sized spiders of "Arachnophobia" (1990). After his ingenious work on "The Fly" (1985), Walas made his directing debut with the 1986 sequel, "The Fly II".