Horror legend Tom Savini was originally slated to play the "Frank Peretti" character, but dropped out at the last minute due to a scheduling conflict.
Director Terry Michael King is the shortest-lived of the eleven victims who get mauled, decapitated, crushed, and, most frequently, brain-sucked by the movie's reptilian star. As "Convertible Victim," King doesn't have any lines except one uninterrupted scream. He is onscreen for 13 seconds of screaming and flailing.
Brainiac's source material is a 1962 horror movie called The Brainiac (1962), one of dozens of low budget Mexican monster films trucked over the border and sloppily re-dubbed by schlock purveyor K. Gordon Murray. The Brainiac original Spanish language title features a suave, meteor-riding monster exacting revenge on the descendants of the Mexican Inquisition by sucking their brains out. Murray produced more than 40 films between the late 50s and mid 70s. The new Brainiac began a few years ago as a backyard homage to its namesake. At the time, King was managing a film production lighting house and working on documentaries and shorts on the side.
In the spring of 2003, Terry Michael King and Greg Bayan went to a horror convention in Cleveland to find out how plausible it was to procure a Brainiac monster. Greg asked makeup-and-effects legend Tom Savini for help. Savini agreed, utilizing students Allison Amann and James Woodruff from his Special Make-up Effects Program at the Douglas Education Center in Monessen, Pennsylvania.
The Brainiac team drew up an extensive monster wish list design reminiscent of the photogenic mutants that held audiences captive in the 50s and 60s. They wanted it to have bat-like features and the brain exposed with pulsating brain lobes. They also wanted a phallic, brain-sucking tongue that attached to its victims heads like a leech. And deformed, meaty claws.