When special effects artist Aaron Sims first read the script for Stranger Things, he was struck by how vague the description was for the show’s centrepiece monster. “It basically said, ‘The Demogorgon is a tall, lanky creature that eats children,’” recalls Sims. “I’m thinking, ‘OK, that’s scary – but what does that actually look like?’” What happened when he posed this question to the series creators Matt and Ross Duffer? “They said, ‘We have no idea – come up with something.’”
For Sims, who has worked on films such as The Incredible Hulk, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men, this was a relief. “When there’s already a fanbase, there is a lot of scrutiny and expectation. The fans either love it or hate it – and there’s nothing you can do. Working on The Incredible Hulk, for example, took years. So when it’s a new creature, a lot of people get excited.”
This near-blank canvas led Sims to an unlikely source of inspiration: the snapping mouth of a turtle. “When a turtle opens its jaws,” he says, “it looks like it has rows of teeth – but they’re actually fibres that draw food inward.” He combined this with a Venus flytrap and the result was that uniquely terrifying head that blooms open like a flower, revealing concentric rings of teeth, then clamps down on its prey, usually a screaming child. The Duffer brothers wanted only one modification: no face.
Fans of Stranger Things, which returns later this year, will find plenty to fear in Alien: Earth, which launches this week. Series creator Noah Hawley has promised a terrifying expansion of the film franchise’s already frightening monsters, introducing new creatures that will rival – and even surpass – the iconic, swoop-skulled, chest-bothering, teeth-within-teeth xenomorphs. “I think we’re giving them a run for their money, certainly,” Hawley has said. Alien: Earth, which is a prequel to the first 1979 film, leans heavily into unsettling body horror, too, with new creatures such as the T Ocellus, a jellyfish-like parasite that dislodges the eyes of other organisms in order to seize control of them from within. These newcomers will ensure the series isn’t just recycling established monsters, but introducing fresh causes of terror and revulsion.
Like Sims on Stranger Things, prosthetic makeup designer Barrie Gower leaned heavily on nature when he was creating his monstrous designs for The Infected, the term given to humans who get the brain infection in postapocalyptic zombie horror The Last of Us. Fungus became an integral part of the creative process, with Gower and his team buying so many bags of “grow your own mushroom kits” for the studio to photograph and 3D print that they soon had 15 species on their hands. “Fungus,” says Gower, “is just such an interesting and beautiful kind of growth. There’s so much to play with.”
Gower effectively had a “superpower” for creating monsters out of mushrooms: he hates them, despising everything from their smell to their texture. “It became quite easy to come up with designs that repulsed me,” he says.
Along with his mushroom aversion, Gower also has trypophobia, an intense discomfort triggered by the sight of clusters of small holes or bumps. “It gives you goosebumps,” he says. However, rather than avoiding the formations that make his skin crawl, he employed them for maximum grotesqueness in his designs for how The Infected look, finding the perfect guinea pig in his daughter Lottie, who shares his trypophobia. “If she’s like, ‘Oh God no dad, I don’t like the look’, I know we’ve succeeded.”
The White Walkers, those furrow-faced ice demons in Game of Thrones, required an entirely different approach. Costume designer Michele Clapton envisioned them wearing dark armour that looked salvaged and repurposed, resulting in an austere, unwieldy look. “It was so, so brutal to make,” Clapton says. “The cutting and the bending of the metal was incredibly labour intensive. The armorists just loathed it because they really cut themselves. It’s almost like a huge cheese grater.”
The final pieces of armour proved so hazardous that the team actually had to create much safer leather duplicates for fight sequences, meticulously painted to mimic metal. Protecting all the prosthetics also proved difficult, given the sharp edges. Another major challenge, ironically, was keeping the White Walkers warm while filming in near freezing temperatures. “We had hot-water bottles we could place inside the costumes,” says Clapton. “But as there were so many prosthetics, you had to be really careful, because they could easily tear.”
In fact, keeping performers comfortable in elaborate costumes and prosthetics is a major headache for monster creators. Gower encountered this with the Bloater – the hulking, spore-spewing, elaborately ridged behemoth in The Last of Us. “We built this big suit that, in terms of size, was like wearing a sofa,” he says. “It was made out of a very soft foam latex material. It’s like a huge sponge, but split into six sections and zipped on to the performer.” There was one very predictable consequence: “You just got really hot.”
The inside of the costume could become so sweltering that, between shots, the team had to unzip the back and fan down Adam Basil, who portrayed the Bloater, sometimes even putting him in a pop-up tent complete with an air-conditioning unit on full blast to cool him down. According to Gower, the huge weight, restricted movement and the need for agility combined to make the Bloater costume ultimately unworkable. The team ended up enlisting the help of Wētā FX in New Zealand, who took detailed scans of all the Bloater’s textures and created a digital version.
Such mega-budget productions give creators the luxury of experimentation, with digital backup plans should their monster imaginings go awry. But on shows such as Doctor Who, it’s a different story – as special effects artist Neill Gorton discovered. On the BBC’s cult show, he encountered something every bit as scary as the Time Lord’s weekly foes: a very limited budget.
“It was a comedown in one way,” he says, “coming from working in Hollywood. I had a production design friend who introduced me to Doctor Who. When I asked what it was like, he said, ‘It’s fun – but they just don’t have money.’ I thought, ‘Well, what the hell, I just want to work on it.’ And sometimes it can actually be more fun, because you’ve got to be more creative.”
Take the Weeping Angels, those statue-like alien humanoids that are able to send their victims back in time with a simple touch, gorging on the “time energy” this releases. Producers had initially envisioned using numerous statues, believing that costumed performers painted as statues would resemble street performers too closely. But there was a problem. “The sheer number of statues required would have been impossible given the timeframe,” says Gorton. “You would need a different statue for every pose. That would have been a minimum of 30 statues.”
Forced to find an alternative, he suggested a design that was part prosthetic, part costume, part body paint. “The producers thought it was ridiculous. But we literally had no choice!” he says. Gorton would paint the actors, attach fabric, then “glue it all together and hope for the best”. At that point, he realised how little time he and the team had left to bring the idea to life – just two weeks, compared to the five they would normally have to prepare for an episode. Sadly, this realisation came too late: Gorton had already talked everyone into his idea.
The result? “A total scramble!” They discovered that the masks used to create the Weeping Angels’ haunting blank stare left the performers unable to see. Fortunately, this wasn’t a huge issue, since the creatures had to remain perfectly still – a feat the team achieved by having the actors sit on a bicycle seat attached to a hidden pole. “On a bigger budget,” says Gorton, “you would never go down that road. But given no choice, we just had to be smart and quick about it.”
Of course, it isn’t just the pressure of budgets and time that lead to human-being-based effects. The Duffer brothers were adamant from the start: the Demogorgon would be portrayed by a performer in a suit. This presented probably the biggest conundrum when it came to designing the creature. “Its legs are unusually long,” says Sims. “It has kind of an extra joint. That makes it very challenging for an actor – to be put into stilts and have to run around and jump. The question was, ‘How do I keep the design the Duffer brothers love – but make it work for a person in a suit?’”
Whatever the challenges and the solutions, Sims finds there is always one benefit of working with flesh-and-blood performers: they ground any design in reality. “It’s important to find things in nature the human eye can identify with,” he says. “If you take a human thing that’s scary, then you add all those things to it, that makes it even more scary.”
Asked how he makes monsters such as The Infected so deeply disturbing, Gower makes a similar point: taking everyday things like mushrooms and making them seriously creepy is a guaranteed win. “Using realistic source material is the key,” he says. “Keeping things familiar is always going to make them more terrifying. It just gives you goosebumps.”