Even as the actors were being cast for the mutant family, the filmmakers were simultaneously conducting painstaking research to begin creating their disturbing appearances. Aja and Levasseur began with a dread-inspiring vision of what atomic radiation might have wrought upon a family of miners hidden away in a cave during the atomic testing era that shook the deserts of the American West in the 1950s. “Alex and Gregory came in with their own ideas for the make-up, prosthetics and CGI. They brought in books of real human anomalies, and ultimately created a completely unique mutant family that was the result of this nuclear testing in a remote desert mining town,” explains producer Peter Locke.
For Aja, this almost scientific authenticity was key to bringing the film into the modern cinematic era. “A lot of our ideas for the mutants came from this background idea that they were the result of a family that never left what became a devastated nuclear testing site,” he explains. “We based all our descriptions and directions on real documents, pictures and footage that we found on the effects of nuclear fallout in Chernobyl and Hiroshima. Everything was created around real facts about radiation’s effects.”
But it is one thing to describe genetic mutations and another thing to turn them into flesh and blood renderings that chill to the bone. To tackle this demanding task, the filmmakers brought in renowned special effects and makeup house K.N.B. EFX Group Inc., whose lengthy list of credits includes some of the most technologically imaginative films of the last few years, among them CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, for which Howard Berger is nominated for an Academy Award, LEMONY SNICKET, MINORITY REPORT and SIN CITY.
K.N.B. spent over six grueling months creating the look of the mutant family in a drastically realistic manner. After going over Aja and Levasseru’s reality-based mutant designs, they first turned to 3-D design tools -- tools that allow traditional sculptors to sculpt and paint their characters on a computer – in order to forge models of each individual mutant family member. From these digital models, molds were made of each horrific face. Finally, the makeup team took casts of all the actor’s bodies and heads so as to custom fit the resulting prosthetics and makeup. “It was a very involved process,” K.N.B. artist Scott Patton reveals, “and we knew that the more prep we did beforehand, the better the results would be.”
For some of the most harrowing horror sequences, state-of-the-art animatronic replicas of the actors were utilized so that they could be literally torn from limb to limb. To create these, each of the actors had to submit to a “full body cyber scan.” Explains Patton: “For the cyber scan, the actor stands on a platform, and a laser scans every inch of their bodies. Exact measurements are fed to a multiple axis mill, which acts like a drill of sorts and carves a piece of foam based on the measurements. This way you get an exact representation of each actor’s body. Unfortunately, the details aren’t good enough for lasering the face, so we have to do those by hand.”
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