Intriguingly, the Airstreams were acquired from the King of Morocco himself, who had previously used them for hunting excursions. Then, the interiors were completely overhauled by Nemec to reflect Ethel and Big Bob Carter’s middle class tastes and values. “The Airstream trailer becomes the bright and shiny antithesis of everything else in the film which is largely decaying and trapped in another time,” notes Nemec. “It’s the one place in the film I used modern day fabrics, textures and colors. It was important to show that before they arrived in the hills, the Carter family had a structure, an order to their lives, a certain amount of success and privilege and that had to come across in the design.”
The Carter trailer makes a stark counterpoint to Nemec’s designs for the mutants’ living quarters, which also involved one of the film’s most dramatic and original sets: the atomic test village. “The mutants are stuck,” Nemec says. “They are stuck in this devastating time, stuck in the only way of life they’ve ever known, stuck in their depraved savagery. So, for their world, we used coarser textures, darker colors and rougher surfaces. I wanted to show as accurately as possible what can happen in the wake of nuclear explosions; what an environment might look like that had been preserved in that moment, which leads you to see how the mutants are, in a way, rebelling against their awful circumstances.”
For Alexandre Aja, and Gregroy Levassseur, Nemec’s sets became part of a whole design matrix that was created with the intent of instilling anxiety, morbid fascination and cold fear into every frame of film. “We knew this film was going to be a tremendous challenge right from the beginning,” says Aja. “We had a very tight schedule, a lot of action, a lot of difficult scenes, a lot of prosthetics, a lot of special effects, a lot of CGI – but we knew every single element was important to telling the story.”
Movie Database
In Theaters
