Production Companies Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, DC Comics (Vertigo), Lonely Film Productions GmbH & Co. KG., Donners' Company, Branded Entertainment/Batfilm Productions, Weed Road Pictures, 3 Art Entertainment, Di Bonaventura Pictures
Rousselot’s most precarious task by far was the bathtub scene, in which Rachel Weisz, as Angela, is fully submerged and held down by Constantine to facilitate her brief passage into the next world. “We wanted to have Rachel’s point of view while she’s underwater, when she opens her eyes and looks up. But of course there’s no room in the tub so we shot it through a mirror,” he says. Adding a mirror to the mix increased the potential of unintended reflections, already complicated by the water, which, Rousselot explains, “reflects not only images but all the practical light.”
The world viewed through John Constantine’s eyes is populated with a variety of demonic half-breeds who live among their human hosts, their true natures undetected and their hideous features thinly masked by human faces that they can transform at will.
Meanwhile, in Hades itself, demons roam and seplavites (soul-eaters) prowl the ruined landscape. Seplavites are a sub-genre of the damned, introduced in the film as soulless, sightless, mindless scavengers who rely on scent alone to scurry after and feed upon new arrivals in the underworld. Not surprisingly, they were inspired by photos the director had seen of medical cadavers with their brains removed.
“It was a striking image,” says Lawrence. “I had been trying to bring a human element into the design of the seplavites, because these are not wholly monsters; they were human at one point. They have no souls now, no brains, no eyes, just sinus passages and mouths, and little spindly bent bodies that can only crawl around after food.” In this, they are relentless.
In the film are hundreds of seplavites, all born from a single fully articulated puppet prototype created at renowned creature shop Stan Winston Studios, under the direction of Creature Effects Supervisor John Rosengrant (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines). Based on illustrations from Lawrence, Naomi Shohan and Stan Winston Studios Concept Art Director Aaron Simms, the hellish scavenger was first sculpted in a computer. From that point, as Rosengrant details, “we had the form milled out and finished in the traditional style of sculpting, putting in pore texture and wrinkles, and made a mold of that. Then we fit it around an articulated skeletal structure and all of the mechanics that will operate the head, and all of that was sealed up with a flesh-like silicone skin.” The finished puppet requires seven technicians and 12 feet of cable to operate.
Pointing to the gruesome puppet and its breathing mechanism that causes it to swell rhythmically, Rosengrant remarks with parental pride, “It’s horrible, isn’t it?”
From this model, which appeared in the film in close-ups, and other demon models designed and constructed at Stan Winston, Craig Hayes’ team at Tippett Studio reproduced a writhing horde. “We scanned them to create computer replicas, painted them, and then put them into performance action, flying or running, jumping over cars,” Hayes offers. “At one point in the film the air is dense with demons.”
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