Horror’s Hidden Genius: What Special Effects Can Teach Us About Innovation

Special effects turn movies into magic, tricking us into believing that what we see on the screen is real. From convincing gore to alien monsters, special effects designers are constantly coming up with new ways to shock and scare us.

To celebrate Halloween, let’s take a look at the special effects in three horror films to see how the magic happened, with an innovation lesson hidden in each.

#1: The Sound of A Quiet Place: Lateral Thinking in Action

In A Quiet Place, the world has been taken over by sightless creatures with an acute sense of hearing. Every noise—the creak of a floorboard, the rustle of leaves—comes with high stakes. The very premise of the film is rooted in the need for silence, which makes the sound of the film even more impactful. 

While working on the movie, sound designers Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl faced a problem common to horror films. If you need the sound of a person walking barefoot, you can simply record someone walking barefoot. But how do you create the sound of a fictional creature? This is the essence of innovation: creating something that does not exist. 

Like all innovators, Van der Ryn and Aadahl had to get creative. To create the sound of the creatures moving, they rubbed crab legs together, and they used twisted celery stalks and lettuce for the opening of the creatures’ ears. And the creatures’ echolocation? A stun gun on a patch of grapes, with the sound digitally slowed down so you can hear the individual clicks.

The lesson here is the importance of lateral thinking. Often, the way you innovate is not always by creating something new but by applying something that already exists in new, novel ways, like using the crunching, snapping sounds of twisted celery stalks to bring life to an alien creature. This kind of lateral thinking was used not just in the sound, but in the visuals of A Quiet Place, with the designers taking inspiration from prehistoric fish, snakes, bats, and bog people.

So when you face a tricky problem and need to create something that doesn’t exist, try thinking laterally. You might find inspiration in an unexpected place.

#2: The Thing’s “Spider-Head”: Prototype Testing

When it comes to practical effects, The Thing is arguably king. The film’s creature effects, designed by Rob Bottin, were groundbreaking and memorable, particularly the spider-head creature. In this sequence, a character’s head detaches itself, rolls to the ground, then sprouts stalks like a spider’s legs and scurries away to escape a fire.

First, a mechanical replica of the actor’s head was made, and a hydraulic ramp was built under the table in order to stretch the head from the body. To make the stretching veins and viscera realistic, they used a mixture of melted plastic and microwaved bubble gum. (There’s that lateral thinking again!)

After the head detaches, a tongue whips out of the creature. In reality, the tongue was actually a cable being retracted into the creature, and then the shot was reversed. Operators hidden under the floor then pushed out the spider-head’s legs, and the creature was moved across the room with a combination of remote control and physical pulling by translucent fishing line.

In the movie, this scene lasts only a few minutes, but it took months of testing to achieve the effects, as they needed to shoot it in one take. When they finally filmed it, though, disaster struck. The plastic and bubble gum mixture let off toxic fumes that built up in the room. When fire was added to the scene, the fumes ignited. Fortunately, no one was injured, and after reconstructing some damaged props, they were able to reset and shoot the scene.

This leads us to our innovation lesson: test, test, and test some more, making sure to mimic real-world (or real-filming) conditions as much as possible. A successful test in perfect lab conditions tells you little about how something will perform in the real world, where conditions are rarely perfect.

#3: Gruesome Transformation in The Fly: Breaking the Solution Down

The Fly is a masterclass in body horror, largely due to the grotesque and unforgettable practical effects that chronicle Seth Brundle’s agonizing transformation into the Brundlefly. 

Chris Walas and his team, including Stephan Dupuis (who won an Oscar for Best Makeup), meticulously crafted seven distinct stages of makeup to depict Brundle's genetic deterioration. They first designed the final incarnation of the creature and then worked out the various steps needed to reach that point. In the early stages, the changes are subtle, like thick black hairs and scaly lesions. With each stage, the changes become more dramatic, through the use of prosthetics, then full-body suits, and finally animatronics. 

The lesson here is twofold. First, start with your desired end state. By first knowing the end goal, you can work backwards to map out how to get there. Then, break the solution down. If you try to tackle everything at once, it can be overwhelming, but if you focus on one piece at a time, it becomes more manageable.

Pushing the Boundaries of Creativity

From the eerie sounds of A Quiet Place to the meticulously crafted set pieces of The Thing to the gruesome transformations of The Fly, special effects artists continually push the boundaries of creativity. Their ingenious solutions, often born from unconventional thinking, rigorous testing, and a methodical approach to complex problems, offer invaluable lessons for anyone seeking to innovate. 

Happy Halloween!

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