The VFX supervisor for ‘The Monkey’ breaks down the film’s craziest and quirkiest death scenes. Plus, exclusive visual effects breakdown videos of all the major death moments.
A girl dives into a pool and is electrocuted. Then, she explodes.
This is just one random death moment in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey.
And it’s all because of a cursed toy monkey.
To find out how that pool explosion and a whole bunch of other deaths were orchestrated, befores & afters got The Monkey visual effects supervisor Edward J. Douglas to break them down.
We’ve also been given first-look VFX breakdown videos for the scenes Douglas discusses.
That pool shot
An air-conditioning unit falls at a motel and electrifies a pool. When a woman dives into the now electrified pool, she explodes.
Edward J. Douglas: The pool gag was a lot of fun. That was one of those where Osgood and I had these conversations that we called our ‘death meetings’. We had to work out, what’s the logic of this world and how Looney Tunes would this be? We decided, in this world, if a pool’s electrified, obviously you explode. That’s just how it works. It was all about, what do we want to feel and what’s the most shocking reaction we can get?
Once the AC machine came off the roof, the first thing I said was, okay, we want to see this electricity traveling to the pool. What does that look like? For that, we looked at it with a 1980s movie reference viewpoint. So, what does electricity look like in the 80s? It’s Emperor Palpatine from Jedi. It’s Ghostbusters, and that optical effects-type electricity. We would go ahead and turn it orange to match the surrounding practical sparks that the SFX team had done.
Then it was planning out of the layers. We knew we needed the woman jumping in the pool. Production built a greenscreen bridge that they also built this cannon on to launch blood and guts for the explosion—actually, the number of times we talked about a blood and guts cannon in prep meetings was…fantastic. Our meetings were as absurd as the movie. So, the blood and guts cannon would spray everywhere.
Then it was about all the limbs. Amazing Ape Productions, our creature effects folks, had a big bucket of body parts that we used. I will tell you a secret, we did not count the number of limbs. There might’ve been four arms, I don’t know how many parts flew out there. If you stop and count, there were probably more limbs than there are body parts on a person. There’s also definitely three times as much blood as there is in a normal person. Part of this was the hero beat of the leg flying at camera. We tried that a handful of times by throwing it at camera.
Lastly, we had the plate of Theo James for his reaction, which we knew would be a straightforward enough splitscreen to time the performance reaction together.
In post, it was about layering it altogether. COSA VFX, with visual effects supervisor Tom Rolfe, did that work. We continued to push more blood and guts around the background, since on set we weren’t allowed to mess up the location very much so we knew we’d be painting in some more pieces and then more blood, more blood, more blood.
Oz kept saying, ‘More blood! More blood! Tom finally cranked it up and he’s like, ‘Surely this is way too much blood.’ But Oz said, ‘Perfect. It’s a Disney fountain level of blood. That’s it.’
A lot of the rule of thumb on this movie was, go too far and that would probably be the right amount.
Aunt Ida’s head is on fire
With rollers in her hair, Aunt Ida dies from a freak accident after her whole head lights on fire and she runs outside and into a for sale sign.
We wanted practical fire as much as we could for this, but there were also some key safety restrictions. It was an old heritage house where we shot, so anywhere there was fire, we had to be protecting the whole space. We would’ve loved to light a stunt person on fire and we actually had a stunt actor who was so excited for it. But when it came down to the schedule, because it wasn’t a big budget movie, we didn’t have a ton of time, so it would’ve taken so much longer to shoot with every safety reset than we had time for.
So it became marriage of practical and digital. We started with the talent running through the space. The electrics team designed this amazing halo LED light for wearing around the head.
Then we would put up safety blacks and douse a dummy head on fire. The special effects technician who was watching the playback would mimic the motions. This meant that every bit of fire was captured on the day on location with the same camera angles and same setups, and then that was laid in through visual effects compositing.
COSA handled this again, with visual effects supervisor Tom Rolfe. They initially had a few doubts we had acquired everything we needed, but ultimately we didn’t have to augment with any sim fire. We did shoot a couple extra elements on an insert stage for some of her hair curlers burning. They had to paint out the light rig and some stunt wires that were there for the stunt actress not hitting a pole or the real estate sign. Otherwise, it was a pretty simple extraction off of black for that fire. We were able to keep the nice juicy glow from the plate.
Thrasher meets the hornets
The character Thrasher meets his end after encountering a horde of giant hornets (and then his face falls off).
This was our heaviest CG piece. Trypophobia was the core vision behind that, the fear of lots of little holes, and so it was about making all these holes in the face and these insects coming out. We started with a full dummy of the character of Thrasher. Also, we knew we weren’t going to have real hornets on set. We would get reference. We had our ‘bee’ on a stick, which made us all quite happy flying him through for lighting references.
The actor would mime the whole action. Then there was a conversation of, okay, how much do we keep of the dummy? How much do we keep of the actor? Where do we blend? We ended up doing a blend of the actor with the full CG patches of the face for the hornets emerging and then a full replacement and all the musculature and the jaws falling off.
We didn’t know if we would go that far, initially. In the edit, we were temp’ing various ways for the face to fall apart. The editor got very involved in VFX temps. Quite late in post-production, the editor ‘found’ a way for where the character Hal gets out of the car, the car shifts, and that dislodges part of the jaw, and then the car door slams and that dislodges the other part.
We then handed over those temp comps and edit to Niche VFX and visual effects supervisor Chris van Dyck. They had been prep’ing the assets and the sim. The last layer, which was the timing and the interaction, came quite late, but they did a great job with that.
An accidental decapitation
Babysitter Annie’s head is ‘accidentally’ sliced off at a hibachi restaurant.
In our very first ‘death meeting’, I had done a quick test with a friend where I filmed her with an iPhone, shot some layers and worked out the shot. Sometimes you’ll do these gags of body parts sliding and you’re seeing inside, and if you do that it often becomes a 3D reconstruction to build the parallax against each other. We didn’t really have the budget to do a full 3D head slide. So, we had to find a middle-ground between the right kind of camera angle and the right kind of motion to make it feel believable, especially since there would be a close-up of the head sliding all the way off.
We shot our hero plate first, and then we shot a greenscreen plate of her head for where she would turn towards camera and her head would roll, which we could achieve via a counter move with the camera on a little slider. So, that ultimately gave us a plate where we have a parallax of her falling and we could have her eyeline move and track towards us. It was almost like doing a miniature model shoot where the camera moves to make it look like the spaceship’s moving. We wanted the head to move, but instead we’re moving the camera.
In the end, it ended up being quite a long, tricky comp. It was all comp, no 3D in the main closeup, and the fine-tuning came in having the hair move and flowing around, keying her off of that, finding a cut line that made sense. The sound design brought it all together.
When her head rolls, that’s an example of trying to get as far as we could with practical effects. The challenge was, Annie the babysitter was one of the last people we cast, and it was the second day of shooting. So we did not have a dummy head that matched here. What we did have was a dummy head with a wig and some pigtails, but the head rolling on the table looked nothing like her. So, that was a little digi-face replacement, enhancing the body to match her body.
The head on the grill was another kind of challenge. We shot the grill first, and then weeks later on an insert day, we went back and just shot tons of elements. This included hair sizzling, extra rice, etc. We wondered, what happens when blood sizzles? Let’s see what happens. So we cranked this grill up and the special effects guys brought out a whole bunch of their fake blood and poured it onto the grill. It started steaming and bubbling and it looked incredible. So we put that in the movie.
The neck starting to slice and the head roll were done by UFX, which is my in-house VFX shop. I comp’d that along with one of our other compositors. The head on the grill was done by COSA VFX.
The real estate agent head blast
Real estate agent Barbara falls victim to a falling shotgun.
We started by looking at the head blowing up in Scanners. We thought, can we just film the real actress, then just cut and blow somebody up and see how it looks? That’s what we ended up doing. We had a dummy there. It wasn’t a screen-ready dummy, but we got some wonderful action in motion with the way the clothes ripped around and whipped and how the head fell and dropped. That gave us a really great starting point.
We did that shot at UFX. We were able to freeze frame the actress’ face with that big goofy grin on her as the head’s falling. We had a ton of blood and guts in that explosion, but a lot of it went forward towards camera. We were hoping it would go more back on the wall. So, my CG supervisor Scott Penner whipped up a bunch of blood and guts, plus we wanted a couple of frames of the rib cage. We were thinking it might be like in Terminator 2, where the skeleton is blowing away from the nuclear blast. There’s a few frames of bone—you don’t even see it, but you feel it. I wanted that kind of feeling in it and layered that into the practical explosion. We kept everything of the practical explosion, just filled up that gullet more, and then sprayed a bunch of extra blood in the background.
And then of course we had to composite Theo James in because we weren’t going to have him standing there when we’re blowing somebody up.
‘Espresso Man’
A character using his malfunctioning espresso machine has his face burnt and melted from the high-pressure steam.
Late in production, we wanted to amp up the deaths. We knew we wanted to add some more spice to a few moments. So we wrote a whole bunch of new wild, ridiculous death scenes. One of them was this scene with, well, we call him Espresso Man.
We took it as far as we could with make-up effects, and then COSA VFX took the face and started eating away at his eyes, and then adding blood and making it boil. We just said, ‘Have fun. See what you can do. Go as far as you can with it.’ They came up with some great stuff and by that time in production they had a really good understanding of the vibe of the show.
Bloody tears
The mother of twins Hal and Bill experiences blood pouring out of her head and eyes, before collapsing.
For this one we said, well obviously she can’t bleed out of her eyes, but how much blood can we do for real? Let’s find something in the plate that can be real and then we can anchor everything into that. SFX rigged up some little blood spigots right by her temples and on cue they would start to dribble and spray blood down. Then we got a greenscreen dummy head and we rigged it up with a whole bunch of blood holes. We shot multiple plates at that same angle on an insert day.
Then we went to Wild FX and visual effects supervisor Jeff Bruneel. It was all about tracking and layering and layering. And then we got the idea, well, can we make it even more horrifying? Do we want to stretch her face? It’s a dream moment, that is, it’s a bit of a nightmare scene. That’s one of those times where Jeff did a first pass of the jaw warping, and I thought, this is too far, this has got to be too far. But we showed it to Oz and he was like, ‘Nope, perfect. Ship it. Done. Don’t change a thing.’
Cheerleaders get a final curtain call
Cheerleaders—who have a presence throughout the film—themselves get the death treatment on a bus after being sideswiped by a truck.
We had already filmed the end of the film, the drive away. But we wanted to add one turn, one twist, like a comedy punchline. The cheerleaders had been in the film earlier, so we thought, OK, can we pay them off?
We filmed a school bus in an empty parking lot, filled it with cheerleaders, and we just did multiple passes. We did one drive bypass and then we ran it back. Then we put the hoods over all of them because the last thing we wanted to deal with is a whole bunch of hair flying out around and trying to do roto and paint around that.
Then the SFX team rigged the pompom drops and the bus motion. COSA added a CG truck whipping past, and then lots of blood and guts. We’re just adding some blood and guts to it. I wanted a Peterbilt truck, the one in Spielberg’s Duel.
Just thinking about that shot, at one point we found ourselves out in a parking lot shooting a bus full of screaming cheerleaders with green hoods over their heads thinking, “How did we get here?’ It was a fun ride.
