‘Men’: Visual Effects Supervisor David Simpson Breaks Down the Shocking Body Horror Climax [Interview] – Bloody Disgusting

This article contains significant spoilers forMen.

Alex GarlandsA24 horror movieMen, available now on Digital and Blu-ray, takes viewers from slow-simmering folk horror to full-blown surrealistic body horror insanity.

The film starsJessie Buckleyas Harper, who retreats to a countryside rental estate to start fresh after her husbands (Paapa Essiedu) untimely death. The estates owner, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), awkwardly gives her a tour of the place and then leaves her to get settled. Harpers plans for peace get shattered quickly, though, when a walk through the neighboring woods catches the attention of someone who appears to stalk her.

That someone takes the appearance of various men around her, all played by Kinnear. Or, in the case of the child characters, a combination of actor Zak Rothera-Oxley and a digitally superimposed Kinnear. Harpers present torment dovetails with her past; shes as haunted by her abusive relationship with her husband as the inhuman presence lurking on the estate.

It all culminates in a final confrontation that sees every iteration of Rory Kinnears characters painfully give birth to one another, a rolling birthing sequence full of blood and body horror until only Harpers pitiful husband remains.

Garland previously shared how Attack on Titan influenced this climactic foray into extreme insanity, but it was up to a team of VFX and SFX artists to bring the whole nightmare to life.

Bloody Disgusting spoke with Framestores Visual Effects SupervisorDavid Simpsonabout this intense sequence and how it was created.

Simpson detailed how the birthing sequence initially evolved from script to screen:

The draft before I joined didnt have birth per se; it had a generic, natural transformation, much more in keeping with the green man and the forest motif. Then over the Christmas break, Alex had this idea of childbirth, which suddenly unlocks a lot more in the next draft of the script. It described the whole story of one to the other through birth. In the same way, the script lays out a framework that youre going to try and film, but when youre on set, you want to take input from a lot of people. It becomes a bit more organic on set.

We have a similar thing with previs. We prevised the whole beat, storyboarded it with Alex, and tried to get something that was a rough estimate, similar to the script. So similar in that it was a shell that could inspire people as to what the sequence could be. Then you get on set and suddenly its, how can we make this sequence better? In post, its once again, how do we make what we filmed even better? Its always just trying to layer another helping of improvement on top.

Menblended VFX with SFX, with both teams working closely together on set throughout production and beyond.

It was a film that VFX and prosthetics worked very closely together on. We had a bunch of calls and chats from Tristan Versluis, the prosthetics designer. He made sure that VFX was involved very early in the process, and we could discuss with him what we needed. We had a sense going in what would be captured in camera, what would be fully replaced in CG and what would be augmented by CG as well. You dont get a lot of opportunities to do things practically, and that was one of my favorite things about this project was being able to work with the prosthetics guys in such a hands-on way, as opposed to just receiving stuff at the end, Simpson said.

The visual effects supervisor breaks down what exactly audiences are seeing in this horrifying sequence:

The first birth is, as much as it can be because its still a man giving birth, as close to a real birth as we could stage it. Then it progresses. The first birth is the vaginal birth, and then the second one comes out through the belly button. This one felt a little bit twisted, and it felt a little unnatural and a bit messed up. It was a vagina that replaced where the belly button was. We wanted to corrupt it a little bit more on each birth, like a photocopy of a photocopy. Each one gets more and more broken and more and more messed up as we go through the process, which was very deliberate. For me, the strangest one is through the back because thats so unexpected.

You want to keep raising the stakes with the sequence. So, the first birth, the shocking moment is its a man giving birth, Simpson explains.

But the second one, suddenly its a man giving birth through the wrong place; it doesnt make sense anymore. By the time you get to the third one, you think somethings going to be wrong here. What do we do now? That back birth is so out there and wild and such a strange idea. Its shifting the shoulder blades out of the way and snapping the spine to get space to put the head through. It gets progressively more messed up. At the final birth, youre expecting something but then the feet emerge. Alex refers to it as turning cards like in a poker game. You want to keep turning the next part of the story and revealing the next interesting thing.

Being on set during production only enhanced the surrealism of this sequence. The artist breaks down filming this body horror moment:

That was a heck of a night. It was very cold, and it was cold for the crew who were there in coats and jackets and wrapped up; its March in the UK. It was bitterly cold, and all the breath you see, all of that is real. Its not just breath. We found that if [Kinnear] was covered in fluid or his feet were wet from walking on wet grass that you would see steam coming off of other parts of the body. We ended up building into the work that we did to make it feel cold and gruesome. He was such a good sport as well that he put through it. Same with Zak [Rothera-Oxley], who played Samuel and Papa. All three of them had to be in these tiny cycling shorts in the freezing winter of the UK. In terms of shooting that, again, we wanted to try and get something for every single shot on camera. We built prosthetics that were rough silicon husks that the actors could push themselves through and emerge from.

For instance, in the first birth, Zak would get down on his knees and push through this aperture. We had a silicon belly and silicon legs that he could interact with and push out of, which gave us something to frame against. For the second birth, we dug this hole in the front garden to let Rory climb into it and then put the husk on top, so hes standing up from a hole. As he emerges, thats Rory we put the dead body around him. For the third birth, the back birth, we built a slide because we knew that he wanted to come out high up and emerge, almost like a baby giraffe being born or a cow being born where they drop; you get that really sickening fallout.

We built a slide about the right height, and a membrane stretched over an aperture so that he could push himself through. We got a reference for him coming out and hitting the ground. We would shoot something with the actor, then they would step aside and go and warm up. While they were in front of a heater, we would reshoot the same thing, just with no one there. It would be a completely clean version. Sometimes youre looking at real footage in the edit, and its really Rory. And sometimes youre looking at that clean plate; weve replaced everything, and its completely CG. But its hard to spot which are real and which are fake plates. Its quite fun.

The entire team put a lot of effort into making this sequence look and feel as natural as possible, which meant thinking about the anatomic ramifications of what these births would do to the human body.

Simpson explained the difficulties, The most challenging part of the birth scene is, I would say, finding the true elements you want to preserve. We know its going to be a man giving birth; we know thats physiologically impossible. But we need to explain whats going on anatomically and make sense of the process. We wanted it to feel real. What happens when youve got a grown man inside your body? Where do your organs go? Where does your rib cage go? If someones coming up through your throat, the rib cage will need to open up to make space for them to get through. If theyre coming up through your mouth, the jaw will need to separate or dislocate in some way to make space to come through. If this whole process is happening, whats happening to the muscles? Do they tear? Are they just stretched so thin?

Theres a lot of questions that you need to go through to justify what youre doing so that it didnt just feel like an inflatable human being, it didnt just feel like a hollow balloon. We wanted to move stuff out of the way and dislocate joints. In the first birth, thats the closest to a real birth as possible. Obviously, a man doesnt have a birth canal, and even if they did, it wouldnt be big enough to squeeze a 12-year-old kid through. We started thinking about what happens with the pelvis. Does it snap? Where does it break? If the pelvis breaks, what happens to the hip joint? If you watch that sequence, the pelvis breaks, and one of the legs is dislocated. As it happens, the joint breaks. Theres a lot of internal story happening to try our best to convince you its real.

The level of detail and the craftmanship between VFX and SFX delivers one of the most gruesomely shocking finales of the year. Watch Men on Digital and Blu-ray today.

Read more:
'Men': Visual Effects Supervisor David Simpson Breaks Down the Shocking Body Horror Climax [Interview] - Bloody Disgusting

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero