For 4 Seasons of ‘Evil,’ Joel Harlow Was a Nightmare Factory
For audiences, the four seasons of Robert and Michelle King’s “Evil” have been the stuff of nightmares. For Oscar-winning prosthetics artist Joel Harlow, it was the stuff of childhood dreams.
“This is the high water mark of my professional career in terms of artist fulfillment,” Harlow told IndieWire over Zoom a few days before the series finale aired August 22 on Paramount+. “This is what I wanted to do as a kid.”
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Harlow means that literally. In most instances, the “Evil” script would merely say, “Joel will deliver us something terrifying.” And starting with the sleep paralysis demon George, that’s just what he did.
“Evil” followed three assessors for the Catholic church — a priest (Mike Colter), an agnostic psychiatrist (Katja Herbers), and an atheist scientist (Aasaf Mandvi) as they evaluated a case of the week to determine if an exorcism was needed while battling demons in their personal lives. Throughout, the show toed the line between the supernatural and the coincidental. And Harlow and his team at Morphology FX brought them all to life, week to week for 50 episodes. And George was the creature that started it all.
Already renowned for his Oscar-winning work on “Star Trek,” as well as “Mad Men” and “Dark Shadows,” Harlow met with the Kings to discuss their project, bringing preliminary sketches he did of George. They liked it enough to hire him, and from there evolved a “beautiful working relationship.”
“I would pitch them ideas, things that I’d always wanted to do ever since I was a kid, going back to old sketchbooks, but I didn’t know how to do them back then,” he said. “So I’d pitch things like that, and they would be like, ‘Yeah, that’s great. Let’s put that in the season finale.”
That creature turned into the demonic therapist seen by Michael Emerson’s sociopathic devil worshipper Leland in the Season 1 finale, while another favorite Season 1 pitch found Harlow creating “cenobite” creatures inspired by “Hellraiser” for an episode in which Colter’s priest is in the hospital at the mercy of a terrifying nurse named Linda.
But Season 1 was just a preliminary round of what would become TV’s scariest series, one that takes social media as seriously as human sacrifice on the scale of horror. But the series’ genius always lay in how literally it took the concept of the banality of evil, something that Harlow was initially unprepared for.
“If you took any one of those designs, and you put them in a very darkly shot traditional horror film, it would be scary as hell,” Harlow said. “But because the therapist is sitting in his office, taking dictation with a headset on, it almost humanizes them. Seeing him in his therapist’s office, it was like, ‘Wow, we really got to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s. When you’re working on a TV schedule, you do have to cut some corners to make the schedule. So we’ve got to make sure that everything we deliver can be shot in a brightly lit, walled room, which is difficult.”
And throughout the final season, one of those demons managed to terrify even within the brightly lit confines of a courtroom: the greasy lawyer Henry Stick (who also appears as a towering demon to those unlucky enough to see it). “That was one of our biggest suit performance creatures, ’cause I just kept adding stuff to it,” Harlow said. “I’m like, ‘I want severed heads hanging off of its belt on hooks. I want him dragging three bodies behind them. More horns, more eyes, let’s pack everything and the kitchen sink into this.”
The character also served as a personal bookend to the series for Harlow, who began the show by personally sculpting George and ended it by sculpting Henry Stick. “I knew that one being the last one, I am going to sculpt this one myself,” he said. “I’m going to sculpt the first one, I’m going to sculpt the last one. So I managed to pull that off.”
One creature that Harlow couldn’t possibly tackle alone was the possibly possessed pig of Season 4.
“The Demon Hog in 403, I think, was our longest build because that thing is a full animatronic we are puppeteering,” Harlow said. “It’s all us behind the camera. And anytime you’re dealing with something like that, where you have to build this structure, it always takes more time. I think that was four months to make that creature. And he’s in one scene! [But] I never like saying, ‘Wow, we spent all this time on one shot,” because that shot could live in your head forever. Once it’s committed to video or film or digital, it doesn’t matter how many scenes it’s in or how much it interacts because one shot of something could be all you need for it to make its impression. And all that work is then worthwhile if that one shot works. And I think that one did. I was really happy with that.”
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