How ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Created a Monster That Is Definitely, Legally Distinct from the Frankenstein One
It’s easy to imagine Matt Berry’s Lazlo Cravensworth, vampire about town (well, Staten Island) and self-proclaimed man of science, saying that “there is no subtlety allowed” in the quest to create life. But for the artisans behind FX’s “What We Do In The Shadows,” that really does hold true. Paul Jones, the show’s prosthetics makeup and creature effects designer — and creator of life insofar as it pertains to the animatronics of Nadja’s (Natasia Demetriou) doll — cites the mockumentary nature of the show as helping shape the style of his work to be big, bold, and very funny.
With all the quick pans and zooms and shakes that react to the antics of the show’s vampires (and friends), Jones told IndieWire anything less doesn’t read on camera. “Especially with the frenetic pace of the script and how we work. We shoot a lot of pages a day, and the actors are very fast, and you’ve got to be able to adapt. So that translates into costume, into props, into prosthetics,” Jones said.
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So for Lazlo’s quest in Season 6 to engineer life from dead flesh — a wholly original idea that has never been explored in fiction before, despite the fact that Nadja, Colin (Mark Proksch), and Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) have all clearly read “Frankenstein” — the intricately detailed and unnerving beauty of a Guillermo Del Toro-type monster wasn’t ever on the proverbial operating table. “I had to do something meaty and big — something that you could read from across a room and know it’s body parts stitched or stapled together,” Jones said.
There were many dismembered parts to the challenge of designing and building Cravensworth’s Monster (Andy Assaf). Jones and his small team needed to create a headless version of the monster that would live in the tank, a version with a head that could be taken apart in a fit of pique, versions that would work as prosthetics for Assaf, one that could be covered up by clothing, and one where his full multi-body torso would be on display.
“Each time you glue on a prosthetic, when you remove it, those pieces are destroyed. You have to have a brand new set each time. So it was a lot of pieces, especially for what is still a small show compared to other series. We had to make it kind of user-friendly,” Jones said.
That meant making choices that would do what they could to shorten the amount of time Assaf was in a makeup chair and being smart about how the prosthetic body parts were constructed. The big staples joining all of the monsters’ limbs were, for example, were a special lead tape laminated to make it thick and applied right to the prosthetic. There’s an actual metallic kick to them that reads great on camera, plus, as Jones said, “I didn’t want to paint a million staples every single day with silver paint.”
Although the prosthetics team started working with Assaf early on, “What We Do In The Shadows” runs on a comedy schedule and waits for no vampire. Jones and his team had to sculpt the monster makeup bodysuit somewhat generically and then mold it to Assaf — quite literally Frankenstein-ing the pieces onto him.
“If you notice on his chest, he has this kind of S-curve where there’s a section of stone skin in the middle. That wasn’t by design. That was a practical element I needed to add because when we created the sculpture and molded it and made the foam pieces, we live cast Andy on the table in a mortician’s pose and put the pieces on him and there was this big gap in the middle,” Jones said.
It wasn’t unexpected, but Jones had to add a section on the fly for the prosthetic body suit to cover the whole of Assaf’s torso. “It was like adding a pleat in a pair of pants, except we did it in skin,” Jones said.
The macabre work of creating the monster happened in tandem with everything else Jones and his team did for the final season of “What We Do In The Shadows” — about four to eight sculptors, molders, and shop supervisors doing seams and stitching and fabrication, all in two months. “It sounds like a lot of people, but for that kind of work, it’s actually not,” Jones said. “Every episode was different. It was literally like, ‘What are we doing this week?’ It wasn’t the same characters week in, week out, like a ‘Star Trek’ show or something like that. Every time I got a new script, there’d be something new.”
For Jones, part of the gift of “Shadows” is the room that it offers for his designs to be funny. Whether it’s the monster’s mismatched ears or the squat, sad, and goofy shape of The Sire, Jones found ways for size, color, and texture to help convey the comedy. “[The Monster] had to look like human body parts sewn together. It had to look like it was created from meat, and from people, but at the same time, he’s doing comedy, things that are absolutely ridiculous,” Jones said.
It’s not necessarily the first time a Frankenstein (who?) has been a featured character in a film or TV comedy, but Jones wanted to push the grotesque nature of Lazlo’s monster ever further, with different skin tones and limb proportions.
“It just looks like a kind of patchwork quilt. It’s something that Lazlo would do. He would just take, ‘Oh that’s a nice looking arm. That’s a nice looking hand,’ and stick them together. He wouldn’t be worried about the aesthetic. But at the same time, he’s an artist. So he would create something that’s grotesquely beautiful at the same time,” Jones said.
“What We Do In The Shadows” is streaming on Hulu and Disney+
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