Possession (1981)

Andrzej Zulawski made Possession in the aftermath of several stressful events in his life. Not only had he recently divorced his first wife, Małgorzata Braunek, but he had also been forced to leave his home country of Poland after its government had more or less banned his films, including halting production on his science-fiction epic On the Silver Globe.

It was no wonder that Possession would reflect much of Zulawski's emotions at the time; the sense of alienation in its gloomy Berlin setting, and more bluntly with its premise of a dysfunctional relationship that, over the course of the film, literally turns monstrous

The film's monster, an entity that over the course of the film transforms into a doppelganger of Sam Neill and has sex with Isabelle Adjani, represented the subtext of loneliness and love turned sour. Frederic Tuten, who adapted Zulawski's script into English, said about the entity;

'She loves something that she created. She loves something who loves her in the strangest aberrant way, but still loves her in the way that she wants to be loved. I think that as a metaphor is so interesting, that our loneliness that can create something that nurtures our love. (...) That somehow in our most despairing abject pain and loneliness, somewhere is a creation of something that comforts us. That's the part I understood about making that film.'

However Zulawski had never worked with elaborate special effects in his career, and according to producer Marie-Laure Reyre, at first he was unsure if the film even should have a monster!

'At the beginning, we weren't sure that the monster should be seen. It was a big decision to show or not to show...or maybe, just show a little as in Rosemary's Baby, when you never fully saw that was happening, but you certainly felt it.'

Zulawski changed his tune later on, with Reyre remembering that he used golems as his inspiration for the entity's look. 'The creature wasn't easy. Andrzej knew what he wanted. He showed me pictures that he had cut out of magazines that gave some idea of how such a creature could look. Among those were various pictures of golems statues from Prague.'

Then came the matter of finding who could realize such a creature, with Zulawski and Reyre making unsuccessful offers to effects artists in Britain, France and Germany. It wasn't until they saw a certain Ridley Scott movie that they found their man.

'Some day we went to New York and saw Alien there. (Zulawski) immediately said, 'That's the guy we need for our monster!'. So of course we got in touch with Giger right on the spot. But Giger told us that he didn't have the time for our project, because he was already working on two other films. But since we were already in New York, we should try and get in touch with Carlo Rambaldi directly. (...) So we went to LA where, thanks to Giger who had organized everything, we met with Rambaldi.

Carlo Rambaldi had provided special effects for several Italian films, before Dino De Laurentiis took him to the USA where Rambaldi's career was now based in. Possession did not have the lavish budget of films he had recently worked on, such as De Laurentiis' infamous King Kong or Alien, but he took the job thanks to admiring Zulawski's films and the script.

Reyre recalled, At first, he did ask for a lot of money. So we explained, this was a European film, not a big American budget. We did not have the kind of money he should receive. So, we spoke quite a long time and then he said, "Okay, I'll do it."

He liked the story. He liked Andrzej. He liked Andrzej's film a lot. And I think he also trusted me. But it was not easy at all to start building this special effect in Los Angeles when we were shooting in Germany.'

Reyre and Zulawski both would visit Rambaldi's workshop in Los Angeles to check on his progress designing the entity. 'Zulawski went six times to the United States to see the maqutte and followed 'the birth' of the entity. So he knew how it was. Me too, because I'd been going to Los Angeles as well. I was pleased with it. Very pleased.'

Rambaldi and Zulawski with the design drawings and maquettes for Possession.

Reyre remembered an amusing incident when Rambaldi arrived in Berlin, taking his creations with him to prep for shooting. 'We went back to Europe but we constantly had to check the development of the beast, or rather the beasts since there were several.

A lot of designs, drawings and miniatures were sent around for that reason. When we came to Berlin to prepare the scenes, the finished beast was to arrive for shooting. I think I'll remember that day for my whole life, when we went to pick up Carlo Rambaldi at Tegel Airport in Berlin.

He arrived with five or six wooden coffins which were all as big as the monster. I was there with the executive producer, Jean Jose Richer. The customs officers were very curious and wanted to know what these were.

The coffins were opened, and all you could see were these sort of tentacles, these pieces of rubber. I was still startled, even though I had seen the drawings and witness the development. I had also been to LA several times, the last time just two weeks before.

But these things, made of plastic and other strange materials, to see them in these crates, it was absolutely surreal. The customs officers also looked started and quickly closed the crates again. They probably thought that we were crazy!

Reyre recalled how filming began shortly afterwards, and how the low budget restricted the shooting schedule.

Five or six days later, we started shooting the scenes. It was a lot of work, since we made the film on a small budget. Back then it took a lot of time to shoot a film with special effects. Everything had to be prepared: the lighting and the infernal machines had to be set up correctly. I have to say that Carlo was great and Andrzej was very patient. He knew that we only had a small budget and therefore were quite constricted, so we had to adjust the schedule to our budget. Andrzej strictly adhered to the schedule and Carlo Rambaldi also.

Rambaldi with one of the tentacle rigs.

Again, Zulawski had zero experience with filming special effects, and so evidently didn't have an understanding on how taxing they could be for the effects artists.

In a rather taciturn comment about Rambaldi's request for a larger schedule, he recalled how he forced Rambaldi to spend sleeplness nights making the entity.

'I never got the monster that I wanted, never. Rambaldi came from Hollywood to Berlin and said, “Listen, for the scene when you encounter the monster for the first time, with a close-up, I need two weeks.” And I had like two weeks to finish the whole film; I had five weeks to shoot the whole film. I said, “Carlo, it’s impossible.” So he brought a big pile of rough material, pink condom stuff-we couldn’t do anything, he got very red in the face, and I said, “Listen, you are an Italian and not an American, now you have to do something.”

Because we couldn’t do absolutely anything with his monster. So he worked all through the night and locked himself in, and he did it with sticks and film stock woven together-it wasn’t what I had in mind, but the idea was there. The whole story revolved around the monster that Rambaldi was supposed to build up. The monster had stages of development: there was the first outpouring of this thing from Adjani in the subway; then the same stuff had to lay in the tub in her apartment, starting to shape itself into something; and each time you see it, it becomes more and more like a human form, and you see that she forms the husband, but it’s very fuzzy.

I tried to give some life to this idea, which is basic to the film, but I didn’t get to show it in the way I would have loved to show it. (...) Therefore the whole thing is, I won’t say ruined, but this way didn’t work with the film.'

Reyre was much more gracious about Rambaldi's contributions to Possession, crediting him as the one to have actually finalized Zulawski's vision.

'Zulawski never knew exactly what he wanted, not until we found Rambaldi. He was the first person who understood what Zulawski required. Zulawski had the idea but didn't know how to put it on paper. He knew how he wanted to use it in the film, especially at the finish, but Carlo was the first special effects person we met who could complete this idea in reality.'

The infamous scene where Adjani is found having sex with the entity, was achieved via a stunt performer being attached to the tentacle rigs. Reyre remembered how hard it was for the stuntman. 'It was something quite heavy, he was In a very uncomfortable situation'.

Sources:

• The Other Side of the Wall: The Making of Possession (2009)
  
• Starburst Magazine #44 (1982)
  
• 'My Dinner with Andrzej' interview on Metrograph.com
  

Keith Thompson concept art for The Ritual (2017)

As a follow-up to my article on Russell FX's special makeup effects for The Ritual, here are Keith Thompson's design drawings that he did for the picture.

All of these images were found on Keith Thompson's website, but I'm reposting them here just in case the images are lost, because you never know!

Thompson didn't just design the film's main monster, but also its undead worshippers, as well as the grisly effigy prop found in a cabin early on in the film.

The monster itself, the Moder, was the result of David Bruckner's discussions with Thompson about how Moder should be an uncanny hybrid between human and animal.

Thompson also designed how the Moder's walk cycle should look like, as well its skeletal understructure, as reference for the digital VFX team animated the creature in wide shots.

Again, all these images are taken from Keith Thompson's own website, and more of his art can be seen at keiththompsonart.com!

The Ritual (2017)

Note: I would like to thank Sierra Spence of Russell FX for having kindly sent several images of the assorted gore and undead makeups, as well as the Moder head puppet and maquettes!

David Bruckner only had read Adam Neville's The Ritual after his management company sent him a screenplay based on it, with a prospective offer to direct the adaptation. Bruckner enjoyed the novel enough that it only made the project even more appealing to him.

'I wasn’t familiar with Adam's work but the script was bouncing around and it came to me through my management company at the time I got hold of it. I thought it was totally lunatic in all the best ways (...) and I got talking to (executive producer) Will Tennant over at Imaginarium. I read the book and I just fell in love more and more with the project.

It really just started as a conversation. It’s always a challenge to adapt a book for screen as there are certain fundamental things that translate and some that you don’t have to carry further and having that conversation was the arena in which I got involved.'

Bruckner had previously only directed segments in anthology horror films such as V/H/S, meaning The Ritual was to be his first feature film. It was a difficult experience, as nearly the entire picture was shot on location in Romania's Carpathian Mountains.

Bruckner explained, 'Coming from an independent filmmaking background I don’t always measure my ambition. You sort of strive for the impossible. We had a really great production services company in Romania and we’d looked in a few different places to shoot it but we were shown this immense range of forests in the Carpathian mountains in Transylvania which is about 7000ft high and at that elevation you get dark coniferous forest that kind of feels very Northern European. I fell in love with that look. I’d never seen woods like this.

I grew up in the South East of the United States and those wood structures felt too familiar to me and I wanted them parachuted into a bizarre nightmare so we had to shoot there. We got a lot of support but it was incredibly challenging.

It’s a mountainous area so getting a steadicam on there at 40 degrees, as I’m sure you can imagine, is not an easy feat. Every day we were in a different place and we scavenged that forest and really used as much of the area as possible. The weather at that elevation is also a problem, as well as bears. (...) They just like to circle the set at night occasionally and in the morning one of the crew would have filmed them but we were well protected. It was a very remote landscape and hopefully that sense of immersion shows up on screen'.

The harsh terrain made all aspects of filmmaking difficult, but especially the effects as Bruckner remembered. 'We had a running joke on set where I’d ask, “What’s been the hardest week so far?” and the 1st A.D. would say, “Next week”. But some of the genre stuff at the end of the movie which required a lot of technical expertise, a lot of planning and dealt with prosthetics and CGI and stunts, all co-ordinated and were not on a sound stage. We’re doing it all on location and all of those things are troubled by the weather.'

Despite the complicated filming, Bruckner pushed to use as much practical effects as he could, but still conceded he would have to use CG effects. The Ritual's special makeup effects were handled by Russell FX, an effects company that Bruckner had previously worked with.

'Well of course, growing up on horror films in the 80s, I wanted to do as much practical as I could, but you run into the limitations of that pretty quick, both in terms of budget, and just you know... you can have high aspirations for practical, and then realize you're in deep trouble pretty quick when it doesn't look right on camera.

But I have a really wonderful SFX team that I've worked with (...) Josh and Sierra Russell. They did an incredible job on Southbound, and they're great friends as this thing was brewing, we had talked about finding a way to get them over to Romania.

Russell FX handled the film's gore, the most elaborate gag being the shot of Robert James-Collier after his character has been disembowelled by the Moder. A gored fake torso appliance, with fake legs attached was strung up to a tree.

James-Collier himself would be positioned behind the fake body, wearing a greenscreen suit with his jacket; his legs would be digitally edited out in post-production. One can only imagine that the harsh weather made this even harder to shoot!

The Moder is worshipped by a cult whose members are granted immortality by the beast. The immortality comes at a price; the cultists age and decay into living mummies.

The undead congregation were designed by Keith Thompson (who also designed the Moder, which we are getting to) and sculpted by Clint Ziccoli at Russell FX.

According to the Russell FX instagram page, 'All told, we built six dummies, two of which had puppeteered components, along with eight background makeups on actors.' The mummy bodies, prosthetics and articulation was handled by Mark Villalobos.

The Moder, the monster that has been controlling the cult and killing the hikers one by one, was always intended to be the film's highlight according to Bruckner.

'Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it's about masculinity in crisis, it's sort of this old Norse Viking nightmare that these modern men have wandered into. (...) So we always knew that we wanted to reveal, in one way or another, what it was. There are many movies that I admire that are withholding until the end, and like I said, we just felt that wasn't this film.

So yeah, we had to feature it and that meant that we had to kind of literalize not just how it looks, but how it chooses to present. Because the idea of these kinds of shape-shifting Norse gods is that they can kind of choose how they want to look to you. So, what you're seeing is how it desires to be interpreted, and it's part of the way it intimidates and controls.'

Keith Thompson's finalized artwork for the Moder.

'We brought on Keith Thompson who has done some wonderful work and anybody's who's familiar with his work as a concept designer, I think this fits well with other stuff that he's done. He threw a bunch of images across the desk based on those conversations. One of the things we loved about this was that it, it was a difficult construction to understand at a certain glance. You know, that you could sort of build a mystery, just a very simple visual mystery around it.

We talked a lot about different influences in Norse mythology. We knew that it was gonna be some sort of animal god, and, but we also talked a lot about it would have a sentience, and how would you give it a human quality How would you obfuscate the difference between animal and human, and how could an animal form read with a human intelligence?

And so Keith had many variations on those kinds of conversations, and this was one that he would kind of do an initial design on a few different things, and then I would have some notes. And this was one of his original designs based on our conversations that he had passed across and I loved it instantly, but kind of put it on the wall as one of those things that you can't possibly do. And then you kind of come in the office every day and you keep thinking oh man, but that! And then there are all kinds of questions like, what kind of movie do you want to make? And maybe that's what you have to do, in a sense, and if you're inspired by something or intrigued by it, or you can't take your eyes off of it, or if it's something that can't be unseen in whatever way, that felt like something to follow, so we ran with it.'

Russell FX's unpainted Moder maquette.

Bruckner elaborated in another interview about how Thompson's Moder design fitted the themes of the film, as well as its basis in the original Adam Neville novel.

'There’s one way of thinking about monsters in the movies. You can start with the pre-existing myth and then you service that myth in some way. I did a movie with a Succubus so it was a case of how do you bring that to screen? So some are metaphors and you choose what path you want to go down. There’s no concrete idea that you’re trying to bring to life necessarily.

The other approach is that the monsters are fabricated nightmares and part of their fears and you design this creatures both visually and archetypically as a counter point to a characters journey and it gives you licence to explore and in the movies there should be something refreshing about it, you know, kind of, ‘I’ve never seen that before and I can never unsee that!’ and so for that reason we were very interested in Keith.

In the book you get impressions of the beast and it’s a nightmare version of it unwinding in the men’s mind of what it could be and because of his prose and the language he uses you never get a firm concept of its size and there are certain attributes that I could kind of literalise. It’s always kind of changing in my experience of reading the book. You may not conjure a characters specific look when you read a book just an idea of their face if that makes sense.

So it very much grew out of a conversation between Keith and I based on the book and the impression we had. But there’s something so human about it that we wanted to bring it together and Keith would sketch something and send it to me and he came up with some really incredible ideas and when he slipped one idea by us it took me a second. He had literalised, if this makes sense, some of the expression that I felt were coming across in conversation. It was the idea that it had a human quality about it despite the fact that it was very much an animal and just presented us with something that I felt I could never unsee again.'

Russell FX's painted Moder maquette.

Bruckner knew that the Moder would need to be realized in many shots as a digital creation, but pushed to have Russell FX realize it as a physical prop in close-up shots, especially when it caresses its victims faces or when it smashes the cabin's door in.

'(Russell FX) built in LA a life-sized model of the head, and the head actually has a stunt performer inside of it that is wearing prosthetic arms, and then we would go into the computer and paint out her head basically, because it was kind of visible in the front.

And the prosthetic head was used both for wire work, and we had it on kind of unit jib out in the woods, and a lot of that is what Rafe is interacting with.'

Bruckner had to rely on CGI for wide shots. 'Originally, we wanted to diffuse images of the prosthetic head in wide shots with the digital body itself, under the assumption that the brain knows on some primordial level that it's looking at light on real objects (...) but we found that was increasingly hard to fuse those things together visually.

And usually, once a shot becomes digital, most of what you're seeing becomes digital. It just makes more sense from a cost perspective. But yeah, Josh and Sierra brought a lot to the table where that head was concerned, and it was not an easy construction.

Bruckner had nothing but praise for Sierra Spence and Josh Russell's physical Moder head, translating Keith Thompson's artwork to the real world perfectly.

It's really great to have on set too, because everybody was looking at some concept drawing and getting a sense of what they're dealing with, and then you wheel that thing out and it just, you can feel the energy on set change. Suddenly everybody has a greater sense of what they're dealing with, and it's something else to look at. It's incredible.'

The Moder puppet head on display at Russell FX.

Sources:

• Collider interview with David Bruckner
  
• Scream Magazine interview with David Bruckner