Everybody loves a good monster. They feed into our cultural zeitgeist on a daily basis: Whether it’s the wave of Jean JacketTikToks that made everyone look twice at the sky or The Babadook We love creepy animals and have made ourselves an unrivalled gay icon. We love making memes of them. We love dressing up like them. For the slightest glimpse, we will watch two-hour films. And Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of CuriositiesYou will be satisfied with a variety of amazing monsters.
But how do you make it a monster, then? While del Toro’s reputation as a creature king precedes him, Cabinet of CuriositiesEach episode features eight completely unique, separate creatures. This is a new feat. Some will keep you awake at night, while others will leave you speechless at their uniqueness. So if you’ve found yourself googling octopus lore after Cabinet of Curiosities’ first episode, thank the show’s brilliant lead designer and prosthetics expert Mike Hill — a close collaborator of del Toro’s for over 10 years and the monster maker behind many residents of his creature canon.
Literally, making a monster
“We try to stay away from the Hollywood fabrication type of things that look like [they’ve]Hill stated that Hollywood made it. “We try to make something that’s of this planet, of this earth… You should be able to walk past these things in a zoo, and look in and think oh, it’s a marine animal, and never think oh, what the hell is that.”
While we’ve often seen feature films going to extreme lengths to create extraterrestrial entities or amalgams of things completely alien to us, we’ve also seen an arguably more successful track record of creatures inspired by all the weird stuff going on on earth. Whether it’s Stranger Things’ Mind-FlayerYou can catch a thousand spiders, or Jean Jacket echoing obscure jellyfish lurking in the deepest parts of our ocean, taking something that we recognise and morphing it into something that we don’t is an approach to horror design that’s significantly scarier because it’s so close to home. And that’s exactly what Hill and his team do for every creature in Cabinet of Curiosities.
“After my first conversations with Guy Davis and Guillermo, our job is simply to take those ideas and notes and turn them into reality. [them]Hill stated that Hill wanted to transform the idea into something concrete and plausible. It’s a job that’s all too much like a quest, with Hill and his team relying on troves of real-life footage, including mummified bodies and war-induced physical trauma, to get a sense of what a flayed, starved demon could realistically look like.
The quest continues on to finding the materials needed to create the creature. “The greatest marriage is VFX and practical effects,” explains Hill. In the pursuit of making their Dottie, the hellish tentacled nightmare in the show’s first episode, Hill explains that while VFX worked to produce the tentacles sprawling out of her, the rest of Dottie was pure SFX. There were many steps involved, including casting bodies, turning them into fiberglass, using clay to create extra parts, then molding the latex suit into a latex suit and applying an external paint job to make it more realistic. A tedious, yet incredibly, rewarding SFX process that’s been a recipe for all our favorite monsters from Dottie all the way to the Night King.
Figuratively, making a monster
“If a movie’s called Count Dracula, he’s got to be good because that’s all the audience is waiting for,” said Hill. Hill said that even though you can have the most talented actors and the most beautiful sets, the people still need the creature. If that creature doesn’t work, your movie’s lost, the audience is lost.”
The stakes are abundantly clear when making a creature feature, but while visual concepts and effects take up 50% of its creation, the other 50% rests in its personification — in making a character out of a creature. It’s easy to make something scary, but to build something that’s scheming, primitive, and constantly hunting, is a mammoth task that transcends a creature’s terror beyond a fleeting jump-scare.
That is the line between seeing animals as and not seeing them. CharactersThese monsters aren’t deluded. “You really need to make these things seem like undeniably living creatures with a personality and with a soul,” explains Hill. “[del Toro and I] see them as everyday characters who just happen to have no face.” del Toro and Hill’s love of characters like Frankenstein’s creature informs a process that values building a personality for their antagonists as much as their appearance. Why we remember the duo’s creatures, with the extensive list including the iconic Amphibian Man from The Shape of Water, is because there’s a story behind them. Dottie in “Lot 36” is a scorned woman whose revenge plays in tandem with the demon living inside her. The witch in “Pickman’s Model” is intrinsically “evil for evil’s sake,” admitted Hill. Hill acknowledged that all of these characters have motives that are completely unbound and behave in completely unpredictable ways. That’s what makes them so good time and time again.
“Everyone loves creatures and monsters,” Hill said simply. “The whole world loves them… They love WitchesThey love monsters. They love the dark. Monsters are actually loved and not hated, which is ironic.” In 2022 alone our Twitter feeds have been blessed with Vecna memes, Targaryen dragons, alien sightings, and Barbarian’s mother character all at once. Cabinet of CuriositiesShe is available to add more colorful creatures to her horde.
We often overlook the monster makers who spend months on end perfecting every detail of what later becomes all of our Halloween costumes — a shame considering the meticulousness of the craft. While everything can be a monster but not everyone can make it right, there are some things that can’t be ignored. In Cabinet of CuriositiesHill and his amazing crew elevate the show every second with their creations of creatures. And I can’t wait to see all the Dottie cosplays to come.
