Editorials
[Set Visit] The Gore and Ghosts of Nicolas Pesce’s Practical Effects-Heavy ‘The Grudge’
On set of the police precinct where some of supernatural happenings of The Grudge plague the unlucky detectives who stepped foot in the cursed home, we observed a scene featuring actress Andrea Riseborough’s encounter with a male ghost. Only, he doesn’t look like a typical ghost, and nothing like the kabuki style ghosts of Shimizu’s original films. Sickly, pale, with purple veins spidering out throughout his face and skull, the man stands there in the doorway, shaking as he pulls his finger up to his lips and hoarsely whispers, “Shhhhh.” If it wasn’t clear before that this reimagining would be a very different beast, this seals it.
Between takes, we sit down with the ghost himself, actor Dave Brown, who reveals his character’s name is Sam. Of his character’s background, he shares, “So Sam is the original owner of a house that has a Grudge. But what happened to here, to get him to this point, is he died. And we’re not quite sure how yet. Or at least he disappeared. He seems to be haunting anybody that comes in contact with the house.” Of his internal conflict he adds, “For me, the emotional bit is trying to play this ghost as if he’s fighting it. So for Sam, the two emotions are extreme rage and extreme sadness.” In other words, Sam is a ghost of barely contained rage, threatening to spill over any moment.
From there, it means that the iconic croaking sound that Kayako made in Shimizu’s original films will be replaced by something entirely new and different. Brown adds, “I’m trying to play it a little bit differently, almost like it comes from a sense of asphyxiation. And so it’s more of a breathing in, versus an exhale. And a struggle, and I think that’s what happens with the character of Sam, is he’s constantly struggling to breathe in this new thing. And at the same time, trying to suppress everything else. So you’ll see what that sound is in the film.”
The actor is in full makeup for his scenes, and when asked how long he spent in the makeup chair he reveals an intriguing detail, “This is stage two. Stage two takes somewhere between two and three hours.” That’s correct. As the effect of the Grudge wears on, the ghosts’ appearances will become more grotesque. Specific stages that initially start out as calm yet eerie before increasing. Brown explains, “There’s three different stages that play within each stage. Well especially stage two and three. There’s playing around a little bit with the progression of it. So, stage three is a very different beast.” As for stage three? That involves an impressive, fully articulated animatronic mask.
The special makeup effects design and puppeteering for The Grudge was created by artist Toby Lindala (Final Destination 5, Death Note, Seventh Son) and his company Lindala Schminken LSFX. Lindala and his team are having a blast working on The Grudge, showing off the various lifelike prosthetics, masks, and blood that will be used in the film. Lindala and his team have essentially been let loose to create shockingly horrific gore and ghost effects, and that excitement isn’t just contained within the special effects team.
Executive producer Schuyler Weiss elaborates on the decision to go practical, “We’ve tried to do a lot of practical work in this movie, and that’s something we’ve been really excited about, connecting it not just with Grudge and that world but connecting it with the whole legacy of horror movies and genre movies. Tony Lindala is our key effects designer, and he’s created all the ghosts, all of the gore. We’ve done it all in-camera, and it’s been ambitious in a totally different way than a big effects movie. It’s almost a much more delicate ambition to try and get all those things to work on the day. It’s exciting, we think, for the process and for the audience but it’s also great for the scene, too. Instead of the actor running around green screen chasing a pink X on a stick, we have really hideous, shocking, gruesome things happening in the scene with the other actors on the screen, everybody from the cast members to the production, also maybe the audience, are going to get why we made that such a priority.”
Practical effects were a big part of director Nicolas Pesce’s vision from the outset. A huge, long-time fan of the genre, Pesce elaborates on his excitement to go practical, “It’s not the ’80’s anymore with wax, bad prosthetics; we can do things that look incredibly realistic and I think that it is just a more guttural reaction for the audience. In terms of the ghosts, I think that so much of our conception of the ghosts and the designing of the ghosts went into thinking about how do we do something practically that’s just as frightening as something you would do that you would normally be like, ‘Okay, it’s just easier to do in the effects, but let’s go there practically and see how far we can push it.’ When we get into our full-on ghost modes, we’re dealing with really elaborate animatronic prosthetics that is something that people don’t really do anymore and to me, my taste in horror lies in the more vintage stuff. There are bits and pieces that pay homage to the bigger, slightly more campy stuff of the yesteryear of horror but also stuff that’s brutally realistic. Getting to play in that world is much more my taste and things that I want to do as a director. It’s fun for me to get to play with masks and like this stuff and figure out how to shoot it and make it look as scary as possible rather than, ‘Yeah, I’ll fix it in post, I’ll make it scary don’t worry.’ I think that the end result is hopefully going to be far scarier.”
This meant Lindala had a lot of creative freedom when designing the new ghosts. “We shot really wide and we tried out some wacky ideas. What’s that little movie, The Hidden. Right? And there was some stuff that was almost reminiscent of that, right? With these crazy creatures. So, it’s this thing embodying inside and kind of like, Alien, an addition to the person. It’s latched on and these things. Tentacles coming out and wrapping heads and crazy stuff,” Lindala shares of the more eccentric design ideas, though ultimately the designs drew inspiration from the classic drama masks more representative of the strong emotions these ghosts embody, “A really strong, super sorrowful, super angry … We just did these really extreme expressions almost like Renaissance art.”
Each of the ghosts represents a different emotion, and Lindala explains of the ghosts and Sam in particular, “But, I love the fact that it’s really about capturing the emotion, right? And the fact that they’re victims as well, right? They’re tortured. So, there’s a synthetic quality to it, which is more scary. He’s kind of rage and there’s a wonderful out of control, unpredictability about him that is so frightening.” With the actor who portrays Sam on set, his makeup and masks are the focus of today’s show and tell, but Lindala makes sure that we know that’s not even the crowning glory of his designs. He shares a sneak peek of two more, one of which is monstrous, “Her abdomen is ripped open. She’s got her fetus hanging there…”
It’s not just the ghosts that team is excited about, but the really gruesome deaths as well. These ghosts don’t just whisk their victims away from beneath the bedsheets; the victims suffer violent ends. Lindala discusses one of the character’s deaths, a gnarly fall down a stairwell, “[Redacted] goes down four flights of stairs, just gets bashed to hell. And then the amount of blood and gore, we just painted walls, man.” When asked just how much blood has been involved in the process so far, Lindala grins, “I think we’re probably looking at something around 30 gallons now.”
We’re now just as excited to see what Pesce, Lindala and the crew have created for The Grudge.
Five decades ago, Stephen King published the story of a bullied girl with telekinetic powers and forever changed the world of horror.
Carrie follows a high school misfit who seeks revenge for a hideous prank by psychically destroying her senior prom. The name Carrie White has become synonymous with the concept of a formal dance thanks to a flawless adaptation from Brian De Palma. Now fifty years after the film’s release, Mike Flanagan is putting his own stamp on the troubling story.
Rather than a feature film, the writer/director will expand King’s relatively slim debut novel into an eight-episode miniseries for Amazon Prime set to premiere on October 7.
Flanagan is no stranger to the world of Stephen King. A long-time Constant Reader, he first made waves with his daring adaptation of Gerald’s Game (2017), a novel many fans considered un-filmable. His underrated Doctor Sleep merges the disparate plot of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with King’s original source material, and his 2024 genre-bending tearjerker The Life of Chuck faithfully executes one of the author’s most metaphysical novellas.
He’s currently mired in pre-production for an expansive adaptation of The Dark Tower series, keystone to King’s connected universe, and Warner Bros. recently announced that Flanagan will helm a new version of The Mist, King’s 1980 novella which sees a small Maine town overrun by otherworldly monsters.
Considering the vast array of the author’s previously unadapted material, an obvious question arises. Why reimagine Carrie in 2026? Noting the timeless nature of the content, Flanagan expressed his desire to bring the story of a bullied girl into modern times, mirroring his approach to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. He explained, “The only way to approach it was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie. Otherwise, there’s really no purpose in trying to retread ground that’s been so beautifully walked before.”
His miniseries will maintain the novel’s bloody bookends while delivering “big surprises” along the way.
A New Prom Night Nightmare
The roughly 60-second teaser introduces Summer H. Howell as Carrie White just before the moment of catastrophe. Standing in a prom dress, she smiles at her applauding classmates with an ominous crown perched upon her head. Moments later, Carrie unleashes a rage-filled scream into the night air while promgoers rush for the exit doors. But careful examination of this scene shows Carrie wearing a different, albeit dirty dress as she seems to telekinetically punish her peers.
In an exclusive first look with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan explains that in his version of the story, “the events of that prom are going to be completely different.” An open trunk emitting a crimson glow does hint at the pig’s blood dumped on Carrie’s head, but it’s likely Flanagan’s formal dance will be a different kind of horror altogether. Despite these changes, the series may end with the widespread destruction outlined in the source material. Unlike any previous adaptations, King’s novel ends with the near-total destruction of Chamberlain, Maine. A flaming street in Flanagan’s trailer promises similar carnage no matter what prank sparks Carrie’s deadly revenge.
The Monstrous Addition of Social Media
On the opposite end of this fiery conclusion is an extreme act of bullying that brings together the story’s main cast. King’s novel begins as Carrie gets her first period while showering in the girls’ locker room. Completely unaware of the concept of menstruation, the sheltered girl thinks she’s bleeding to death. Her classmates respond with vitriolic rage. Led by ultra-mean girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), they mock the terrified teen while pelting her with tampons. Glimpses of this disturbing event reveal that Flanagan has excised the scene’s nudity while adding a seismic update. As Carrie sobs in the shower stall, Chris and her friends film the breakdown with their phones.
Other scenes note the presence of social media, bringing King’s fifty-year-old story into the digital age.
Flanagan’s adaptation promises to explore the destructive power of social media, an often invisible entity with a potential for harm rivaling Carrie’s own powers. While King’s tormented heroine suffers in front of a small group of girls, Flanagan’s version of the incident will likely become a viral video, potentially circling the globe on social media. Similar to Katt Shea’s criminally underrated The Rage: Carrie 2, which includes elements of revenge porn exploitation, Flanagan’s modern retelling will distinguish itself by exploring the nebulous cruelty of online bullying, a force ten times more powerful than the irl pranks King first envisioned.
A Completely Reimagined White Family
In addition to modernizing these canon events, Flanagan hints at updates to Carrie’s oppressive upbringing at the hands of her mother, Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan). Dead before the novel begins, we never meet Carrie’s domineering father Ralph, known to carry a bible alongside his gun. Flanagan’s White household will be an altogether different beast. In his version of the story, Carrie and her mother have been hidden away in the unassuming home, forced out of hiding by Ralph’s unexpected death. Perhaps we will finally meet this elusive man whose shadow hangs over his wife and child. Considering the White family’s fundamentalist lifestyle, this reimagining hints at tradwife culture and a home ruled by staunch patriarchal control.
Whereas King’s Carrie has been tormented by her classmates since Kindergarten, Flanagan’s Carrie will be a wide-eyed newcomer to public school, eager to make friends and engage with her peers. We glimpse Carrie cozying up to Chris and the equally popular Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) as she navigates a new social scene. Of course, we know this kindness is part of an elaborate plot designed to lull Carrie into a false sense of camaraderie, setting up an atrocious act of public humiliation. These brief moments of feigned compassion put Sue’s own complicity into question. Will Flanagan’s version of the character find the courage to defend Carrie from vicious bullies or will she succumb to peer pressure and join in the mob mentality?
Perhaps the biggest deviation from King’s original text is the relationship between Carrie and her mother. King’s Margaret White is a horrifically abusive religious zealot whose worldview has been hardened by internalized misogyny. She shames Carrie for menstruating, locks her in a closet to “pray,” and regrets not killing her child in infancy. She’s also responsible for Carrie’s social ostracization. Known to berate her neighbors for their “sins,” Margaret forces her daughter to live by an extreme code of conduct and disallows any potential friends lest they corrupt the girl with their worldly ways.
Flanagan’s version of the character is perhaps just as much a victim as Carrie herself. Also trapped inside her home, his Margaret is overly vigilant, her own trauma manifesting as strict control. Describing a more sympathetic depiction of the iconic villain, Flanagan explains, “Our Margaret White is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from this world … [She] doesn’t know how to do that and thinks the way to protect her is to close her off; not punitively, but to create this private utopia.”
Despite this potential softening, Sloyan’s Margaret may still have a sharp edge. Though she has appeared in many Flanagan projects, from Hush (2016) to The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), she is best known for her role as the abhorrent Bev Keane in the poignant saga Midnight Mass (2021). Perhaps inspired by King’s Margaret White, Bev is pious and sadistic, willing to punish anyone who does not adhere to her warped approximation of Catholicism.
Flanagan specifically wrote Margaret with Sloyan in mind, likely remembering the actress’s eerie ability to create deceptive empathy and shift our allegiances on a dime.
Expanding Stephen King’s Telekinetic Universe
While most of King’s story deals with an unthinkable prom night in Chamberlain, Maine, large sections of the semi-epistolary novel see experts debating the nature of telekinesis. Do Carrie’s frightening abilities represent a new phase in human evolution or is the prom night carnage merely a fluke? King settles the debate with a shocking denouement in which a young mother recounts her infant daughter’s ability to dangle her crib toys in midair. We’re left to wonder if she will become another tormented girl who surprises the world with metaphysical strength.
Flanagan plans to build out this brief scene while amplifying themes of female empowerment. After introducing our main cast of characters, episode two will open with an unrelated story in which we meet another girl with the TK gene. Each subsequent chapter will expand this world, building out a roster of telekinetic young women. Considering King’s fondness for stories about powerful kids, often described as possessing “the shining,” Constant Readers will no doubt have their eyes peeled for various Easter Eggs nodding to the author’s vast catalogue.
Giving Carrie Her Own Voice
Perhaps the most striking distinction in Flanagan’s new trailer is the extent to which we hear Carrie’s voice. The sneak peek is fully narrated by the titular prom queen as she demands accountability. “I want to know why,” she explains while detailing Chris’ elaborate plan. Aside from the aforementioned coda, King’s book essentially ends with the aftermath of the prom night tragedy, leaving little time for Carrie to reflect. His shifting narrative does bring the reader into her fragile mind, though not before she’s been cowed by relentless cruelty. We watch Carrie sink into bloodthirsty revenge, but never hear a considered desire for justice or repair.
Flanagan’s original monologue allows Carrie to voice her pain and mourn the life she could have had. We’re also treated to a mug shot-style photo of Chris with a bruised and bandaged face, implying that the mean girl will have to answer for her senseless sadism.
Flanagan is known for filling his series adaptations with heartwrenching speeches that cut to the heart of his thematic intentions, and this teaser seems to follow suit. After years of fans, critics, and scholars analyzing Carrie’s pain, perhaps his modern retelling will offer the titular anti-hero a chance to finally speak for herself.
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