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.