Spoiler Warning: The following article contains spoilers on two character deaths.
Ti West delivered no shortage of memorable, gnarly deaths in his slasher, X. Each one different than the last, and most of them gruesome and bloody.
The filmmaker previously shared with Bloody Disgusting that the first kill, that of aspiring director RJ (Owen Campbell), “was meant to say, ‘Okay, you are now entering the movie that you originally came for, whether you like it or not.'” He succeeds in keeping audiences on their toes with a vicious stabbing, courtesy of Pearl (Mia Goth), resulting in a gloriously bloody kill.
When chatting with Bloody Disgusting this week, Hair & Makeup Designer Sarah Rubano broke down that particular kill, revealing just how grisly it got through its stages.
Rubano explains, “For that first effect with RJ getting killed in front of the truck, Pearl comes up to him, and she stabs him in the neck. He’s not wearing any appliances there. It’s just a retractable knife. From that point, he came back to the makeup trailer, and we put on a prosthetic neck with a slit in it. There were, of course, the blood tubes built into it. We had a magnet system so that the handle of the knife could stick in place without Pearl holding it. That was stage two.
“From there, they pull the knife out, and blood starts flowing from the tube. It’s all over everything. We moved on to stage three. They had to get it. You know? Then he’s on the ground, and she starts just stabbing away. At that point, it was just adding tons of blood gel, more blood, and other little mangle-y pieces of appliances to make it look like things were separating and breaking down. We built from there.
“Then later, when Maxine comes and sees the aftermath, she sees his head is … He’s been decapitated ultimately. Ti wanted the body to be still twitching and then the head to be slightly off to the side.
“We had a high-res dummy decap head made of RJ. Then we did a fun little trick, where we had a stunt performer. We had him lying on his back, and we had a false floor built. He had his body out on the ground, then his head and shoulders were down in the hole with a false floor over the top. Then we had on his body, we had an upper body, like prosthetic shoulders and neck stump. Off to the side, we had the decapitated head. When she comes around the corner and looks, he’s twitching a little bit. The body’s twitching.“
RJ’s death ushers in a full-throttle back half as the rest of the characters encounter an unhinged Pearl as well as her protective husband Howard (Stephen Ure). Among the first to go is Wayne (Martin Henderson), whose Lucio Fulci-like demise delivers one of the film’s biggest jolts. While Wayne’s death features impressive editing, it also created one of the biggest challenges for Rubano and the special makeup effects team.
She explains how they pulled this off, “One of the most challenging makeup effects to pull off was Wayne and the pitchfork stabbing in the eye. That was tricky. Because our timeline was so short, that was one makeup effects gag that MimicFX Studio handled and a dear friend, Rogier Samuels, who’s based out of the Netherlands. He’s been working with Weta Workshop on and off since The Lord of the Rings days. They’ve got a shorthand with each other, a close working relationship. He did a great job, but it was just tricky.
“It was always going to be tricky. Because when Wayne is looking for RJ, he’s peeping through that little hole in the barn wall. And out of nowhere, the pitchfork pokes him and skewers him right through the eye.
“It’s a super gory moment. We had to do two passes, one with the actor, like clean of the pitchfork, taking the impact and falling out of frame, of course, but then one with the Wayne dummy, which is this amazing, beautiful Wayne head and upper body dummy that MimicFX Studio built.
“The dummy body had to be at the same angle as the actor, and it had to line up perfectly with the pitchfork and the eyeball rig. Plus, the eyeball had to pop out of the socket. And then the dummy body had to fall, like start the descent to the ground. The eyeball also had to fall to the ground and hit its mark.
“It was quite a rushed moment trying to get this on the shooting day. We had to assign it to a splinter unit day to give it the attention and time needed for us to get there. It was complex. But I mean, it works in the movie. You see that split moment where it just goes right in the eyeball, which is horrifying. You know it’s coming; it’s all so horrifying.”
Ti West’s X will be available on PVOD on Thursday, April 14, 2022.