A new creature feature from New Zealand filmmaker Scott Walker (The Frozen Ground), The Tank is coming to select theaters April 21, followed by Digital on April 25.

Set in the 1970s, The Tank is about a young family who unwittingly awakens creatures at their recently inherited coastal property. Academy Award-winning special effects supervisor and creative director Richard Taylor (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Krampus, Braindead) and his team at SFX studio Wētā Workshop are behind the film’s practical creature effects.

Ahead of the film’s release, Bloody Disgusting spoke with Walker and Taylor about bringing these creatures to life.

Walker explains where his throwback creature feature began, “It was during COVID when I wrote this, and I wanted it set in 1978 as a nod to a simpler time. That was about a year into COVID, and nobody knew what was going to happen. We had been displaced around the world, my family and I, and I thought, ‘Oh, if I could just do one thing, what would I do?’ And my dream would be to work with Richard on a monster movie. Weta is such a phenomenal, iconic institution and such an amazing and wonderful group of people who are so friendly and so enthusiastic. Even on little things like this, you always felt like everyone’s going the extra mile, and it’s never too late, almost, to throw another idea into the mix and see if we can squeeze something else into it.”

Nightmares about climbing into a water tank further crystallized the concept behind Walker’s creature feature.

He elaborates, “We were back in New Zealand renewing visas for the US, and COVID started. We ended up homeless, and a friend said, ‘Go and stay in my house.’ It’s an old house built on top of a huge water tank, and we ran out of water. So, I climbed into the tank and had nightmares that night about creatures coming out and eating us all, which they didn’t. But I rang Richard and said, ‘I’ve just written a script about going down into a water tank.’ And Richard’s had his own experiences about water tanks from being a kid and being sent into them; they’re scary places. It reminded me of a bit of The Descent and was just a place I wouldn’t want to go. So that coalesced into the film from there.”

Still from ‘The Tank’

The Tank was an easy sell for Wētā Workshop founder and effects legend Richard Taylor, who cut his teeth on early Peter Jackson films Meet the Feebles and Braindead (Dead Alive). The artist’s answer surprised when asked what it was about Walker’s project that enticed him to come on board.

Taylor explained, “Well, it didn’t need any enticement. You can appreciate that we grew up making monster movies. You mentioned Braindead, which is very lovely of you, and I love the fact you called it Braindead and not Dead Alive because Braindead obviously is its proper title. So no, it doesn’t take any coercion to agree to something like this. There is a misconception, sadly for us, that we’re so busy working on large-budget feature films for the James Camerons of the world that we wouldn’t be available, nor would we desire to work on something like this. And it’s completely the opposite. We actually hang out and are hopeful that the phone rings from directors like Scott.

“I was just mentioning that we’ve just done an even smaller budget creature feature for an Australian director recently. We love this type of work. It’s irrelevant, really, what the film’s budget is; it’s all about the opportunity to execute something of creativity that fulfills the brief from the director. In this case, Scott had a very elaborate, very well-thought-out, and very plausible brief. So, it made it even more fun trying to fulfill his preconception of what he thought the creature could be.”

There are overt amphibious aspects to Walker’s monsters. Taylor breaks down the creature’s evolution in design and execution.

Close up creature design photo

“One of the first things always is to determine with the director whether [the creature suit] is going to be worn by an actor,” Taylor explains. “Because if it is worn by an actor, then you have restrictions that you have to respect; the primary two, of the distance under the arms and the distance from this point, the clavicle down to the underside the groin. If you don’t respect those two measurements, you’re going to impede the performance capabilities of the person in the suit. We knew that it had to roughly correlate to human anatomy. That sets in place a very stringent set of restrictions that you then build on. We knew that it wanted to be translucent; it had to go into the water for long periods of time, so we knew that we couldn’t make it in foam latex. So, we only had one other option, which was making it in silicon.

“We also had a time restriction, so we couldn’t make it practically like we would normally sculpt a suit. We ended up doing it entirely digitally. The whole suit is cast out of 3D printed molds so that we could turn it around fast enough. But to your core question, it’s an evolution, always, of development, response, development response. You develop an idea; you get a response from the director. In this case, it was a very fluid development process, drawing from a broad spectrum of ideas that I shared with, and Scott shared with me references.

“The hagfish is a very good example—various poisonous frogs, as you mentioned, salamanders. The axolotl, of course, is one. My wife used to keep axolotls, and they’re an amazingly unique but very creepy creature that is hugely inspiring. Then you’re trying to bring in predatorial attributes that give the sense that if it attacks, it’s going to be pretty deadly for you and it has the ability to do some pretty serious damage. So that informs how the jaws work, the more predatorial shape of the face, the fact that Scott definitely wanted it to have a secondary surprise. What you first see and perceive is not ultimately what you get. That was a process of designing and building that into the mechatronics. We also couldn’t use servo control technology, which gives us freedom to operate a creature by remote control, because we had to go in water. It’s all cable controls. It’s all just old-fashioned, really pulling big levers to operate cables that are creating the movement that you need. As good as you could ever hope, everything you dream about when you wake up on Monday morning.”

Creature concept art

Perhaps as important as the creature’s design is its physicality and the way it moves. Walker reveals how he lucked into finding Regina Hegemann right away for the role.

The director shares, “We started with the premises of, it’s going to be a practical creature. It’s probably going to be, I thought, someone who was obviously a woman, smaller. This is not Predator, seven foot tall; it’s the opposite. So, I wanted to go smaller, lithe, and muscular. That meant a dancer, a gymnast, a contortionist, someone who’s got incredible muscle strength. But the creature is not bipedal. It doesn’t stand up and is not of a humanoid shape; it’s reptilian. Someone has to hold themselves in a position. In fact, the first person that Richard found was Regina, who had this amazing ability. I remember she came in, one of the things she did was she crawled across, up, and over a coffee table. And she had her elbows higher than her shoulders and her knees almost higher than her hips. She looked like a tarantula. She would climb up and over the couch, and she could hold these positions, which felt reptilian.

“I had never cast someone in a role like that before. This was to me, ‘Oh, great. Job done.’ And Richard said, ‘I don’t want to jinx us, but instead of having to meet a hundred people, we may have found the first person.’ Richard was in Wellington, and she was down there and working with him. One of the things that he did in the first audition was we were talking about if she can be aggressive, and I’d had this idea of if you’ve ever been unlucky enough for a cat to try and leap on your head. I asked, ‘Could she do that?’ Richard was working with her doing all of these things [like], ‘Let’s get the biggest guy in the workshop to see what she can do.’ And she took a running leap at him and leaped on his head, and started to look like she was going to eat his head and with amazing aggression. She’s 4′ 11″ or five foot. It was just one of those, ‘Crikey, she’s going to be amazing.’ It was fantastic.”

See the creatures in action when The Tank releases in select theaters on April 21, 2023.