Interviews
Meet the Man Who Played the Demogorgon in “Stranger Things”!
When you see him, you fireball him.
Every great horror story needs a great monster, and in Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things, the monster is certainly a memorable one. With its petal-like head that opens up into a massive mouth, the show’s main villain has been compared to everything from an Alien Xenomorph to a creature ripped out of Guillermo del Toro’s worst nightmares, and it’s fittingly dubbed “the Demogorgon” by Mike and the gang – a reference to one of the most iconic monsters in Dungeons and Dragons.
How did the Duffer Brothers and their team bring the Demogorgon to life, you ask? As many fans have noticed and pointed out, a good deal of computer-generated imagery was employed for some of the scenes where the monster emerges from the Upside Down and crosses over into our world, but what you may not have realized is that the creature was partially brought to life the old-school way. Stranger Things is of course one big ole homage to the cinema of the 1980s, and staying true to the way things were done back then, the Duffers flexed their practical muscles and put a man in a rubber suit.
That man was Mark Steger, credited as “The Monster” in six of the show’s eight episodes.
As it turns out, Steger is one of Hollywood’s leading men when it comes to bringing otherworldly creatures to screens both big and small, and his resume extends well beyond playing the Demogorgon in Stranger Things. The body-based performance artist has been utilizing his unique abilities since moving to Los Angeles in 1995, and his work as a creature and stunt performer has been highlighted in many movies and television shows that you’ve no doubt seen and enjoyed.
Mark Steger, dating back to the early 2000s, performed stunt work in the horror films The Unborn, Priest, and the remake of Fright Night, and on his acting resume you’ll find films like Men in Black 2, I Am Legend, The Pact, At the Devil’s Door, Resident Evil: Afterlife, World War Z, and The Last Witch Hunter. Last year, he portrayed Tobi in Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, and he was also the nightmarish “Bunny Man” in this year’s horror anthology Holidays – if you’ve seen it, you’ll damn sure never forget Steger’s performance. On the small screen, the award-winning performer was a choreographer on American Horror Story: Coven, and he played “Addiction Demon” on American Horror Story: Hotel.
So how did Steger get cast in Stranger Things? It was perhaps a role he was destined to play.
“All the work that I’ve done – as an animator and live performer, creating other beings that inhabit other realms – has brought me to this point,” Steger told us in a written statement. “I got a call to meet with The Duffer Brothers about a new series. [They] immediately impressed me as smart and easy going with a very youthful enthusiasm. They showed me designs but said very little about the project. They talked about doing the creature effects practically with some VFX enhancement, and mentioned John Carpenter’s The Thing and the original Alien as influences. I knew the designer, Aaron Sims, whom I had worked with on previous projects, and who I first worked with on I Am Legend. I told them of my experience as a live performer, actor, creature performer, and animator. It was a good vibe. Fun. I wanted to do it. I was very honored to be hired for the job.”
“We spoke about influences for the creature – John Carpenter’s The Thing was an important one,” he continued. “They envisioned The Monster like the shark from Spielberg’s Jaws, a predator that exists in a different realm that crosses over in order to feed. The Monster is very primitive in that sense.”
“We started the development process with Mike Elizalde and his team from Spectral Motion – one of the premiere FX shops, working with amazing artists and technicians,” Steger wrote, digging into the creation of the monster. “There were fittings and tests over the course of several months. Gradually adding flesh, animatronics, batteries and servos. After reading the scripts (the ones that were finished), I arrived in Atlanta, where the show was shot. We did a lot of movement tests, sussing out the capabilities of this creature.”
“There’s a good deal of sensory deprivation that happens when I inhabit an elaborate creature suit,” he described the experience of playing the Demogorgon. “My vision and hearing are often impaired, if not completely cut off. Sense of touch is isolated to what I feel in the suit. There’s an overwhelming smell and taste of the materials that I’m fabricated from. When I first don the suit, there can be a strong sense of claustrophobia. And now my biometrics are altered in other ways – I’m taller, I must create extra joints (or they’re not where they usually are) and different ways of moving, extra appendages. Then I feel like THIS is my body. Then I feel truly alien and other. And I know that I’m a Monster from another realm in this narrative, one that breathes a different atmosphere.”
“I absolutely LOVED working with all the young performers on this show. Chasing and fighting the teens and the kids. Millie Brown, Charlie Heaton, Natalia Dyer, Caleb McLaughlin and Gaten Matarazzo, Noah Schnapp and Joe Keery. And of course Winona Ryder. Great experience with all of them.”
Reflecting, Steger hit the nail on the head of what Stranger Things means to all of us.
“This experience helped me remember why I love film,” he ended his statement.
Check out Mark Steger’s impressive (and often creepy) performance and choreography reel below, and learn more over on his official website, found at MarkSteger.net!
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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