Everyone loves a good monster. They feed into our cultural zeitgeist on a daily basis: Whether it’s the wave of Jean Jacket TikToks that had everyone double-taking at the sky, or the Babadook becoming an unprecedented gay icon, we love creepy creatures. We love making memes out of them. We love dressing up as them. We willingly sit through two-hour films for the slightest glimpse of them. And Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is a whole feast of marvelous monsters satisfying all of that hunger.
But how do you make a monster? While del Toro’s reputation as a creature king precedes him, Cabinet of Curiosities is an entirely new feat with eight separate, totally unique creatures starring in each episode. Some will haunt you at night, and some will leave you awestruck at their complete originality. So if you’ve found yourself googling octopus lore after Cabinet of Curiosities’ first episode, thank the show’s brilliant lead designer and prosthetics expert Mike Hill — a close collaborator of del Toro’s for over 10 years and the monster maker behind many residents of his creature canon.
Making a monster (literally)
“We try to stay away from the Hollywood fabrication type of things that look like [they’ve] been Hollywood created, » said Hill in an interview with Mashable. « We try to make something that’s of this planet, of this earth… You should be able to walk past these things in a zoo, and look in and think oh, it’s a marine animal, and never think oh, what the hell is that. »
While we’ve often seen feature films going to extreme lengths to create extraterrestrial entities or amalgams of things completely alien to us, we’ve also seen an arguably more successful track record of creatures inspired by all the weird stuff going on on earth. Whether it’s Stranger Things’ Mind-Flayer amping up spiders by a thousand, or Jean Jacket echoing obscure jellyfish lurking in the deepest parts of our ocean, taking something that we recognise and morphing it into something that we don’t is an approach to horror design that’s significantly scarier because it’s so close to home. And that’s exactly what Hill and his team do for every creature in Cabinet of Curiosities.
« After my initial conversations with Guillermo and Guy Davis, our job is to take those notes and concepts and turn [them] into something real, into something plausible, » said Hill. It’s a job that’s all too much like a quest, with Hill and his team relying on troves of real-life footage, including mummified bodies and war-induced physical trauma, to get a sense of what a flayed, starved demon could realistically look like.
The quest then spans into figuring out the materials to create the creature. “The greatest marriage is VFX and practical effects,” explains Hill. In the pursuit of making their Dottie, the hellish tentacled nightmare in the show’s first episode, Hill explains that while VFX worked to produce the tentacles sprawling out of her, the rest of Dottie was pure SFX. The many steps included body casting actors, turning that into fiberglass, then using clay to sculpt extra bits needed for the creature, molding all of the above into a latex suit, and then doing an external paint job to make it look all the more real. A tedious, yet incredibly, rewarding SFX process that’s been a recipe for all our favorite monsters from Dottie all the way to the Night King.
Making a monster (figuratively)
“If a movie’s called Count Dracula, he’s got to be good because that’s all the audience is waiting for, » said Hill. « You can have your A-list actors and magnificent sets, but at the end of the day, people are waiting for that creature. If that creature doesn’t work, your movie’s lost, the audience is lost.”
The stakes are abundantly clear when making a creature feature, but while visual concepts and effects take up 50% of its creation, the other 50% rests in its personification — in making a character out of a creature. It’s easy to make something scary, but to build something that’s scheming, primitive, and constantly hunting, is a mammoth task that transcends a creature’s terror beyond a fleeting jump-scare.
The line between that is seeing creatures as characters and not as deluded monsters. “You really need to make these things seem like undeniably living creatures with a personality and with a soul,” explains Hill. “[del Toro and I] see them as everyday characters who just happen to have no face.” del Toro and Hill’s love of characters like Frankenstein’s creature informs a process that values building a personality for their antagonists as much as their appearance. Why we remember the duo’s creatures, with the extensive list including the iconic Amphibian Man from The Shape of Water, is because there’s a story behind them. Dottie in “Lot 36” is a scorned woman whose revenge plays in tandem with the demon living inside her. The witch in “Pickman’s Model” is intrinsically “evil for evil’s sake,” admitted Hill. All these characters have motives which are entirely unbound and act in entirely unpredictable ways. That’s what makes them so good time and time again.
“Everyone loves creatures and monsters, » Hill said simply. « The whole world loves them… They love witches, they love monsters, they love the dark. Monsters are actually loved and not hated, which is ironic.” In 2022 alone our Twitter feeds have been blessed with Vecna memes, Targaryen dragons, alien sightings, and Barbarian’s mother character all at once. Cabinet of Curiosities is ready to add even more colorful creatures to the horde.
We often overlook the monster makers who spend months on end perfecting every detail of what later becomes all of our Halloween costumes — a shame considering the meticulousness of the craft. Everything can be a monster, but not everyone can do a monster right. In Cabinet of Curiosities, Hill and his wonderful crew elevate the show with each second of their creature creations. And I can’t wait to see all the Dottie cosplays to come.
