‘Men’: Visual Effects Supervisor David Simpson Breaks Down the Shocking Body Horror Climax [Interview]

This article contains significant spoilers for Men.

Alex Garland’s A24 horror movie Men, available now on Digital and Blu-ray, takes viewers from slow-simmering folk horror to full-blown surrealistic body horror insanity.

The film stars Jessie Buckley as Harper, who retreats to a countryside rental estate to start fresh after her husband’s (Paapa Essiedu) untimely death. The estate’s owner, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), awkwardly gives her a tour of the place and then leaves her to get settled. Harper’s plans for peace get shattered quickly, though, when a walk through the neighboring woods catches the attention of someone who appears to stalk her. 

That someone takes the appearance of various men around her, all played by Kinnear. Or, in the case of the child characters, a combination of actor Zak Rothera-Oxley and a digitally superimposed Kinnear. Harper’s present torment dovetails with her past; she’s as haunted by her abusive relationship with her husband as the inhuman presence lurking on the estate. 

It all culminates in a final confrontation that sees every iteration of Rory Kinnear’s characters painfully give birth to one another, a rolling birthing sequence full of blood and body horror until only Harper’s pitiful husband remains.

Garland previously shared how “Attack on Titan” influenced this climactic foray into extreme insanity, but it was up to a team of VFX and SFX artists to bring the whole nightmare to life.

Bloody Disgusting spoke with Framestore’s Visual Effects Supervisor David Simpson about this intense sequence and how it was created.

Simpson detailed how the birthing sequence initially evolved from script to screen:

“The draft before I joined didn’t have birth per se; it had a generic, natural transformation, much more in keeping with the green man and the forest motif. Then over the Christmas break, Alex had this idea of childbirth, which suddenly unlocks a lot more in the next draft of the script. It described the whole story of one to the other through birth. In the same way, the script lays out a framework that you’re going to try and film, but when you’re on set, you want to take input from a lot of people. It becomes a bit more organic on set.

“We have a similar thing with previs. We prevised the whole beat, storyboarded it with Alex, and tried to get something that was a rough estimate, similar to the script. So similar in that it was a shell that could inspire people as to what the sequence could be. Then you get on set and suddenly it’s, ‘how can we make this sequence better?’ In post, it’s once again, ‘how do we make what we filmed even better?’ It’s always just trying to layer another helping of improvement on top.”

Men blended VFX with SFX, with both teams working closely together on set throughout production and beyond.

“It was a film that VFX and prosthetics worked very closely together on. We had a bunch of calls and chats from Tristan Versluis, the prosthetics designer. He made sure that VFX was involved very early in the process, and we could discuss with him what we needed. We had a sense going in what would be captured in camera, what would be fully replaced in CG and what would be augmented by CG as well. You don’t get a lot of opportunities to do things practically, and that was one of my favorite things about this project was being able to work with the prosthetics guys in such a hands-on way, as opposed to just receiving stuff at the end,” Simpson said.

The visual effects supervisor breaks down what exactly audiences are seeing in this horrifying sequence:

“The first birth is, as much as it can be because it’s still a man giving birth, as close to a real birth as we could stage it. Then it progresses. The first birth is the vaginal birth, and then the second one comes out through the belly button. This one felt a little bit twisted, and it felt a little unnatural and a bit messed up. It was a vagina that replaced where the belly button was. We wanted to corrupt it a little bit more on each birth, like a photocopy of a photocopy. Each one gets more and more broken and more and more messed up as we go through the process, which was very deliberate. For me, the strangest one is through the back because that’s so unexpected.

“You want to keep raising the stakes with the sequence. So, the first birth, the shocking moment is it’s a man giving birth,” Simpson explains.

“But the second one, suddenly it’s a man giving birth through the wrong place; it doesn’t make sense anymore. By the time you get to the third one, you think something’s going to be wrong here. What do we do now? That back birth is so out there and wild and such a strange idea. It’s shifting the shoulder blades out of the way and snapping the spine to get space to put the head through. It gets progressively more messed up. At the final birth, you’re expecting something but then the feet emerge. Alex refers to it as turning cards like in a poker game. You want to keep turning the next part of the story and revealing the next interesting thing.”

Being on set during production only enhanced the surrealism of this sequence. The artist breaks down filming this body horror moment:

“That was a heck of a night. It was very cold, and it was cold for the crew who were there in coats and jackets and wrapped up; it’s March in the UK. It was bitterly cold, and all the breath you see, all of that is real. It’s not just breath. We found that if [Kinnear] was covered in fluid or his feet were wet from walking on wet grass that you would see steam coming off of other parts of the body. We ended up building into the work that we did to make it feel cold and gruesome. He was such a good sport as well that he put through it. Same with Zak [Rothera-Oxley], who played Samuel and Papa. All three of them had to be in these tiny cycling shorts in the freezing winter of the UK. In terms of shooting that, again, we wanted to try and get something for every single shot on camera. We built prosthetics that were rough silicon husks that the actors could push themselves through and emerge from.

“For instance, in the first birth, Zak would get down on his knees and push through this aperture. We had a silicon belly and silicon legs that he could interact with and push out of, which gave us something to frame against. For the second birth, we dug this hole in the front garden to let Rory climb into it and then put the husk on top, so he’s standing up from a hole. As he emerges, that’s Rory… we put the dead body around him. For the third birth, the back birth, we built a slide because we knew that he wanted to come out high up and emerge, almost like a baby giraffe being born or a cow being born where they drop; you get that really sickening fallout.

“We built a slide about the right height, and a membrane stretched over an aperture so that he could push himself through. We got a reference for him coming out and hitting the ground. We would shoot something with the actor, then they would step aside and go and warm up. While they were in front of a heater, we would reshoot the same thing, just with no one there. It would be a completely clean version. Sometimes you’re looking at real footage in the edit, and it’s really Rory. And sometimes you’re looking at that clean plate; we’ve replaced everything, and it’s completely CG. But it’s hard to spot which are real and which are fake plates. It’s quite fun.”

The entire team put a lot of effort into making this sequence look and feel as natural as possible, which meant thinking about the anatomic ramifications of what these births would do to the human body.

Simpson explained the difficulties, “The most challenging part of the birth scene is, I would say, finding the true elements you want to preserve. We know it’s going to be a man giving birth; we know that’s physiologically impossible. But we need to explain what’s going on anatomically and make sense of the process. We wanted it to feel real. What happens when you’ve got a grown man inside your body? Where do your organs go? Where does your rib cage go? If someone’s coming up through your throat, the rib cage will need to open up to make space for them to get through. If they’re coming up through your mouth, the jaw will need to separate or dislocate in some way to make space to come through. If this whole process is happening, what’s happening to the muscles? Do they tear? Are they just stretched so thin?

“There’s a lot of questions that you need to go through to justify what you’re doing so that it didn’t just feel like an inflatable human being, it didn’t just feel like a hollow balloon. We wanted to move stuff out of the way and dislocate joints. In the first birth, that’s the closest to a real birth as possible. Obviously, a man doesn’t have a birth canal, and even if they did, it wouldn’t be big enough to squeeze a 12-year-old kid through. We started thinking about what happens with the pelvis. Does it snap? Where does it break? If the pelvis breaks, what happens to the hip joint? If you watch that sequence, the pelvis breaks, and one of the legs is dislocated. As it happens, the joint breaks. There’s a lot of internal story happening to try our best to convince you it’s real.”

The level of detail and the craftmanship between VFX and SFX delivers one of the most gruesomely shocking finales of the year. Watch Men on Digital and Blu-ray today.