How the Zombie and Christopher Lloyd Made It to the Screen

[This story contains spoilers from Wednesday season two, Part 2.]

With a new school year there are always new faces, and Nevermore Academy is no different. When Wednesday Addams, played by Jenna Ortega, returns for her second year at the school — “the first time you’ve ever returned to any school voluntarily,” mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) teases in season two’s first episode — a whole new contingent of the community is introduced. Some of them are friends and some are foes, and some look completely normal, while others … not so much.

Tasked with bringing into reality those that are a little further down on the bizarre end of the spectrum, the show’s prosthetics and VFX teams had their work cut out for them. One of the biggest challenges, says prosthetics designer Tristan Verslius, came in the form of the zombie known as Slurp. Brought back to life by Pugsley, Slurp (Owen Painter) regenerates by consuming human brains, and (here comes the spoiler, you’ve been warned) we learn in episode six, “Woe Thyself,” that he’s actually Isaac Night, Tyler Galpin’s uncle, who’s intent on curing Tyler’s mother of her Hyde.

“Very early on, when the first drafts of the script were being made, there was a conversation of Slurp needing to be a practical actor in makeup,” Verslius says, “so we started off by trying lots of zombie designs. There are many different types of zombies, and we were trying to find that unique look that was both enhanced, and was part of the world of Wednesday and Nevermore and the showrunners’ visions, and we landed on it with guidance from Tim [Burton] and the sketches and edits to some of our designs.

“When the actor [Painter] was confirmed, we took that design and applied it to him, as it were, on Owen’s face and body. Then we started going stage by stage, really. We made stage one first and we tried to figure out how to get to stage three, and what stage two was and how that journey takes place.”

The zombie necessarily incorporated more CG elements in the early episodes, notes visual effects supervisor Tim Turnbull. “When he first comes out of the ground, he’s in rough shape, so that’s where the CG really came in, that’s where biggest enhancements were,” he says. “By episode five, we’re doing very little [with CG]: His jaw still distends quite largely in those episodes and he has a giraffe tongue, but the hole in his head is gone and his nose has grown back. So most of our work was in episode one, and it phased out to be more and more practical as we went deeper into the episodes.”

The designs were tailored to maximize the “classic horror zombie vibe” in the early episodes, including at the camp in episode three, “Call of the Woe,” says Versluis, “but had these changes that lead you on the path back toward Owen.” He adds, “Prosthetics is about enhancing and adding to the acting — we can only add — so we added enough to start stripping it back through the stages. The prosthetics got thinner, and we started to bring out more cheekbones of Owen and some of his facial features until we feel like he’s coming back into it. So hopefully there are no jumps [in Slurp’s evolution to Isaac] where you suddenly say, ‘Oh, who’s this?’ We feel familiar at that point.”

For Turnbull and the VFX team, Professor Orloff (played by Christopher Lloyd) turned out to be an even bigger challenge than Slurp. Lloyd’s character was given a new lease on life years ago by Isaac, who created a machine that suspends Orloff’s head in liquid and supports its life without his body. The first question the VFX team asked, Turnbull says, was: “What does a head in a jar look like, and how do we do that?”

The solution, it turned out, was not easy. A decade ago, Turnbull says, they probably would have filmed Lloyd in front of a blue screen and very carefully chosen their angles to composite together the needed shots. But, he adds, “it would have looked like a CG head in a jar.”

Instead, they harnessed new technology by partnering with Eyeline Studios, a division of Scanline VFX, to create a 4D volumetric capture of Lloyd’s performance, gathering the data in high resolution at 60 frames a second, Turnbull explains. “So what’s in the jar is an actual direct translation of his performance, which I think is what gives it its reality. We didn’t change his performance except adjusting his eyelines a little bit. What you see there is Christopher Lloyd. The layer of CG that we put on it is really only there to support it, rather than take it over.”

Creating that magic trick was by far the most complicated visual effects work in the season, he says: “A lot of technology went into that, a lot of smart people working on a difficult problem and an enormous amount of data to process to come up with something that looks pretty simple. That’s the beauty of that.”

Wednesday season two, Part 2, released Sept. 3 and is now available to stream on Netflix.