I Can’t Unsee That: The Special Visualisation of Bodies in Cinema

*Warning: This article contains images of body horror and VFX that may be uncomfortable for some readers!

I grew up in England in the late 1970s and 1980s, part of a generation ‘scarred for life’ by what we saw on television. Children’s television of that era featured strange and disturbing things, many created by what was then known as Special Effects (SFX). It wasn’t too long before we realised that a great deal of adult entertainment also focused on the impossible and horrific – images that even when briefly glimpsed on a movie poster could be fascinating and repellent. 

My daughter went through this recently when she stumbled upon an image of Pinhead, probably in a meme. Pinhead is the nickname for the villain of the 1987 British Horror film Hellraiser and its many sequels. Played by Doug Bradley, Pinhead is the leader of the Cenobites, leather-clad undead purveyors of pleasure and pain. Their pale, hairless heads are permanently studded with rows of sharp pins – a painful but oddly beautiful image created by SFX make-up artists Bob Keen and Geoff Portass. My daughter wished she’d never seen it, but, now that she had, found herself wanting to look at it again – a bit like the urge to scratch a scab. 

I had the same feeling about a hardback history book of Science Fiction and Fantasy films given to me when I was six or seven. It had large colour stills from some classics (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars), and many less reputable films with shoddier, more grotesque images. The page I generally avoided, and yet still wanted to peek at occasionally, showed the painfully contorted animal-human experiments from a forgotten 1977 adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau. These unwilling mutants were created by Tom Burman, who’d started his SFX career on Planet of the Apes.

British children’s TV shows at that time liked to run features on practical SFX. They revealed the secrets of matte painting, model work, integrating stop-motion, front/rear projection and other optical effects. These techniques, some almost as old as cinema itself, were on full display in many of the films at this years’ Perspectives Film Festival.

Learning about them was illuminating, but more compelling to me was the sticky, icky business of make-up and prosthetics — an art that could change, distort, and destroy bodies and faces. I’d seen it properly in action when I watched Raiders of The Lost Ark on VHS and couldn’t believe the imagery of the climax. A Nazi henchman’s eyes liquify and pour out of his melting, screaming face, an image so transgressive that I didn’t even notice another exploding head in that same scene.

This was the time of the ‘Video Nasty’ in the early 1980s — a not entirely unjustified moral panic about uncensored horror films on VHS tapes infecting high street shops (and spreading to our suburban living rooms) like a J-Horror virus. Many were ‘powered’ by SFX make-up so effectively unpleasant that advocates for censorship could argue that the murder and gore in these films might even be real. I listened to my friend Tim’s breathless report of sneakily watching the nastiest of the ‘Nasties’, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and wondered if it was possible to show a mechanical blade ripping through human flesh. 

That image isn’t actually in the film, although many viewers, like my friend Tim, imagined they’d seen it. It didn’t matter, because the skill and craft of SFX make-up wizards including Dick Smith, Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Tom Savini, and others achieved all manner of gruesome and disgusting imagery by combining liquids, silicone and latex prosthetics and even puppetry (to create exposed organs pumping blood, among other things).

In the late 1970s, SFX became Visual FX (VFX), and the dawn of Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) accelerated in the late 1980s and became standard practice from the 1990s until now. There was a moment in the 2000s where CGI’s most fervent advocates were sure that it was a matter of time before everything would be digital.

Arguably, this is fine for building worlds and fantastical creatures, but there’s a problem when it comes to the human body – which links back to our visceral reactions when we see a body altered or ‘extended’ by practical effects. Remember Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man in 2002? We were supposed to be marvelling at the titular hero effortlessly leaping and web-slinging around Manhattan, and all I could think was – there is nobody there. Nobody and literally no body. Peter Parker was an elegant flow of weightless pixels, devoid of physicality and life.

I don’t mean to cry nostalgia for the ‘old ways’ of FX-making and my childhood days of being terrified in front of the TV. Rather, it seems that when it comes to bodies on screen, what remains important is the impression of weight, volume and substance. Especially so if you want to split that body asunder – to reveal what’s beneath or make it extraordinary. The VFX team designing the horrific effects that transform the bodies of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in The Substance (2024) were told by director Coralie Fargeat not to use CGI. Instead, they built truly disturbing models and puppets ‘adapted’ from the actresses’ bodies, using physical crafts and skills first innovated in films like The Thing (1982) and American Werewolf in London (1981).

Last week I watched two horror films with students with my Asian Horror class. The first, The Tag-Along (2015), is a Taiwanese film about mysterious hauntings in Taipei. When the evil ghost is revealed about halfway through, it’s a child-moth hybrid created with CGI, and it’s rather ridiculous. One could critique the less-than-stellar CGI, but it’s more than that. The few scenes where they filmed an actual child with make-up, were far more disturbing than those with the digital creepy-crawly. After that, we watched The Corpse Washer (2024), an Indonesian horror that largely relies on old-school make-up and practical gore effects (pulling barbed wire out of orifices!), and while the ghosts were more theatrical than scary, this approach had the integrity of being charmingly hand-made and ‘real’. 

Certainly, digital technology is going to keep simulating the real with greater degrees of fidelity (as we can see with processes like face-swapping). It also provides amazing opportunities to do the opposite – to realise the imagination of the unreal. But when it comes to the body, its destruction and transformations, and the very specific fears and desires we have over witnessing these effects, the practical beats the virtual every time.