The Witcher season 3 took months to create its hardest monster so far

You can also find out more about the following: The WitcherSeason 3, Geralt’s (Henry Cavill), is now facing demons both literally and metaphorically. But none have been so tremendously challenging as the “flesh monster.”

He encounters it in some dungeon lair — one Geralt knows is a trap but, naturally, ventures into anyway. The mythical Witcher is no stranger to monsters. He has faced them for hundreds of years and has always emerged more or less unharmed. Still, he’s surprised when he encounters something he’s never seen before: a lumbering, Cronenbergian mass of arms coming at him from a cocoon in the corner. As he battles the monster, he quickly learns the monster is connected to a set of three human heads linked to the wall, who wail with every blow to the monster’s body.

It’s gnarly and great, one of the most effective scenes of the new season. It’s also what production designer Andrew Laws said was easily the hardest monster to create of the season, and possibly the hardest Witcher monster to date.

“We originally concepted it in very abstract ways,” Laws says. The issue was figuring out the nature of the flesh monster, which Laws says took place with “more esoteric discussions” to get to the heart of the issue: Does it have four legs? Two? It stands up and waves its arms. How does it look when it’s in a dormant state versus an active state? The flesh monster: What does it do??

Image: Netflix

It’s a process that Laws estimates took months to develop and reach a (mostly) finished product.

“We had to deal with the dynamism of it between prosthetics, creature concept design, VFX, and try to figure out how to evolve this thing and make sense out of it,” Laws says. “We also had to do stunts, that was a big part of it — how they wanted to deal with their movement. That one in particular, I’d say it was months.”

The Witcher Monster was conceived as a massive mass of flesh that defied the traditional notion of what it could be.

“There was definitely a sense of the idea of how that monster comes together, and that maybe it’s not You can also find out more about us on our website. together. And that it forms — depending on the level of conflict, it intensifies,” Laws says.

He thinks that the flesh-eating monster could have been created only in Season 3, when crew members had developed enough shorthand to create such an enticing monster from a vague description.

This was important: the flesh monster represents more than a new challenge for Geralt or another beast for him to face. The flesh monster is the symptom of a true evil Geralt, his family and friends are facing. It’s a horrifying experiment which he must unravel if he hopes to save Ciri. It’s the first sign of an evil he can barely wrap his mind around. No wonder it’s a massive fleshy behemoth.