The startling story behind Hatching’s horrifying puppet-monster

Two things particularly stand out about Hanna Bergholm’s creepy horror feature HatchingThe emotional performance of Siiri solalinna, a wide-eyed teenager under the watchful eye of her mother. And Alli, the toothy, slowly mutating, dripping bird monster she hatches in a huge egg. Where it’s been standard procedure since JawsHorror directors tend to reveal the central characters of horror films with only a few glimpses up until the end. Alli, however, is present throughout most of Hatching — a slimy, shrieking, blood-drinking monstrosity that Solalinna’s character Tinja is trying to keep hidden and safe, even as it gets bigger, stranger, and more dangerous.

Bergholm directed the film from the script she wrote with Ilja Rautsi. She knew it was essential that Alli worked on the screen if the film was to succeed. So she literally got online and Googled “the best animatronic designer in the world” to see who she should ask to work on her film.

“We needed the best possible people to make it,” she told Polygon in an interview after Hatching’s premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. “These kinds of animatronics, this prosthetic makeup, it has to be perfect, or it just looks hideous […]Google said to me Gustav Hoegen was the top animatronics designer worldwide. Gustav is also the star animatronics designer for Star Wars. Prometheus Jurassic WorldSo on. I basically emailed him. Hello, I’m Hanna from Finland, I have a film — low budget but good story!”

Photo: Sundance Institute

It paid off. She says Hoegen “got fascinated with the story,” and between Star Wars projects — he handled animatronics on The Force Awakens, The Last JediPlease see the following: Rise of SkywalkerAlso, Rogue One Solo — he agreed to bring his team to Bergholm to design and operate the Alli puppet. Similarly, Bergholm reached out to makeup effects designer Conor O’Sullivan, half of the Oscar-nominated team who designed Heath Ledger’s Joker makeup for The Dark Knight. O’Sullivan has done prosthetic makeup for movies from X-Men: The First ClassTo Morbius The future Quantumania: Ant-Man and The WaspHe agreed, however, he also signed on to a project by a new feature director who was venturing into horror.

“I had admired his work so much,” Bergholm says. “Like Gustav, he got excited about the design and just wanted to be on board. And that was great.”

Bergholm said that she had hoped from the beginning that the Alli puppet would be practical. “CGI nowadays is wonderful, but it still doesn’t really have physicality,” she says. “It looks great, but I didn’t want my creature to be too smooth. I desired some roughness and ugly. I was always impressed by them. ET, those kinds of old practical-effects films, so that’s what I wanted. And its physical presence and its physical interaction with the girl in the film was so important.”

Photo by IFC Midnight

She says that she was diligent in reaching out and exploring her options with VFX companies. “They made us offers and thought of different ways to do it digitally,” she says. “But even they said, OK, this would be very involved — the creature is splashing in water, and the girl is touching it all the time. Although it might be possible digitally it could cost the earth.”

This is the entire metaphorical idea. Hatching is that Alli the monster reflects everything Tinja is hiding about herself from her controlling mother — it reflects her rage, but also her insecurity about her imperfections, and the ways her influencer mother would disapprove of them and punish her for them. Bergholm initially worked with concept designer Marko Mäkinen to draft sketches reflecting what she wanted Alli to look like — something lumpy, asymmetrical, and awkward, but still with enough pathos to earn sympathy.

From there, she says she worked with Hoegen and his team as they built the Alli puppet and began rehearsals in London, using the creature’s metal skeleton as a stand-in for the finished version, to see what it would be capable of doing. The movie evolved along with the puppet’s capabilities.

“In the rehearsals, they came up with all kinds of lovely details,” Bergholm says. “There’s a very important scene where Tinja is bonding with the creature, and its tiny hand grabs her finger. This was something that we created during rehearsals. The script was more descriptive. Tinja forms a bond with the animal Gustav’s team came up with those little details, based on what the puppet could do. Also in the rehearsal, they came up with the idea that the creature starts to mimic Tinja’s gestures.”

Photo by IFC Midnight

Bergholm states that Alli, once it had been painted with textures and added internal servos, was so heavy it required five people to operate it simultaneously. That meant sticking closely to storyboards: “The puppet can’t improvise,” she says. “There are five people moving it! If someone’s improvising, everyone else is like, How are you getting on?”

One puppeteer was responsible for Alli’s head, back and limbs in shots that Alli moves or activates. Another handler operated each limb. “We had five wonderful puppeteers who had done Star Wars films and worked 20 years in this business, and they were awesome,” Bergholm says. “[Hoegen]The best people were chosen. If you see these people’s CVs, it’s just [gasps]. Amazing. They have done everything possible in creature films.”

Bergholm reveals that Alli was manipulated by Hoegen, along with two puppeteers, using remote-control animatronics. “One was moving the eyes, one was moving the beak. One was moving the eyes, one the beak. Sometimes the tongue is all that moved. This was really cool with the beak and tongue synchronizing with each other. However, the tongue and beak were not synchronized. [were moving] at the same time…” She laughs, walking through how careful the puppeteers had to be to make sure the puppet’s toothy jaws didn’t sever its own tongue.

Animator effects are often used in studio movies. They have multiple backups for if one is damaged or fails. You can find more information here Hatching, there was just a single puppet, and Bergholm says Hoegen didn’t tell her how risky that was until after the shoot. “It was only in the very final day of shooting that Gustav admitted to me that he was so scared all the time, because these animatronics, they can break so easily,” she says. “Luckily, he didn’t say it to me before. It would have made me feel better. [terrified squeak].”

However, she does mention that the Alli animatronic did not work on the last day of filming. This necessitated some careful maneuvering. “The very last shooting day with the puppet, we had been shooting the bath scene, and the puppet skin just started to explode. All the animatronics broke down,” she says. “In the end, we only had to do a reshoot of one tight closeup of the puppet on the bed. The plan was in place. [to do something with the hand as well]But the hand animatronics went out of business. […]The facial animatronics also failed. That was all. So in the very final shot, the whole puppet broke down.”

Image by IFC Midnight

Part of the obvious challenge for the movie was working with Solalinna on scenes where she shows obvious affection and fellow feeling for Alli, even though it’s a repulsive monstrosity. “At first, she said it was very disgusting, the puppet,” Bergholm says. “And its slime dripping on her face, I think that just kept on being disgusting always for her, even though it was the kind of slime you can actually eat. It was completely safe.”

Solalinna found it initially difficult to use the Alli puppet. This was not due to the slime, its ungainly design or the fact that it was covered in operators. Bergholm claims this made it more difficult to pick out the set and react to Alli like a living creature. “Luckily, she was so amazing,” Bergholm says. “She just was so good at being in the moment, just living the character’s emotions and acting them out. Working with her was easy. The puppet was the difficult one.”

It’s as graphic and disturbing as it gets Hatching Bergholm said that she intended the film to appeal to viewers normally scared of horror movies. “I’m that kind of person myself,” she says. “I’ve always been terrified of horror films. Because I’ve seen horror films, it has always scared me. [such a]Strong imagination, I instantly start to envision any murderous creatures [are in a given film]In my closet, I look a lot like Tinja. I’ve always been afraid of them.

“But since starting this story, I discovered that I am actually at home making horror films, because it’s so cool to deal with one’s own fears. Then, I watched a ton of horror films. My own horror film experience was what I wanted to share. Other [Alejandro] Amenábar — that, for me, was an eye-opening film, a true horror film with a very dramatic story, a deep story. That’s what I was thinking. HatchingIn the same way. This story is about wanting to love growing up and being accepted for who you are. Maybe that’s quite terrifying.”

The art of hatchingIt is available now for purchase or rental Amazon, VuduOther digital platforms.