Whatever you thought of Other Mommy, its creature effects deserve some love. There are images in Rob Savage’s latest that are fucking otherworldly, and the team behind them is giving us a closer look at how those nightmares came to life.
Makeup effects artist Jeremy Selenfriend has shared behind the scenes photos and footage of the entity’s “attack mode,” designed with Brian Spears, Melanie Licata, and the team at Monster in My Closet. Hayley Spelman wore and performed the creature, which takes the familiar features of Jessica Chastain (It Chapter Two) and stretches them into something wonderfully wrong.
According to Selenfriend, the look evolved from concept art by Vincent Proce through numerous sculptural variations, always using a distorted version of Chastain as its foundation. The black portion of the makeup was deliberately left as a placeholder for visual effects.
“This beauty queen of a creature … was referred to as the entity’s ‘attack mode,’” Selenfriend explains. Although it appears in the finished film for only a few beats, he says it was the most frequently applied of the production’s many creature looks.
And that first image clearly means a lot to him.
“The first image is my single favorite monitor shot from my entire career thus far,” he writes. “It was SO terrifying and effective in camera and took so many talented humans to bring to life!”
Listen, Other Mommy took a beating from critics and audiences, but maybe some of that response was a little too harsh. Chad Collins made his own counterargument, finding more to appreciate in its dark fairy tale than its effectiveness as a conventional scare machine.
I thought the first act was phenomenal. Savage hits the gas right out of the gate, delivering terrifying imagery in those opening 20 or 30 minutes. Maybe that’s part of the problem: it opens so strong that the rest struggles to keep up. And while he previously teased around 50 jump scares, there’s a difference between making someone jump and actually building atmosphere and fear. Still, some of these creatures were so fucking cool, and there were genuinely chilling sequences.
Matt Konopka was less forgiving in our review, giving it 2 out of 5 and calling it “a generic funhouse of horrors that’s seldom scary.” Financially, it’s had a stronger run: our latest box office report put its worldwide total at $78.78 million through October 18, despite a 70% second weekend drop domestically.
Based on Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, the film follows a young girl whose family is terrorized by an entity that wants to inhabit her. Chastain stars alongside Jay Duplass (Transparent), Arabella Olivia Clark, and Dichen Lachman (Severance). Universal’s Blumhouse and Atomic Monster release is in theaters now.
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