Terrifier 3 is satisfying gore hounds everywhere. Considering how much director Damien Leone‘s sequel delivers in the blood and guts department, no surprise there. The kills are next level.
Along with cinematographer George Steuber, Leone captures nightmarish deaths. “Honestly, almost every day it felt like that it was such a giant leap from the second one,” Steuber told Immersive. “From first to second was a huge leap as well, but this one is totally different. It was a huge leap.”
The shower kill is one of those leaps.
Recently, the Terrifier 3 cinematographer briefly spoke with us about the jaw-dropping sequence.
What made you go with the Alexa 35?
Such a beautiful image, and the dynamic range is really good too. So, we kind of stayed with the Alexa. I mean, the second one we also shot with an Alexa Mini. This is a big jump up from that, I’d say. It does shoot blood particularly well. A lot of that’s also in the lighting as well. So, it’s like a combination of things that create that, and then, obviously, in post we make it pop a little more.
What do you really need the lighting to do for the blood to really pop?
It really depends on the kill, what we’re trying to accent. I’ll go over with Damien what we’re really trying to highlight in the kill in particular. Sometimes we backlight the blood. It also depends on the background, if the background’s dark or if it’s light, we would light accordingly to that as well.
How about the shower scene? What did that require from lighting?
That one was a little bit brighter in terms of lighting. Basically, for this film, we used all tungsten lighting. We went back to the old-school lighting. Basically the whole movie was lit with that to give it more of a retro look. And we used the units throughout the entire film. So, the shower scene was lit a little brighter. The contrast wasn’t as much as in the rest of the scenes, I guess, to show it off and highlight it.
How many days did you have to shoot that, and what was some of the prep involved for pulling that sequence off?
It was a lot of prep for effects and for lighting. For effects, they had a lot of prep. They had to recreate the bodies, and there were a lot of effects. I mean, my garage was full of bodies. I think at one point I had 12 bodies just sitting there, and there were body parts everywhere. We shot on Staten Island, and we’re all kind of local to Staten Island. So, I would get deliveries to my house. It was convenient, and they would pick them up from there. I don’t know how many days they spent out in LA with the group. I know it took quite a while to get that done.
So basically, between that and the prep for the shower, we actually had to rebuild the shower set piece. Because certain angles wouldn’t be possible without removing that back wall. So, in the very next room, there was actually a set that was just the same as that, so we could get behind the wall and shoot that way. That took a while to build, too, to replicate. That’s probably a week of work right there, and then I’d say a few weeks for the effects to work, and then for us to light. I mean, that was basically a day to light it.
How many takes do you get for a scene like that?
Basically, we keep going until we get it right. Effects are kind of hard to shoot; they don’t always work out the way you want them. So, we plan accordingly for that, though. This is our third one — we already know it’s going to take a while to get the effects just right. So, we allow for a lot of takes with effects.
Terrifier 3 is now playing in theaters.
