How Hatching’s charmingly terrifying monster was brought to life

Image: IFC Films

Some of the biggest film franchises have been worked on by Gustav Hoegen. He helped bring to life the characters from Rise of the Skywalker and Prometheus. The set of Hatching, a movie about a body horror, was one of the most difficult places in his career. Hatching is a smaller-scale film, with only one creature to make, and Hoegen's team was responsible for every aspect of its creation.

Tinja, a young girl in a seemingly picture-perfect family of vloggers, stumbles across a strange egg. She hides it in her room, and eventually it hatch, unleashing a strange bird-like creature. I won't go into too much detail about the creature's existence, since it's a big part of the story. I will not show the whole beast in this article, but you can see it in the trailer. The creature and Tinja have a strong connection, one that only grows more twisted as the movie progresses.

After hearing the story and seeing the concept art for the creature, Hoegen was sold on the project. He was given very specific instructions before work began. She would send me reference materials for things like the skin texture and feathering. We would basically cut the whole creature in half.

The scale of the production was smaller than a blockbuster movie, which was a big change for Hoegen and his team. Most people are only involved in one step of the process when it comes to these productions. That was not the case on Hatching.

Everything was done in-house. Every small detail has consequences. I usually focus on building animatronics and hand it over. It was a great experience for me. I thought I knew what I was doing when I worked on films. The techniques you use were not new to me. The process took a bit longer, but Hoegen thinks the end result is as good as if it were a Star Wars movie.

The Hatching monster that you see in the movie was operated by a large team of puppeteers, with Hoegen in charge of the facial expressions. He says one of the challenges was to balance looking friendly or fearsome. The monster's eyes were one of the techniques they used. We didn't go too far with making it look grotesque.

You might be struck by how wet the thing is once you watch Hatching. It was disgusting so. Hoegen used a low-tech strategy to achieve that effect. The more realistic it is, the more you have to do. It is sort of an old-school trick. The monster movies that we grew up with, they made us sexy. It adds some more life to it. The lube was a big factor.

Image: IFC Films

The Hatching monster is one of the highlights of the film and it seems that having a singular vision helped. The smaller scale of the production made it a lot more difficult to film a scene, as a single delay could be very costly. He was worried about something going wrong inside of the head and he would wake up with a knot in his chest. It is a quick fix. You have to have surgery if anything happens inside the mechanical head.

There were no major issues on the set. It was a unique stress for Hoegen, a veteran who used to work on big franchises, because of how important the creature was to the film.