“We wanted it to be the Chucky of the animal attacks world”: How The ‘Slotherhouse’ Team Brought Their Killer Sloth To Life [Exclusive]
Slotherhouse is as ridiculous as it sounds, which I mean with every ounce of love. A talking sloth named Alpha going on a killing spree against those who abandoned her? Count me in, especially as a self-described sloth fanatic. Perhaps the best part of Slotherhouse is the team opted to use an incredibly detailed puppet inside of a CGI sloth. She may not be a REAL sloth, but Alpha is as real as you can get, with at least five puppeteers necessary to bring her adorable little killer face to life.
We have an exclusive look behind-the-scenes look at the creation Alpha below! Plus, we also spoke with Slotherhouse producers Bradley Fowler and Cady Lanigan about sloth facts, how to make their perfect puppet, and perfecting the sound of Alpha.
Watch the exclusive behind-the-scenes featurette below:
Learn more about making Slotherhouse a reality below!
Dread Central: OK, so you mentioned something about how individualization played a big role in getting Slotherhouse made?
Bradley Fowler: Cady and I are really big into individualization. During the process of pitching Slotherhouse, there was one particular source that we were talking to quite a bit, and we kept doing visualization meditations. Through the visualization meditations, I kept seeing this person wearing a pink shirt. Literally, it just kept being pink shirt, pink shirt, pink shirt. And the day this person said yes, they were wearing a pink shirt. It was so freaky. I called Cady and I was like, “Holy crap.” That stuff really does work.
Cady Lanigan: It totally does. And this whole journey for us has been super spiritual just with the visualizations, the manifestations, even just praying about stuff. I remember I had a very vivid moment of seeing a sloth. So I was on the fence about some things with the project and trying to figure things out, and there was a sloth outside my window. I was in Panama, so it’s not like a sloth appeared in Los Angeles. It wasn’t that cool. But I woke up and there was a sloth outside my window. I was like, “Well, that couldn’t have been more clear.”
DC: I have to share with them with you that sloth is my favorite animal. To the point that for my birthday and Christmas for about the past 10 to 15 years, I get a sloth gift. So Slotherhouse was my dream because I met a sloth once and I cried. It was Kristen Bell-level crying.
BF: If the sequel happens, you’re going to have to come and visit on set.
DC: I have to. I want Alpha. I want the puppet.
CL: I love that you love sloths so much. So you had a Kristen Bell moment?
DC: It was the best day of my life
BF: That’s so awesome.
CL: When we were doing our research on Slotherhouse, we hired a company to work with to help us tell the best story of how we could tell the best version of this story. So we did a lot of research, and then the moment that sloths really came to a lot of popularity was a part of it, because of Kristen Bell and she went on the Ellen Show. I think it just really magnified how sloths, they’re so cute, but they’re also very interesting. They almost have human elements to them.
DC: There are so many weird facts about sloth.
CL: What’s your favorite sloth fact? Just I want to hear.
DC: They poop once a week. And follow-up fact is that there’s a species of moth that only lives on sloths because they have their own specific microbiome that grows on their backs.
BF: Okay, that one. I didn’t know that one.
DC: OK, this is Slotherhouse conversation, so how did you all get involved in this project? Where did it all begin?
BF: Well, the very, very beginning was when my friend Bob Muir convinced me to fly down to Florida. I was a little disenfranchised with Hollywood. I’d made two movies at the time, and it’s so hard to get products out there, especially when there’s a lot of eyeballs that are watching them. Yet you’re still having a hard time paying your rent without working three jobs. So I was in a pretty dark spot, and my buddy Bob was like, “Come on down to Florida.”
He’s this little guy in his 70s, so wise. And he’s like, “Yeah, we’ll just drink a few Fosters beers, hang out on the water. Everything will be fine.” So I did it, and I don’t normally take vacations. I’m very German, and while I was down there, we were sitting on his couch drinking beer, watching the Alabama football game, and I was complaining, and he was like, “Well, what makes money?” And I said, “I don’t know, Bob. Stupid shit.” And he goes, “Well, what’s the dumbest idea you can come up with?” So that’s where it started. And then a week later, I met Cady at a coffee shop and I’ll let her pick up the story from there.
CL: So me and Brad have been longtime friends. He’s one of my closest friends, and it’s been so great to be on this business partnership with him. At the time, I was also similarly in kind of a down spot. I was working on a lot of really serious content, things that had to do with child kidnapping and very intense subject matters in my own career in Hollywood, in television. And me and Brad had produced an independent film prior to this. I was just at a point in my life where I was like, I’m going to go back to business school. I’m going to get my MBA, and I just need a break from the industry. I need to reset. So I got coffee with him before I left to come back to Chicago, and we were just messing around, pitching each other.
We normally do funny ideas and stuff like this, and he literally said the title. He was like, I got one for you. I’m like, yeah, yeah, OK, sure you do. We always kind of riff on things. Then he said, Slotherhouse. I literally took a beat and I looked at him and I was like, “I’m in. I’m a hundred percent in this sounds like the best movie, and I want to see this.” So that’s kind of how our journey started, but then it evolved so much over the course of developing Slotherhouse and the phases that it went through.
BF: Yeah. It started off as Terrifier meets a sloth originally, and there is a version of that out there. Just know that. So Cady was a little bit more business savvy on it, and she was like, “Well, let’s see. I know horror fans are going to like this, but who else likes sloths?” I was like, “Nobody.” And so she pushed to do some research, get some data, and really hone in on who we’re telling this story to. We ended up figuring out with the data that the best way to tell the story was to the widest possible audience. So Cady, you really pushed that.
CL: But it takes somebody from a creative standpoint to really listen. And so that’s what I got to give Brad props for as a writer. Sometimes you get really attached to your own ideas and you don’t want to change them. It’s really hard to have people come in and be like, “Hey, I think this should be different.” Brad has an immense amount of agility to be able to shift and tell the same story in similar ways with different beats. And there’s nobody I know more who loves telling stories and is the best I’ve worked with at it. So he did good at responding to the, “Hey, I think we need to talk and we need to shift things a little bit conversation,” which is not always easy.
BF: Emotionally, I didn’t
CL: Actually we straight up had some arguments about it. But he did a great job at responding and doing such a great job writing the script for Slotherhouse.
DC: Oh, yeah. Was there ever a version of Slotherhouse in your head where you’re like, we’ll use a real sloth somehow? How did that evolve?
BF: I think that got smashed pretty quickly. Obviously, yeah, it definitely got pitched at one point. But Cady and I do try to, as best as we can, do things ethically and positively and that sort of thing. And also the fact is the sloths aren’t very good actors.
DC: They’re pretty slow.
BF: So it really came down to puppets or VFX, and I will say the script was written for VFX just because you write the story that’s in your head and it’s 2023. So I’m imagining what is possible. You know what I mean? When the idea of puppetry came into play, we talked about it. Both Cady and I are absolute practical effects nuts. We love it. So it was like, okay, could we actually do this?
CL: I had worked with a puppet before that was also animatronic on the set of Fanorama with my uncle who’s a director, Dan Lanigan. I got a lot of creative influences from him growing up, just he’s really heavy into the props world, the props community. So I had the privilege of working with a puppet previously. When me and Brad went down this road, we were really excited about doing with a puppet because it’s fun to bring in those practical effects. I think there’s so much realness even on set, watching your actors respond and meeting the makers who make these props.
People don’t realize there are so many makers behind this. There are so many people that spend their whole lives with this attention to detail. So bringing in that collaborative process from that standpoint was exciting to us too. We worked with Creature Effects and they absolutely did a fantastic job because they make very realistic animals. They were able to bring a realistic sloth to life, but then also add those character elements to the design of the puppet. It’s really an interesting hybrid because we wanted her to feel like she’s her own thing, but still resemble a sloth. So that process was really interesting. Brad, I don’t know if you want to get into the details of the actual stages of that, or if that’s over information.
DC: I’d love to hear about developing the puppet and what that process was like.
BF: There’s a lot of different things, but we got our director, Matthew Goodhue involved, obviously said Dan. Dan had a pretty healthy experience with puppets, as did Cady. And then Creature Effects obviously has a wealth of knowledge, but we wanted it to look as real as it could because the comedy comes from the reality of it. We wanted it to look as real as it could while also looking different enough that it was a unique creature. It’s actually kind of a hybrid between a three-toed sloth and a two-toed sloth.
The nose is a little bit different. The hair is a little bit different. So it’s familiar but slightly different. We wanted it to be unique, we wanted it to be Alpha. We wanted it to be the Chucky of the animal attacks world. You know what I mean? So we went little by little talking through all the things in the script, what is possible, what’s not possible, and then obviously all the challenges. The problem was, too, we were in a very short window. We were shooting during COVID, first of all, but we really wanted to get this thing done and through within, I think it was like a six or eight-month period.
CL: We actually went out and visited a sloth in a sanctuary and looked at the movement and studied the movement and tried to understand how we create something that can have the same body movements as a sloth. It was really a challenge for our team. And then on top of that, we had to factor into the design process, how do we get so many animatronics within such a small space? Because it’s in a large size sloth, we try to make it real to size.
So then we’re trying to figure out from the technical side, with all of those components, how do we manufacture enough space to be able to fit all of the axis? There are about 10 axises of movement in Alpha’s face alone. So her eyes blink. She has movements on this vertical and this vertical. So factoring in all those things was a really big part of it. And then figuring out where we put the pick points in the rods for her arms so that we can have full body motion. We have a pick point in the center, and then we have pick points in different areas so that we can have all five puppeteers on rods while we’re also using the remote to control her facial motion. So it was really a challenge in a lot of ways.
BF: Shot overseas during COVID with the puppet. It’s an American movie, shot in England, and Serbia during COVID with a puppet using British actors.
DC: When did you decide to have a voice actor? Was it always in the plan and your idea to have someone voice Alpha?
CL: Yeah, I think we always wanted to work with the voice actor. The challenge for us the whole time was “Who can do this?” And we were able to find the most amazing man, Rudi Rok, who’s based out of Finland. He lived in Los Angeles for a long time, but he works in many different capacities. This guy, he’s like the Michael Jordan of voice acting. I mean, truly unreal. He understood the physicality because he has a background in break dancing. And then he also has a lot of comedic experience as well. So he has a lot of experience in bringing characters to life. So with those two elements, I mean, just watching him work, Brad, you can jump in as well, was such a phenomenon.
BF: The guy’s unreal. We were looking at voice actors and obviously, the main staples came up. But we were like, I don’t think we can pull that off with our movie. So literally, it was a Google search. It was for the best animal voiceover actor on the planet, and this guy had 40 animal voices on his YouTube, and we clicked on it. I was like, “Holy crap, this guy’s amazing.” And so we’re like, “Do you think we can get him?” I was like, “Let’s try.” So we reached out and he completely ignored us because he thought it was fake. So we had our casting director reach out, and then finally he responded. But yeah, he does full Foley packages just with his vocals.
CL: And it was so interesting too, as we went down the creative journey, he brought so much of Alpha to life in such a really unique and special way. When we were first doing the research and development of what is a sloth, we had no idea about sloths.
So Rudi pulled all of this research of what sloths sound like when they scream, what sloths sound like when they’re mating, and all of these things that we were just blown away by because we had no idea. We were like, “They’re totally quiet.” No, they’re not quiet. They actually do have their own vocalizations and their own noises that they make. So he brought all of that research to us and then was able to create sort of a hybrid voice within the character of Alpha that sounds true to a sloth.
BF: Ish.
DC: Also evil.
BF: If sloth had a blood lust, that’s what it would sound like.
Slotherhouse is out now on Hulu.
Categorized:Interviews
