Concept Art for MANDY Suggests One of the Demonic Bikers was Female

We’ve just gotten our first look at some pre-production concept art for the unexpected breakout horror hit Mandy. Shared by artist Rob McCallum via Digital Arts Online, they included interview questions where McCallum discussed the process of working with director Panos Cosmatos and screenplay co-scribe Aaron Stewart-Ahn.

“After reading the great script by Panos and Aaron, I did some roughs and Panos could pick and choose what he liked to develop further. This was all over email. He’d send photos of textures and shapes – one email of pics had a lovely pic of David Lee Roth in full metal pose at the end captioned ‘Dave’.

“I’d work from those onto what would eventually become the final design. We had one call to go through everything – and after that I’d get short notes like ‘make it a cursed object’. For one of the characters’ strap-on blade, [there was just] two words: ‘more rusty’.”

Check out Red Miller, an unholy dagger dubbed “The Tainted Blade”, “The Horn of Abraxis”, and a couple of sketches of Mandy’s demonic bikers. What I found most intriguing is how feminine the bikers look, baring more than just a passing resemblance to the “Wire Twins” who appeared in the straight-to-DVD Hellraiser: Inferno (the baldness and scarification specifically). Even though the final products turned out to look very different, many fans have noted their similarities to Clive Barker’s Cenobites.

Whether this means that one or several of the bikers who appeared in Mandy are female is a matter of debate. It’s more likely that the use of highly-concentrated LSD has turned them into something no-longer-human—perhaps beyond binary concepts of gender. Have a look for yourself below and let us know what you think in the Comments section.

If you’ve yet to experience Mandy for yourself, you can check out the synopsis and trailer at the bottom of the article. The film stars Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, and Linus Roache.

Synopsis:
In the Pacific Northwest in 1983, outsiders Red Miller and Mandy Bloom lead a loving and peaceful existence. When their pine-scented haven is savagely destroyed by a cult led by the sadistic Jeremiah Sand, Red is catapulted into a phantasmagoric journey filled with bloody vengeance and laced with deadly fire.

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