Practical effects: monsters you could touch
Practical effectsnoun
Practical effects are special effects made physically on set, with prosthetics, puppets, animatronics and blood rigs, rather than added digitally.
Practical effects are effects made for real, in front of the camera: prosthetic makeup, puppets, animatronics, squibs, miniatures, and a great deal of fake blood. The opposite is work added later in a computer. Horror fans have strong feelings about the difference.
Where it comes from
Every monster before the 1990s was practical by necessity, from Jack Pierce's makeup on Frankenstein (1931) to Dick Smith's work on The Exorcist (1973). The early 1980s were the golden age: Rick Baker's transformation in An American Werewolf in London (1981), Rob Bottin's creatures in The Thing (1982), Tom Savini's gore for the slashers, Chris Walas on The Fly (1986). Digital effects arrived in the 1990s and for a while replaced almost everything; the backlash, from fans and filmmakers, brought practical work back as a selling point, and most modern horror now mixes both.
Why it matters
A practical effect has weight. Light hits it the way light hits a body, it occupies space, the actor is looking at something, and when it is good it looks like the thing it is pretending to be rather than a drawing of it. It also ages differently. The Thing looks better than most films made thirty years after it; a lot of early digital monsters do not. The argument is not that computers are bad, since good digital work is invisible, but that in horror the audience is looking for the seam, and a prosthetic rarely has one.
It is the craft that splatter and body horror are built on, and the reason those subgenres have such devoted makeup fans.
In Gasper
Practical effects is not one of the built-in tags, but members add it to a rank with "Add a tag" and use it as praise, and it travels with Gross and Rewatchable. A tag is a note, not a score, so it never changes a scare score; that comes from head-to-heads alone. What the tag does is say why a film sits where it does in your rankings. The NEW DIRECTOR card that can follow a rank applies here too, since effects artists who moved to directing, like Tom Savini with Night of the Living Dead (1990), count.
Questions people ask
Why do horror fans care so much about practical effects?
Because a physical thing has weight and light falls on it correctly. The actors are reacting to something real, and it tends to age better than early digital work.
Are practical effects always better than CGI?
No. Most modern films mix them, and digital work is often used to clean up or extend practical pieces. The argument is about what the audience can feel.
Which films are the usual examples?
The Thing (1982), An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Fly (1986) and Braindead (1992) are the ones fans point to first.
Go deeper
- FeatureSubgenre browsingThirty-three subgenre shelves, from Slashers to Cosmic Horror, resolved from TMDb keywords.
- GuideBuilding Your Horror Rankings: Ranking a Backlog ThoughtfullyHow to rank a lifetime of horror into one honest list: where to start, how to stay consistent, when to revisit, and what tags and the Loved it heart are for
Related terms
- DreadDread is the sustained, building fear that something terrible is coming, the slow counterpart to the jump scare in horror.
- Jump scareA jump scare is a sudden image or sound, usually after a quiet stretch, designed to make the audience physically flinch.
- Body horrorBody horror is horror in which the human body itself transforms, mutates, decays or betrays its owner, often in graphic detail.
- Cosmic horrorCosmic horror is horror built on the dread of forces vast and indifferent to humanity, whose true nature cannot be understood or survived.
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