Man-Thing Crew Accidentally Built Film’s Practical Swamp Using “Chicken Shit” Instead of Dirt

In this day in age, Marvel movies receive hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure the highest-quality blockbuster is released to theaters. When it comes to smaller fare like 2005’s Man-Thing from Lionsgate, that most certainly wasn’t the case. The indie film based on one of Marvel’s favorite horror characters received just $5 million the film the production. Oh, and the crew accidentally made a hazardous swamp built largely out of “chicken shit.”

During ComicBook.com’s exclusive Man-Thing commentary with filmmaker Brett Leonard, the director revealed that some of the mud brought in to help beef up production’s practical swamp set wasn’t really dirt or mud at all.

“We had to constantly replace mud to get enough mud in certain areas. And we had to build up mounds of mud, because mostly it was a tank of water,” Leonard says.

“This was like working in water, mud, and weird slime the whole time. It basically, even though it was not a toxic real swamp, like the other part we were making, but this was the man-made swamp,” the filmmaker adds. “It actually became a bit toxic because one day, for one of the scenes coming up, we had to create a bigger mound of mud and the Australian crew went to grab some bags of like Fuller’s earth to build the mud mound up. It turned out it was made of what they would call, chook shit, which is chicken shit.”

Leonard and the rest of the crew could only laugh about the situation, even making t-shirts to commemorate the occasion.

“They poured all this chicken shit into this giant tank and the entire tank became bacterially dangerous,” Leonard continues. “And we had t-shirts made up with a Man-Thing, with his hands on his nose going, ‘This swamp stinks.’”

Man-Thing is now streaming on Tubi.

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