Man-Thing: Behind the Building of Film's Incredible Practical Monster Suit

The world of visual effects evolves rapidly with each passing blockbuster released. Nearly 20 years ago, VFX capabilities were just a fraction of what artists have access to now. As such, Lionsgate's Man-Thing feature skipped crafting its swamp monster with a computer-generated model. Instead, the production used a massive practical suit.

Built by the team at Australia's Make-Up Effects Group, the Man-Thing loomed large over the entire cast. As such, Man-Thing helmer Brett Leonard tells us it was required the production cast a professional weightlifter to act inside the suit, purely because of its weight and size.

"We had to find a very, very, very tall guy, big guy who also had to be very strong because the prosthetic pieces of the Man-Thing were so heavy, that just even to raise the arms and the hands that had mechanics in them, was you had to be literally a weightlifter. He was a weightlifting, big, big, big guy who played the Man-Thing," the filmmaker says during ComicBook.com's exclusive director's commentary for the film.

"It was audacious just to go make a movie in Australia that had these things in it. Because I didn't even know there was a swamp outside of Sydney. It turned out it was a toxic swamp near a chemical plant, but it was lucky. We had some of these very subtle visual effects where we were warping things a bit," Leonard adds. "There was a lot of little nuanced, almost subliminal visual effects to the swamp that are done all the way throughout if you go through and look at those interstitial pieces, you'll see that. There was a lot of detail put to the tune and this is now on the fake swamp. Which all that sculpture of all those trees was done just fantastically."

Man-Thing is now streaming on Tubi.

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