- After watching "Fear Street: 1994".
- We asked ourselves, would a head really do that?
(spooky music)
- My name is Kat.
- And I'm Dominic.
- [Kat] I'm an electrical engineer in my day job,
and in the afternoons,
I like to show people about engineering.
- I'm a science communicator online,
so I basically take the concepts that she's working on
and dumb them down even more
for people like me to understand.
So, we've got an industrial bread slicer.
- And a bunch of stuff to slice.
We have a fresh loaf of bakery bread.
- [Dominic] We've got a watermelon.
- And a ballistic gel head named Kate.
Before we do that, let's review the footage.
(dramatic music)
- Yeah, I'm not a horror movie fan.
Gore is a little bit too much for me.
- I like how she's still fighting him,
even though she'd literally just got stabbed.
- Is it weird that I'm hungry, looking at the cake?
How's her hair?
How's her hair
not getting tangled? - That's what I'm saying.
Like, her hair goes through.
(Kate screams)
- Does that not look like fruit cake with everything inside?
Why am I thinking of food this whole time?
- This machine is supposed to slice bread,
and it's very, very likely that,
if you put in something much, much harder,
then it'll either just overload or break the machine.
I know that engineers
are not going to design a machine for extreme conditions
if these extreme conditions are not needed.
Let's hear a little bit from the filmmakers
about how they did this.
- We had a lot of discussion in pre-production
about that sequence, because I remember, like,
sitting and kind of arguing with my production designer,
Scott, and my art director, Sean,
'cause they were like, there's no way
that a human head could go through a bread slicer
and that would happen.
And so, ultimately, what they did
is they bought a bread slicer.
We fed watermelons through it, and it worked.
So, then, I created a prosthetic head,
and that was like varying degrees of success.
We ran our actress through the bread slicer
without the blades,
and we knew that it was ultimately
gonna all be visual effects.
- We had some versions of, like, brain splatter,
like brain collapsing, like, with a lot of gore.
We need to really recognize Kate.
It's really important to maintain the visual integrity
of the face to really be still connected to a human being
and not just see, just like some gore,
like some dog food coming out the other side.
- Probably, if you put a human head,
like an actual human head through a bread slicer,
it would be a disgusting, goopy mess,
and it wouldn't really recognize,
but it's way better to see Kate's face,
like sliced and awful and destroyed.
So that was our thing for this.
- [Dominic] This is the Oliver 777N bread slicer
with 0.5 horsepower.
- [Kat] That's roughly 370 Newtons of force,
and it takes about 2,300 Newtons to break a human skull.
- [Dominic] But variables like speed, pressure,
and the distribution of force factor in, too.
- So, I definitely think the bread is gonna be no problem.
I'm excited about the watermelon,
because I know it will make a mess.
And I really want to see what happens with Kate.
- I just don't feel like a soft object like that
is gonna have as clean of a cut as, like, a watermelon,
cause watermelon has a hard shell.
So, as it's going in, it's gonna kinda stay together.
And then, as it cuts through, it's just a lot easier.
I feel like that's probably gonna have the cleanest cut,
and I think the bread's just gonna be the least interesting,
and I think the head is,
it's gonna just shatter and explode.
- I think the head will either go in really messily
or break this machine.
Let's get into this.
Bread first?
- Let's do it.
(upbeat music)
(bread slicer whirs)
- I mean, overall, it did a pretty good job.
For me, I've followed your suggestion of doing it faster,
and that just made it get caught more.
- Yeah, for me, like, I was going really slow,
but the problem with going slow, too,
is it was able to jump up, and that was kind of the problem.
And I foresee that being a problem with,
probably, the watermelon.
Bread is, like, pretty soft,
and I think that's why, like,
the bread kind of jumped up a little bit.
So, I think the watermelon should do a good job
of like staying put for the most part.
- So, we can actually see that this is a really clean cut.
- This is like the cleanest cut I've ever seen.
Like, I kinda want to buy these just to cut my watermelons.
- I feel like we should rebrand this
as a watermelon cutting machine.
- Yeah, yours got stuck.
Mine was a really clean cut,
but noticing just how yours
was drastically different than mine
worries me about the head.
So, I think for the next one,
we're gonna have to put in some force with it,
but we'll have to see how it goes.
- [Kat] This looks really good.
- It does look good.
Are you gonna eat it?
(dramatic music)
This head has been precisely designed
to replicate a human skull.
- Not only is the skull precise, but the skin thickness
also simulates the thickness around a human's head.
Oh my gosh, it's actually slicing it.
(bread slicer whirs)
- Whoa, poor Kate.
Oh, this is bad.
- So, we can see that the skin is completely gone on the top
and we can see the cuts from the blades.
And if you touch it,
you can definitely feel that it was starting to cut through.
Yeah, this, this would have hurt.
It didn't make clean slices like in the movie,
but it definitely did something to Kate.
- [Dominic] This might not work,
and I think the movie showcased that it could,
but I mean, if someone's struggling, too,
while you're pushing them through this, I mean-
- [Kat] It would take a very long time.
- It would take a long time.
- It would be... - It would kill someone.
That is a fact. - Eventually.
- Another Shadyside tragedy.
(spooky music)