""Hereditary"" has been called,
"The Scariest Movie of the Year"
- Mom?
- I don't like this. Dad, I don't like this.
- What's Happening?
- Peanut!
- [Narrator] And one reason for that
is these creepy model houses.
- In this movie, the models almost became
a character in the movie in a sense.
- [Narrator] Steve Newburn is the owner
of Applied Arts FX Studio in Canada.
He's done visual effects for
The Dark Knight Rises and Inception.
- My team and I, we built all the
prosthetics and models for "Hereditary".
- [Narrator] If you haven't seen it yet,
turn back now because there's some
possible spoilers ahead.
Minature models are used all the time in movies.
Filmed in a way to make them look
like a life sized object.
- Usually with miniature work,
the intent is not to see it.
It's intended to to duplicate a real thing.
- [Narrator] But in "Hereditary", the miniatures
were actually part of the story.
Toni Collette's character creates the models
in preparation for a gallery.
Steve and his crew were tasked
with making about 15 of them
to match the life sized film sets.
- We had a thousand pieces at one point
and really didn't know exactly how they went together.
- [Narrator] The whole process took
quite a bit of time to complete.
- Ten weeks with a crew of about half a dozen people.
- [Narrator] The buildings included
a funeral home, a preschool, a hospice
and an accident scene.
The largest of the models was a
copy of the family home.
And it's exteriors were modeled after a real house.
- Yeah, I went down in 6-8 weeks
before they started filming and
just kind of surveyed the house.
Took several hundred photos,
a bunch of measurements, that sort of thing.
- [Narrator] He worked with the director
to nail down all the details.
- Flooring, they'd sent us samples,
wallpaper, they would send up samples.
All that stuff would be taken and scaled down
to the appropriate scale.
- [Narrator] The house was built
in nine separate pieces.
- We built the entire thing as a giant puzzle
where you could remove sections of it
to shoot from that location.
- [Narrator] The models that didn't need
to resemble the set, were built using
generic images online as a guide.
Like the preschool.
All of the furniture was either handmade
or 3D printed depending on the complexity.
- If they were a wood finish,
odds are we actually made the battle wood.
If they were something that was metal
or super detailed, 3D printed quite often.
- [Narrator] They had multiple in-house
3D printers working simultaneously.
While outsourcing some of the work.
They also had to create some
creepy looking figurines of the characters.
- [Steve] The people were, they were all 3D printed.
Some of them were sculpted.
Toni Collette for example, we took that from
a digital scan of Toni we did in New York.
The grandmother was a scan of somebody else.
- [Narrator] The car used in
the most disturbing scene in the movie
also had to look just like the one in the film.
- [Steve ] The car we modeled and 3D printed.
It was a Volvo, I believe it was a V70.
It's the exact model car they used in the movie.
- [Narrator] Some of the models were finished
and then taken apart to make them look
like they were in progress.
- There was a lot of pieces of furniture,
for example, that we made that we just like,
let's leave that out on the side
and it's on a shelf somewhere.
She hasn't quite finished it. That kind of thing.
- [Narrator] Another important set piece
was a house sinking into the ground.
It was made with card foam
and covered in real dirt and soil.
- [Steve] Supposed to be showcasing time passing.
And like, these things have been sinking
into the ground like quicksand kind of thing.
And as they get further down,
they're also a lot more deteriorated.
- [Narrator] After all the hard work,
many of the models were ultimately
destroyed by Toni Collette's character
as she starts breaking down.
- Don't you ever raise your voice at me!
I am your mother!
- They were all built to be smashed.
- [Narrator] Steve says that
they actually filmed the scene
for smashing the models,
which ended up being cut from the film.
- Some of the ones that were actually intended
to be break away and come apart
and get squished were built out
of basswood and balsa wood.
Other ones that weren't intended to be smashed
where MBF which is a high density fiber,
like cardboard kind of wood.
- [Narrator] But Steve says watching his
masterpieces get destroyed is all
just part of the job.
- It's kind of run of the mill
for the miniature side of things.
Most of the time when you're building a miniature,
it's for the purpose of it being blown up,
or smashed, or destroyed in some respect.
It's actually the thing
you kind of look forward to.