Before they even started shooting their movie Extraterrestrial, the Vicious Brothers (aka Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz) knew they wanted their Cabin in the Woods-meets-alien-invasion film to be authentic. Bug-eyed invaders, flying saucers—the whole deal. Unfortunately, those things are expensive, and what they didn't have was a huge budget.
"It was not the amount that we required, for sure," Minihan says of Extraterrestrial, which hits theaters next week. "Our complete production budget was $3 million dollars." Yet, somehow, they crammed the movie with so much wizardry that producers were convinced they'd gotten a $3 million budget for visual effects alone.
How'd they do it? For one, they went digital. Originally, they wanted to shoot the alien using practical effects instead of CGI. But they also wanted a 9-foot-tall skinny creature ("it looks funny when there's a bunch of four-foot-tall critters cowering around people," Minihan says), so a human in a suit wouldn't do the trick. Also, the 9-foot-tall puppet was nearly impossible to light properly and always looked like rubber on camera.
"So we started to opening our minds to the idea of doing it in post-production," Minihan says. "But it was only when our visual effects company basically sat us down and begged us to do the alien in CG and then proved to us that they could do it that we came around to it."
That visual effects company, Waterproof Studios, turned in a herculean effort to complete the visual effects on the film. But even so, Minihan and Ortiz still ended up doing about 50 VFX shots themselves. The result is an alien horror film that plays by the alien-invasion rules in all the best ways. There are, of course, the aliens (the Vicious Brothers call them "The Greys"), but there's also a flying-saucer-like spacecraft that crashes near—surprise!—a secluded cabin, along with terrified young people, and even a little bit of alien conspiracy.
And what extraterrestrial flick would be complete without an anal probe? It's the one thing that's become lore without ever really being widely used in space-horror films.
"I think we did really try to incorporate every alien trope we could, everything but the kitchen sink, so maybe we could've overlooked the anal probe," says Ortiz. "But I think it's become kind of a joke in pop culture---though it's not that funny if you're in that situation."
Originally, the alien torture was much more elaborate, involving 10 different methods using 10 different apparatuses, the filmmakers pared it down after Waterproof informed them that the scene would require 200 shots. "We had to let it go," says Minihan, "and cut it down to three cool gags." It still worked out. (The hashtag for the film is still #GetProbed, after all.) "It's still basically the essence of what we wanted to do," Ortiz says. "We're very happy with it."
Extraterrestrial hits theaters Nov. 21 and is currently available on VOD. Check out the digitally-rendered alien from the film, as well as some storyboards from the torture scene, in the gallery above.
