‘Death Becomes Her’ Revolutionized Special Effects in Hollywood

There was nothing quite like Death Becomes Her before the 1992 camp classic achieved immortality on the big screen. There also hasn’t been anything quite like it since — but its special effects left a lasting mark on the moviemaking industry. 

Robert Zemeckis‘s film sees Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn star in a tale of two women chasing youth via a magic potion. Costarring Bruce Willis and Isabella Rossellini, the movie achieved box office success despite mixed critical reviews, and has since become a favorite come Halloween season.

Its visual effects, from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), earned Death Becomes Her its only Oscar nomination and win. In part because of the new territory they explored on the film, the company went on to create lifelike dinosaurs in 1993’s Jurassic Park and insert Tom Hanks into historical footage in 1994’s Forrest Gump — both also winning the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. 

ILM’s artists were “inventing the tools as we were making the movies,” said Death Becomes Her visual effects art director Doug Chiang in a 2017 interview with Yahoo. “Often we would start projects without really knowing how we were going to do the effects.”

With Zemeckis, 72, at the helm of Death Becomes Her — a movie where Streep, 75, has her head on backwards after breaking her neck, and Hawn, 78, gets a shotgun-induced hole in her abdomen — that was especially true. “With a lot of these movies, especially for Bob [Zemeckis], a huge percentage of it seems impossible,” the movie’s visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston said in a 2022 interview with befores & afters. “So it’s the only way to go into it. If you achieve the impossible things, you’ve just raised the bar of your own company.”

Computer-generated effects, noted Ralston, 70, weren’t used in studio filmmaking until the early 1990s. While movies like 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (also from the ILM team) utilized the technology, it was chiefly for robotic characters made of metal. The challenge with Death Becomes Her, as Chiang and Ralston have explained, was creating lifelike human skin for the film’s absurd body horror. 

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Photoshop, a now-popular tool, was cutting-edge technology when Chiang used it to achieve Streep’s twisted neck, he told Yahoo. “Most of the art departments were still very traditional, in terms of pen and ink and markers,” he said. Death Becomes Her was “one of the films that bridged that technology gap” and created “organic CG.”

As a behind-the-scenes video featuring Streep reveals, her head twist effect involved three stages: shooting the scene with the Oscar winner in a blue mask covering her head, then filming her in front of a blue screen with only her face showing, then digitally splicing them together. 

The hole in Hawn’s stomach, out of which water pours and the camera films through, used a makeup piece that showed “what it would have been, a chewed-up shape,” Ralston told befores & afters. The filmmakers then used rotoscoping (or manually altering film footage one frame at a time) to remove that section of her abdomen. 

“We had to create the feeling that what you were seeing was this three dimensional space, even though it was absurd and cartoony,” he said of the “simple concept.”

Other tried-and-true visual effects techniques pepper Death Becomes Her: the mansion of Rossellini’s mystical character is a miniature set, while Hawn’s fat suit and jowls are a combination of makeup and prosthetics. A scene in which Streep’s character takes the immortality potion and her breasts pop up on her chest at first attempted using a pressurized device, but eventually the star’s dresser stood behind her and pushed them higher. 

Despite the enduring audience love for the movie, it was Streep’s “first, my last, my only” experience with “tedious” CGI, she told Entertainment Weekly in 2000. Likening the process to “being at the dentist,” she said, “Whatever concentration you can apply to that kind of comedy is just shredded. You stand there like a piece of machinery — they should get machinery to do it. I loved how it turned out. But it’s not fun to act to a lampstand.”