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carlett Johansson’s ET, Laura, seduces men around the Glasgow area and takes them back to her home in Jonathan Glazer’s disquieting 2013 sci-fi drama. An instant classic, it’s loosely based on Michael Faber’s novel, and chills to the bone thanks to an insistent, supernatural score by Mica Levi, Johansson’s otherworldly detachment and Daniel Landin’s visceral cinematography.
That marriage is never more arresting than in scenes in Laura’s alien ‘black room’ - a viscous, glossy nothingness that literally swallows the men she entices there. Looking like an unremarkable council house from the outside, once inside everything ordinary is gone, leaving a black void with a floor of pooling black liquid - willingly walked into by victims transfixed by their attacker.
With a striking aesthetic informed by 16th Century Dutch painters Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, Under The Skin’s big moment of revelation was created by production designer Chris Oddy. Though the rest of the film relies on authentic interactions with an unsuspecting public (secret cameras filmed Johansson picking up strangers and then production asked them to sign waivers to use the footage), the inky room which acts as a creepy meat processor for victims was built on a cavernous soundstage. A black glass floor was suspended over a tank of black goo and it tipped the walking victim into the tank as they followed Johansson across the space. “Obviously, if you put something in a liquid bath, you get the Archimedes effect and the liquid overflows, so there was something in the tank that diminished at the same rate that the person was going in,” says Oddy. “The glasses were four metres by three, so they were big pieces of glass painted black, and it was a big area of 80 by 60 feet.”
Once submerged in the liquid, Laura’s victims are suspended in an eerie nothingness, before imploding from an unseen force - the meat of their body forced from them in a horrifying instant. Oddy worked with London VFX house One Of Us to further develop the mysterious inscrutability of the scene - creating something disturbingly akin to the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The mummified remains of bog people were used as inspiration for the victims’ bodies.