The hair and makeup design and costume categories at the Oscars are always a feast for the eyes, brimming with sumptuous period dramas and often shocking transformations of movie stars. There is plenty of that among this year’s contenders, but there is also an unusually high number of movies that delve into the supernatural, horror and fantasy. We have the return of a troublemaking demon in prison stripes; songbird frenemy witches in Emerald City; an infamous Hungarian vampire first imagined by F.W. Murnau 102 years ago; an actress decomposing in graphic, oozing detail; and a pair of star-crossed citizens of Gotham City.
Below, five movies with looks to die for.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”
Nobody really ages in the Afterlife, but if you’re a crusty, decrepit demon, maybe you get a wee bit crustier and more decrepit as the years tick by — even more so if you’re pining away for a human who wants nothing to do with you. That was the logic behind the update of Michael Keaton’s titular tormenter, whose Goth-ghoul-clown look has been a ubiquitous Halloween costume since the character first met Lydia Deets (Winona Ryder) in 1988. (The makeup team for the original film, Ve Neill, Steve LaPorte and Robert Short, won the Oscar.)
“He’s been sitting around for 35 years, waiting for Lydia, haunting her and trying to get her back into his life,” hair and makeup designer Christine Blundell said. She added that Lesa Warrener, the film’s hair and makeup supervisor, “would work out different elements of how we could make the makeup a little bit more decayed, a little bit more rotten and a little bit more like he’s just been festering for a long time, but without taking away the cheekiness and the fun element of him.” That included keeping the bump on the bridge of his nose (achieved with prosthetics) and his hideously rotten chompers, made by Chris Lyons, whom Blundell calls “our tooth fairy. He made three sets of teeth of different degrading stages.”
Throughout the project, Blundell, Warrener and animatronic/special effects makeup supervisor Neal Scanlan worked closely with costume designer Colleen Atwood, a four-time Oscar winner and longtime collaborator of director Tim Burton. Building on the signature black-and-white striped suit dreamed up by Burton and the first film’s costume designer, Aggie Rodgers, Atwood made a new ensemble out of a four-ply Italian silk-satin blend that she happened to have in her stock. She then weathered it with ager-dyer Matt Reitsma, distressing the surface and adding green and brown paint to evoke a “mossier and stinkier” vibe.
On the more glamorous end of the undead spectrum is Monica Bellucci’s Delores, Beetlejuice’s long-lost soul-sucking wife whose black gown with an Italian leather corset and flowing skirts in silk crepeline and nylon Atwood describes as “1600 with a Mario Bava, ’50s turn on it.” In her show-stopping entrance, Delores reassembles her dismembered body with a staple gun and spends the rest of the movie covered in metal stitches from head to toe. Scanlan, also a Burton veteran, worked in step with VFX supervisor Angus Bickerton to determine where to put the prosthetic staples day-to-day to match how Bickerton would eventually composite Delores’ reanimation scene.
“There were prosthetics that had staples. There were prosthetics that had only a few staples, and each one had to be applied in the right sequence so that when we shot her assembling herself, her legs, for instance, [might] not have staples, but the rest of her might have. So it was a real conjuring act.”
After testing “mad, electrical hair” for Delores, Blundell and Warrener landed on a sleek black flowing wig. Initially, they tried exaggerated, streaking eye makeup and smeared “Robert Smith-The Cure lips,” but it was “counterproductive,” Blundell said, laughing. “Listen, you cannot make Monica Bellucci look bad. It is impossible.” So they settled on dark eyes and a ghostly pale that looks even whiter next to Afterlife weirdos like a blue custodian played by Danny DeVito. “She is kept monochrome, whereas everybody else in the afterlife is of a color,” Warrener said. “So she stands out.”
One of the great joys for the makeup team was Burton’s preference for live practical effects over excessive CG. Willem Dafoe’s wannabe afterlife detective Wolf Jackson, for instance, wears a bald cap and an exposed skull inspired by a medical model of a brain that Burton showed Scanlan. In the photo below, Wolf is interrogating Bob, Beetlejuice’s beleaguered sidekick who, along with his fellow Shrinkers, are also Scanlan’s handiwork. Actors wore animatronic shrunken-head rigs on their shoulders, covering their faces, so Atwood’s team hid mesh in the shirts so they could see when moving around.
“Nosferatu”
Costume designer Linda Muir has worked with director Robert Eggers since his first feature, 2015’s “The Witch,” so by the time they got to “Nosferatu,” she knew that historical accuracy was crucial to his vision. She approached the tale of an undead Transylvanian nobleman in pursuit of a young woman in 1838 Germany as faithfully to the period as possible. “We’re doing this realistically — as realistically as we can,” she said.
Throughout the film, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) moves in and out of the shadows; often, we only see him as a shadow. “The silhouette was extremely important, right off the top,” Muir said. “Robert wanted Orlok to have a thin and tall, overpowering silhouette, compared to the tiny Lily-Rose [Depp] or even when he was in shot with Nicholas [Hoult].”
So she made a pair of leather boots with a horseshoe-shaped heel that added four inches to Skarsgård’s already impressive 6’4” height. Based on a Turkish design, they are footwear that a Hungarian count would have worn circa 1600, as was the rest of his clothing: a dolman, or tunic, in lilac-gray silk brocade and velvet, embellished with gold reflective threads to evoke extreme wealth and to catch the light on camera; form-fitting trousers; and on top, a black mente, or silk cotton chenille outer coat with gold silk brocade; a (faux) fur collar; and overly long sleeves. Each piece was aged and distressed. “Corpsifying was our in-house, lovingly used term,” Muir said.
Orlok wears his mente as a cloak resting on his bony shoulders, a sly acknowledgment of legendary vampires past. “There are small, subtle reflections of other iterations of this character — the way the collar sits high up around the neck and the back of the head,” Muir said. “He’s costumed appropriately, and within that, there still is a nod to Murnau’s “Nosferatu,’ there is a nod to ‘Dracula.’”
As for Orlok’s face and body, Focus Features is keeping those details locked in a coffin until the film is in theaters. What we can say is that this count is unlike any previous version: an imposingly tall, menacing bloodsucker whose sallow skin is rotting on his emaciated, hunch-backed frame. Prosthetic makeup designer David White acknowledged that Max Schreck’s iconic incarnation of the character in the 1922 classic was always in the back of his mind as a reference point, but nothing more. “This is something else, this is a fresh look,” he said. For instance, this Orlok has a forelock and prominent mustache that White describes as “slightly Cossack-inspired.” And this is no soigné seducer. “He’s got dirt, he’s got grime, there’s oil residue all over him and even maggots,” White said, laughing. “It’s pretty gross.”
Transforming Skarsgård into this ghastly creature was a lengthy process that, depending on the character’s amount of clothing in a given scene, required as many as 62 prosthetic pieces. When designing Orlok’s face, White did not want to diminish Skarsgård’s expressive eyes, so he used only thin prosthetics to age him, foregoing eye bags and hoods. (His menacing eyes do flash on screen in the trailer.) For the dark facial hair and forelock, White’s team used a mix of human and yak hair to which they added silvery streaks. “Just to push it that little extra further,” White said. “It gives him that extra kick.”
While Orlok is all decay and danger, the object of his obsession, Ellen (Depp) is the picture of 19th-century European beauty. She is pale and raven-haired and spends a good portion of her screen time in ethereal white cotton nightgowns—as when she first encounters Orlok as a younger woman early in the movie. “She had three different weights of nightgown, which served different purposes,” Muir said. “The most diaphanous, we used in the opening scene, where we wanted a bit of transparency and delicacy and vulnerability.”
Makeup designer Traci Loader kept Ellen’s face natural-looking except for the moments when Orlok is possessing her from afar. In one extreme case, her eyes bleed. For that scene, Loader used a fake blood safe for eyes and kept Ellen’s fair complexion “very luminous so it wasn’t a dry, dead pale,” she said. She also enhanced Depp’s veins and added more on her eyelids. Hair designer Suzanne Stokes-Munton always kept several long black wigs on hand for different takes, “sometimes not enough,” she joked. “Because the blood did take six hours to wash out if you lie in that stuff long enough.”
“Wicked”
Paul Tazewell started with nature: patterns and textures in tree bark or on the underside of a log or mushroom, as well as the Fibonacci spiral, the mathematically exact sequence found in snail shells, the scales of a pinecone and elsewhere in the natural world. “All that was very interesting for me,” said the costume designer, who won a Tony for “Hamilton” and an Emmy for “The Wiz! Live” and was nominated for an Oscar for Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” “It informed lots of the imagery that I used … And it opened up and evolved into the design that you see.”
Variations on the swirl are indeed everywhere in “Wicked,” most prominently in the princess-pink dress that Glinda (Ariana Grande) wears when she floats down from the sky in a giant glistening bubble. “The choice of color was directly inspired by ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and the Glinda played by Billie Burke,” Tazewell said. He wanted the dress to have a weightless effect, so the skirt is made of nylon crinoline folded into soft ripples and sandwiched between layers of silk organza screen-printed with a bubble pattern and decorated with iridescent foil. The butterfly-shaped bodice was made of the same elements, plus 225 hours worth of hand-beading. “It’s a lot of hands, some amazing talent that went into arriving at our final Glinda,” he said.
Glinda’s makeup is similarly light and airy. “What worked well with Ari was to keep her look very opalescent,” makeup designer Frances Hannon said. “The overall feeling was that simplicity is the beauty here, and timelessness is really important. [Director Jon M. Chu] always had his stipulation: It is a fantasy film but it is timeless and grounded in reality.” Although, she adds with a chuckle, “We have a green lady and a blue horse.”
The green lady is, of course, Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba, the tender-hearted outcast who advocates for animals, is kind to all and eventually will become the Wicked Witch of the West. Hannon experimented with a variety of greens and products until she found the right one, a bespoke mixture whose magical ingredient was a discontinued neon eyeshadow that she could find only in Canada. Her team airbrushed the pigment onto Erivo’s face, hands and, for certain scenes, full body. To convey Elphaba’s youth, she painted on freckles that gradually become less prominent as the movie progresses.
Erivo wears her hair and eyebrows shaved when she is off the clock, so Hannon gave her brows as well as a head of micro-braids made by wig designer Samuel James. “We laid out four basic looks because Elphaba has no vanity in the storyline,” Hannon said.
Her clothes are similarly unshowy in color — lots of black and gray — but they are anything but basic. For Tazewell, Elphaba’s love of animals grounds her in nature, which he incorporated into looks like the black gown she wears to the Ozdust ball: delicate ruffles over a sheer bodice and sleeves in shapes reminiscent of mushrooms growing on tree bark. Similarly, the intricate dress she wears when visiting Oz with Glinda is made of black chiffon micropleated into an irregular wave pattern that was inspired by the underside of a mushroom cap. Underneath that are layers of black lace and a purple silk gauze that give the black dimension.
“I wanted to make sure that there was a play of light and color throughout,” Tazewell said. And, of course, she wears a pointy black hat, a loving nod to the one designed by Adrian and worn by Margaret Hamilton in the original film.
Hutton wanted Shiz University professor Mrs. Morrible’s (Michelle Yeoh) hair to recall her ability to control the weather, so she came up with a white wig whose swirls (yes, Fibonacci again) and wisps change from scene to scene like moving clouds. Tazewell incorporated astrological and celestial symbols into her wardrobe, like the moon-shaped buckle that accentuates her metallic green brocade dress adorned with beads, sequins and a sculptural collar fit for a dignitary.
In the photo above, she stands next to the wizard himself, Oz (Jeff Goldblum), who wears a wool frock coat and trousers ensemble that reflects the grandeur of the world he has created as a showman charlatan: the origami spiral of his ascot, a pin in the shape of a green eye and lots of gold and emerald embellishments. “It’s pushing as much as possible that image of how he’s created Emerald City,” Tazewell said. “He’s always in green. His trousers were actually custom woven, and if you look closely, there’s a w woven into the pattern for wizard.”
“The Substance”
The vibrant color palette of Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle is firmly established from the start. We see her in a royal blue leotard, a teal and navy business suit, a crimson red dress and, of course, the long yellow trench that she wears like a protective shell throughout the film.
Coralie Fargeat had written a coat into the script, and she and costume designer Emmanuelle Youchnovski settled on a yellow the color of the sun for its high contrast in multiple scenes and for its similarity to the yolk of an egg, a symbol of fertility that is the movie’s very first frame. To give the coat structure and a certain heft, Youchnovski used wool. “It was important that, because she’s in a world of men, she has a masculine side, that she wears beautiful suits à la Tom Ford,” Youchnovski said. “And the coat, until the very end, was her armor. She hides in it.”
“The Substance” is the story of self- destruction: Desperate after being fired as the host of a fitness TV show for being too old at age 50, Elisabeth injects herself with a drug that spawns Sue (Margaret Qualley), a paragon of youth and beauty who exits her host’s body from her back. The image of Elisabeth’s crudely stitched-up spine (which is on the movie’s poster) served as a leitmotif in the costumes, from the long gold zipper on Elisabeth’s red dress to the plunging open back of her blue gown to the gold dragon hand-embroidered onto Sue’s luxurious navy velvet bathrobe. It’s not by chance that it’s the first piece of clothing we see on the newly arrived Sue.
“The dragon, it’s like the phoenix rising from the ashes,” Youchnovski said. “It’s a rebirth for her, and it’s a weapon.” Similarly, the snakeskin pattern on Sue’s black catsuit evokes metamorphosis through shedding skin. (And yes, there’s a back zipper on that ensemble as well.)
Next to Elisabeth’s vibrant color-blocking motifs, Sue appears in more girlish tones (see her metallic pink cutout leotard), all the way down to the sparkly blue Disney princess gown that she wears to host a New Year’s Eve TV special. By then, both characters have abused the substance: Elisabeth rapidly decomposes into an old woman (dubbed “Gollum” during production), and Sue morphs into Monstro Elisasue, a repulsive blob of a creature that is the gory exclamation point at the end of their quest for bodily perfection.
Monstro has a lopsided head, multiple eyes, lumps and bumps, a breast studded with teeth and Elisabeth’s open-mouthed face on her backside, right at the top of a grotesquely protruding certain nerve center. “The final monster suit, I put in some spine between the goops because the spine, from the very beginning, is an important part of the movie,” special effects makeup supervisor Pierre-Olivier Persin said. Drawing inspiration from Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, Persin and his team sculpted a latex suit with several components that required three hours to make Qualley camera-ready.
Turning Moore into Gollum was an even longer process. Though a body double covered in prosthetics was used in scenes showing the fully naked Gollum (including a sagging bare bum), Moore wore prosthetics from her head to her waist, a process that took about seven hours. For the scene in which Elisabeth and Sue fight to the death, Moore had facial and head prosthetics, false teeth and a hunchback. And even in her final hours, she is sporting her trademark armor. “We made six yellow coats because of the blood,” Youchnovski said. “But it’s there till the end. You feel the power of the color.”
“Joker: Folie à Deux”
Todd Phillips’ sequel to his 2019 drama takes place in three main environments: Arkham State Hospital, where Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is locked up; a Manhattan courtroom, where he is on trial for murder; and a series of fantasy sequences in which he and fellow patient Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Germanotta) perform together. For costume designer Arianne Phillips, who took over from the previous film’s Mark Bridges and is no relation to the director, that meant coming up with three distinct styles of clothing that still worked harmoniously within the movie’s overall aesthetic.
“Color palette was key,” she said, referring to the drab browns, mustard yellows and bright reds established in “Joker.” “Todd Phillips’ vision, just in terms of this world, the layers of patina and dirt and early ’80s New York — it was just essential to get that right.”
The red three-piece suit that Arthur famously wears in “Joker” while dancing on steep New York City stairs played a central role in the sequel, reappearing in the “Joker & Harley Show” fantasy sequence and serving as the silhouette for the tuxedos that Arthur wears in other dreamed-up scenarios. Inspired by a scene from Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” in which Helen Mirren’s outfit stays the same but changes color as she walks from room to room, Phillips put Phoenix in a white tux for his imagined wedding with Lee, a blue tux for a performance in a jazz club and a black tux for his and Lee’s Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers moment, dancing on the rooftop of “Hotel Arkham.”
“[That] was really inspiring for me because while Arkham and the courthouse and Gotham are gritty and dirty, these fantasy sequences have saturated color. There is a joy to the fantasy sequences,” Phillips said. In those scenes, Arthur wears his full Joker face, once again created by makeup designer Nicki Ledermann, who was nominated for an Oscar for the first film along with hair designer Kay Georgiou, also back for the sequel. “The makeup is pretty much the same, except the smile is a bit broader,” Ledermann said. “Perhaps there’s a bit more confidence, more ha-ha irony there. But it needed to be very subtle because you don’t want to throw that in people’s faces.”
Lady Gaga brought her longtime hair designer Frederic Aspiras and makeup artist Sarah Tanno, who worked closely with Ledermann and Georgiou to bring Lee to life. “Sometimes it’s tricky when one actor comes with a personal team,” Ledermann said. “Sometimes you feel like that character’s in a different movie because it doesn’t really mix in. But they were really good collaborators, making sure that this whole movie truly looked like one painter painted it and not many other brushes in between messing around.”
For Lee’s wardrobe, Phillips played with the idea of her having an “adolescent naivete” that draws her to Joker. “She’s this sycophant, young girl who’s obsessed with Arthur Fleck,” she said. So in the courthouse, Lee wears babydoll dresses inspired by the silhouettes of the chic 1960s and ’70s London-based designer Biba. Phillips and Lady Gaga also imagined that Lee was a musical theater kid who dressed herself in vintage fashion.
This informed her final look when she becomes Harley Quinn: a black leather mini-skirt and a corset in a black-and-white harlequin motif whose diamond shape is echoed in the pleats of a red silk-and-wool jacket.
“The idea was that she ripped the corset out of a costume that she found at the thrift store because the edges are all really distressed and unfinished,” Phillips said. Lee’s final makeup also subtly evokes the diamond shape through simple lines that form a negative-space triangle on her eyelid. “What was very important to Stefani was that everything she does is somehow an homage to Joker,” Ledermann said. “And it’s kind of a brilliant metaphor, the negative space with no color. We were so excited when that came up.”
This story will appear in the December 17 Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
