The flesh monster was The Witcher’s most challenging monster so far
In The Witcher season 3, Geralt (Henry Cavill) is facing down some demons, both literal and metaphorical. But none have been so tremendously challenging as the “flesh monster.”
He encounters it in some dungeon lair — one Geralt knows is a trap but, naturally, ventures into anyway. After all, the man, the myth, the Witcher has faced his share of beasties across hundreds of years, and always come out more or less unscathed. Still, he’s surprised when he encounters something he’s never seen before: a lumbering, Cronenbergian mass of arms coming at him from a cocoon in the corner. As he battles the monster, he quickly learns the monster is connected to a set of three human heads linked to the wall, who wail with every blow to the monster’s body.
It’s gnarly and great, one of the most effective scenes of the new season. It’s also what production designer Andrew Laws said was easily the hardest monster to create of the season, and possibly the hardest Witchermonster to date.
“We originally concepted it in very abstract ways,” Laws says. The issue was figuring out the nature of the flesh monster, which Laws says took place with “more esoteric discussions” to get to the heart of the issue: Does it have four legs? Two? Does it stand up or wave its arms? How does it look when it’s in a dormant state versus an active state? How does the flesh monster actually work?
It’s a process that Laws estimates took months to develop and reach a (mostly) finished product.
“We had to deal with the dynamism of it between prosthetics, creature concept design, VFX, and try to figure out how to evolve this thing and make sense out of it,” Laws says. “We also had to do stunts, that was a big part of it — how they wanted to deal with their
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