The startling story behind Hatching’s horrifying puppet-monster

polygon.com:

Two things particularly stand out about Hanna Bergholm’s creepy horror feature Hatching: the emotional performance from Siiri Solalinna as a wide-eyed preteen under the thumb of a perfectionist mother, and her co-star Alli, the dripping, toothy, gradually mutating bird monster she hatches from a giant egg. Where it’s been standard procedure since Jaws for horror directors to only reveal their central creatures with teasing glimpses until the climax of the movie, Alli is on screen throughout much of Hatching — a slimy, shrieking, blood-drinking monstrosity that Solalinna’s character Tinja is trying to keep hidden and safe, even as it gets bigger, stranger, and more dangerous.

Bergholm, who directed the film from a script she co-wrote with Ilja Rautsi, knew that making Alli work on screen was crucial if the film was going to work. So she literally got online and Googled “the best animatronic designer in the world” to see who she should ask to work on her film.

“We needed the best possible people to make it,” she told Polygon in an interview after Hatching’s premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. “These kinds of animatronics, this prosthetic makeup, it has to be perfect, or it just looks hideous […] Google told me that the best animatronic designer in the world is Gustav Hoegen, the lead animatronic designer in Star Wars and Prometheus and Jurassic World and so on. I emailed him, basically, Hello, I’m Hanna from Finland, I have a film — low budget but good story!”

Her boldness paid off. She says Hoegen “got fascinated with the story,” and between Star Wars projects — he handled animatronics on The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and Rise of Skywalker, as well as Rogue One and Solo — he agreed to bring his team to