In the harrowing climax of “Sinners,” vampire leader Remick (Jack O’Connell) chases Sammy (Miles Caton) as he attempts to escape the carnage inflicted on the living by the ghouls and their allies.
Remick catches up to him and the two get into a fight. Sammy hits Remick in the head with his guitar before the vampire stabs him with its claws.
Director Ryan Coogler submerged the cast and crew into a Louisiana lake for the scene, which ended with the sunrise and the vampire being destroyed. “There was no margin for error,” says Michael Fontaine, the film’s prosthetic makeup designer. He spent weeks planning, sculpting, and casting.
To perform this sequence, Fontaine created a fiberglass plate with a magnet attached to Remick’s head, into which a fake guitar resonator would click. “He has this plate on his head. It’s hidden by prosthetics and a wig, so it looks like it’s just a head, but there’s a whole structure underneath it. There’s a tube that pumps smoke and blood out of it,” Fontaine said.
In addition, O’Connell had to wear long fake fingers, so he was unable to use his hands all day. Huge false teeth also covered his face and he wore special contact lenses to complete the look.
Elsewhere, when he first appeared, the look of a wounded man with burns and bloodstains took six hours to apply.
In the film’s coda, we see Michael B. Jordan stack up in the 1990s (Jordan also plays his twin, Smoke), and he’s a vampire wearing the latest hip-hop fashion. Fontaine created a 14-carat grill for Jordan. “His gold grill turns into dots, as if his fangs have the ability to almost bend the gold in his mouth,” says Fontaine.
Because of bite marks on her neck, Jordan had to spend “two hours every day fitting this very sophisticated prosthetic device.” He added: “At one point there was a tube running inside that could pump blood into the camera.”
In total, “The Sinner” used 287 silicone prosthetics, 26 sets of custom fangs and gold grills, and 30 custom contact lenses.
