What We Do In The Shadows: Nadja's Ghost Doll & Her Visual Effects Explained
In the "What We Do in the Shadows" Season 2 episode, "Ghosts," the vampires meet the ghosts of their mortal selves. When they turned into vampires, their human selves died but remained in the earthly plane as ghosts with unfinished business, forcing the vampires to help them move onto the other side. The ghost of Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) is disappointed she hasn't achieved anything significant and takes on a more tangible form to help her, inhabiting a doll resembling Nadja. After the episode, she decides to stick around and has been a recurring character ever since.
From running away from home to doing a "Freaky Friday" with Nadja, she's had a ton of great storylines, but viewers may wonder how exactly the "What We Do in the Shadows" Nadja doll came to be. It's a team effort using mostly practical effects. Paul Jones, head of Prosthetics and Makeup for "What We Do in the Shadows," spoke with Screen Rant about everyone who helped bring Creepy Doll Nadja to life, "The brief was just make us a creepy doll and I said, 'Well it'll look better if it actually looks a little bit like her, so we sculpted this and molded it and used images of Natasia as reference. And did the same hair, and Tamara [Harrod] from the hair department made these little cat ears. And we have the dress, and Amanda [Neale] and her team helped work on the dress along with Christopher [Stanback] and props. So it's been a team effort, but I was responsible for all the animatronics. So there's two puppeteers on the day, so I do the head like this and then I have another puppeteer who does the eyes."
The result is an appropriately spooky doll who feels right at home in "What We Do in the Shadows."
Creepy Doll Nadja's look was partly inspired by Family Guy
"What We Do in the Shadows" on FX has come a long way from the movie it spun off from. It's dabbled in all kinds of freaky monsters and apparitions to fill out the world, and Creepy Doll Nadja is a welcome addition. And while it's great to see the team behind the series utilize practical effects, a small amount of CGI was still necessary for a pretty understandable reason. Paul Jones went on to give props (no pun intended) to Bob Munroe for applying the effects to make Creepy Doll Nadja talk, "To get the mouth moving would have been very difficult on not so much the budget but the schedule we had. It's a very, very, very quick turnaround on everything we do on the show. So, Bob Monroe, our visual effects supervisor said, 'I can animate the mouth. If you give me eyes and a head movement, I will digitally manipulate the mouth.' So when she starts talking, the mouth will be CG and the rest of it will be my animatronics."
It turns into a seamless blend of practical and CGI effects so that no one team has too much on its plate. During the interview, Jones also mentioned the surprising inspiration behind the doll's design. Naturally, he wanted it to resemble Nadja but didn't necessarily want a one-to-one likeness. Creepy Doll Nadja is more of a caricature of Natasia Demetriou, as he explained, "I kind of watched a lot Family Guy while I was sculpting it, and so I kind of have Natasia as a Family Guy character – almost."
It's been a lot of hard work, but the results speak for themselves. And it's undoubtedly great to see Creepy Doll Nadja become a recurring character so that all the work gets as much use as possible. Hopefully, Nadja's human spirit never moves onto the next plane of existence.