The Goriest Death In Sci-Fi Horror Movie Cube Is A Practical Effect
Director Vincenzo Natali's "Cube" is a movie that has earned its place in horror history. Released in 1997 (and more recently remade in Japan), the film was ahead of the curve in several ways, particularly when it came to its ridiculously brutal kill scenes. Anyone who has seen the movie will probably tell you that no kill scene is quite as memorable as that of Alderson's. Played by Julian Richings, he ends up being cut into, well, cubes. Turns out, this impressively gross kill was accomplished with practical visual effects.
The most recent edition of SFX Magazine did a retrospective on "Cube" and Natali provided some insight for the piece. For those who may need a refresher, the film centers on a group of strangers who wake up and find themselves in a giant cube. Each of them has a special skill and they must work together to escape the massive maze of deadly traps. "It was really fun designing different ways to kill people but doing it in an artful way. We didn't want to just be gross," said Natali.
As for Alderson's scene, Richings meets his fate very early on in the movie's runtime and it certainly sets the tone. A swinging piece of razor wire carves him into literal pieces. As Natali explained, he and his production team didn't rely on CGI to pull this moment off:
"When we wrote that, we thought it'd have to be a digital effect, but we had a wonderful make-up department in Toronto that built a brilliant silicone replica of Julian Richings who played that character. It was basically composed of bricks that we piled up. During our last shot of our last day, we pulled out the bottom piece and he fell apart perfectly."
Cube's influential slice-and-dice horror
CGI was available to filmmakers at this point in the '90s, having been pioneered by Steven Spielberg and a groundbreaking visual effects team in 1993 with "Jurassic Park." But the technology was still new. It was expensive and limiting. Nowadays, just about anyone with a laptop and enough ambition can do mind-blowing things with digital effects. The only limit is one's imagination. But for "Cube," Natali and his crew kind of had to rely on old-school techniques. For that reason, the scene still holds up today.
Beyond that, the movie's legacy is not hard to track for horror fans. Film franchises like "Saw" and "Escape Room" owe more than a little to "Cube" for paving the way. Heck, the first "Resident Evil" movie had a kill scene that was incredibly similar to Alderson's death, and that came out a full five years later. Natali, for his part, is happy to take credit for the horror subgenre that took off in the years that followed his original film:
"I'll take all credit for any slice-and-dice deaths that followed. I feel like we were the first film to cube a human being, and we certainly weren't the last."
Meanwhile, Lionsgate has been trying to get a "Cube" remake off the ground for some time, though it's been a little while since we've heard anything official on that front. If that does happen, and the movie features a similar kill, it feels like a guarantee it will be done with CGI this time around.