How Pierre-Olivier Persin Made a Body Horror Buffet
The head of POP FX breaks down their Oscar-winning special makeup effects for The Substance
Words by Lana Thorn and Alex Secilmis 18 April 2025
© MUBI
Before charming audiences around the world—or rather, gushing proverbial blood all over them— Monstro Elisasue sat in the palm of Pierre-Olivier Persin’s hand. Working nights amidst a busy shoot, he had sculpted an old-school plasticine maquette to show writer-director Coralie Fargeat. It was all there: the grisly, lopsided head; the backwards-facing arm; the breast-sprouting back. Fargeat saw something in his pitch that was missing from other SFX companies. Where they had created a more “masculine" monster, Persin had found a tragic beauty in the gruesome Demi Moore/Margaret Qualley hybrid. Recognising a talent that would soon be honoured with an Academy Award, BAFTA, Critics’ Choice Award, and more, she hired him and his POP FX team with one mandate. “Coralie wanted me to go crazy,” the 51-year-old artist tells us on a Zoom call from his studio in Paris. “To work with no boundary.”
As a hyperreal Hollywood nightmare with an excess of blood and spandex, The Substance is certainly not the product of a limited imagination. The French indie phenomenon follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), a former movie star who gets fired from fronting her aerobics TV show on her 50th birthday. Reeling from the ageist rejection, she injects the titular neon-green serum: a black market drug that allows her to live every other week as the younger, new-and-improved “Sue” (Qualley)—so long as she “respects the balance”. Naturally, she doesn’t, and body horror galore ensues. That’s where Persin comes in.
Persin’s Monstro Elisasue maquette
With his skilful yet stomach-churning creations centre stage, the prosthetics designer drew on a lifelong love of horror and special makeup effects. “I was allowed to watch horror movies even when I was really young,” Persin explains. “Nothing was forbidden. I would put wounds on my little action figures, with tissue and paint.” He found early inspiration in artists like Tom Savini and SFX-heavy films such as The Thing, The Creeps, and An American Werewolf in London, and his growing knowledge of the craft made him an opinionated viewer. “I hated Dario Argento,” he laughs. “I was only looking from a special makeup effects POV, and I thought the effects in his films were really bad. The blood was too red! I was too young to understand his genius.” Persin’s passion was evident to his parents, and they made sure to cultivate it. “When I was 14, I got latex, clay, and plaster for Christmas and started making my own proper effects. I’m 51 now and I’ve never stopped.”
Persin in his studio
After making Super 8 short films with his friends in high school (self-proclaimed The Evil Dead and Street Trash rip-offs), Persin discovered he couldn’t realistically pursue his passion for a living. “In France, in the early 90s, there was only a handful of makeup effects artists. There was no company or studio whose door you could knock on. There was no French Sam Raimi.” Still, even if it meant years of struggling for rent, he found jobs where he could hone his practice, like making silicone dummy cavemen for a museum. “I don’t really believe in talent,” Persin muses. “I believe in hard work and a bit of luck.” That luck came his way when an art store in Paris put a few of his sculptures on display. One day a prop maker burst through the store doors and desperately asked the shop owners whether they knew anyone who could do a slit throat effect. They handed the man Persin’s business card, and the artist rose to the occasion. Production companies came calling, setting him off on a career of over 30 years: the first half working practically alone, the latter with crews that today form his namesake company (see his initials), POP FX.
POP FX’s concept art
Demi Moore in the final film © MUBI
Barring projects like World War Z and Game of Thrones, Persin has worked primarily on French dramas, which demand realism above all else. The Substance allowed him a bigger canvas—and the chance to make his teenage horror dreams come true. While there was no French Sam Raimi in the artist’s youth, he had finally found that director in Coralie Fargeat.
“I have to thank Coralie because she wanted to use practical effects as much as possible,” says Persin. After winning her over with his vision of Monstro Elisasue, he sculpted maquettes in his studio with Fargeat often at his side throughout pre-production, with anything from Francis Bacon to SFX artist Chris Walas (Gremlins, The Fly) as his inspirations. As he perfected the designs with the director’s feedback, he realised he had found a kindred spirit in such a determined, uncompromising artist. “We are both very passionate,” he says with almost nervous laughter. “But even when we disagreed, we were always on the same page. And the thing about Coralie is that she fought with the biggest American producers to defend her vision: it was all about the movie. I have a lot of respect for that.”
A prosthetic dummy of Moore’s back in the transformation scene
From designing the concept art to the final effects, Persin worked on The Substance for nearly a year. At worst, he had a routine of 3 am start times and up to 22-hour days, driving between Workshop 1 (at his studio), Workshop 2 (at a unit he had to rent due to the scale of the job), and the set. Not to mention the near-nightly phone calls with the first assistant director to prepare for the next morning’s shoot. “You have to keep in mind that, for something like Gollum [the crew’s nickname for Elisabeth’s sagging, hunchback form], we had to custom-make prosthetics for Demi, a body double, and a stunt double,” he adds. “And you have to throw them out at the end of the day. If you have a 40-day shoot, you need 40 sets of prosthetics. You can’t reuse them like a body suit.” Over the 11 months, the artist was only off for a week because he caught COVID. His wife told him she was happy he got sick because he would have never stopped working otherwise.
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