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SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Bring Her Back,” now playing in theaters.
Jonah Wren Phillips, the 12-year-old star of “Bring Her Back,” isn’t a fan of horror movies, despite playing a ravenous demon child who eats the flesh off his own arm and the remains of a frozen corpse in the Philippou brothers’ latest film. He almost turned down the role — but not because it was too scary.
“I’m not a horror person. I get scared by the ‘Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Halloween’ specials. But I know that filming something is different to watching it,” he said. “I was actually originally going to say no because I had really long hair. I vowed that I would never cut my hair for a movie and I’d reject it. But then I saw some of Danny and Michael’s YouTube videos and I couldn’t refuse this.”
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Twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou started their filmmaking career on YouTube under the name RackaRacka and made over-the-top action, horror and comedy videos. In 2022, they made their feature directorial debut with A24’s terrifying film “Talk to Me,” which became a hit with critics and horror fans alike and has a sequel in the works. Now, the Philippous return with “Bring Her Back,” another shocking horror that packs an emotional punch.
In the new movie, siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) move in with a new foster mother Laura (Sally Hawkins) after the sudden death of their father. Laura, who has some odd quirks of her own, is already fostering a selectively mute boy named Ollie (Phillips) who, as Andy quickly points out, is a “fucking weirdo.”
Phillips, who has appeared in the TV shows “Human Error” and “Sweet Tooth,” slowly transforms over the course of the movie as Laura’s unnerving backstory is revealed. It turns out Laura wants to bring her dead daughter back to life via a demonic ritual using Piper and Ollie, who has a gluttonous spirit living inside of him.
The most shocking moments occur when Ollie’s demon takes over and he crunches on the edge of a table — and a sharp knife — to feed the evil entity within him. To create the table-biting scene, prosthetic FX designer Larry Van Duynhoven and his team made sets of dentures for Phillips to wear, plus a balsa wood table that already had some bites taken out of it.
“He was able to really go to town because we had the dentures that helped protect his teeth and mouth,” Van Duynhoven said. “The dental technician designed some breakaway teeth in the dentures, so some of those teeth snap off.”
For how stomach-churning the table-biting scene was, Van Duynhoven said that Phillips actually enjoyed filming it. “He actually liked the timber. He liked the taste,” Van Duynhoven teased.
“They said they put chocolate in it a little bit. I didn’t taste it because I had blood in my mouth. It was more of a texture because they hollowed it out so it was really crunchy. The hard part was with the fake teeth I couldn’t get the leverage to bite down on the table, so it was really hard to crack the wood. They had to glue the teeth in so I could bite it down,” Phillips said. “It didn’t taste like anything, really. It was more the texture I like. It sounds so weird talking about eating a table.”
Another scene has Andy hand Ollie a kitchen knife to make a snack but, after Andy turns around for one moment, Ollie begins gnawing on the razor-sharp edge of the knife. Blood starts spurting and teeth go flying as the creepy child can’t stop trying to eat the blade.
“We used a rubber prop knife for Jonah and some dentures,” Van Duynhoven said. “We had some shots where we used the real kid, and then we replaced him with a puppet head that we created. For the close-ups, we could get a sharper knife and go through a little track inside the teeth and gums that would cut the silicon lip. It was kind of tense on set to get that because we only had one take at the lip.”
Van Duynhoven’s team made a full-body cast of Phillips’ body to create Ollie’s full demonic transformation for the end of the movie, when he has a bulging belly, exposed ribs and bright blue veins snaking across his torso.
“We got Jonah in to the workshop, and we did a full chest and body cast of him,” Van Duynhoven said. “We sculpted the round — skinny-fat, as you would say — that kind of ‘E.T.’ stomach. Then we had the ribs, and that wrapped around to the back. Once we put that on, we colored it all up. We did a lot of necrotic vein tattoos, so that gave the layering.”
The process kept Phillips completely immobile and lasted up to six hours.
“I couldn’t really watch anything on my phone because it was prosthetics and they were using sprays. I couldn’t really listen to music because I had prosthetic all around there. I just sat there,” he said. “Larry kept telling me to try to go to sleep. I found that difficult because it’s so ticklish and the glue is so uncomfortable.”
Van Duynhoven added of the young star, “Imagine you sitting there for five hours, let alone an 11-year-old boy. It takes a special person to be able to sit through that stuff.”
