Black Mirror's Horrifying Playtest Monster Was A Monstrous Labor Of Love

"Black Mirror" season 6 has taken a slight detour from the anthology's usual approach of peering into a future dominated by nefarious technology of one sort or another. As real-life tech horrors catch up with the dystopian visions depicted in the show, "Black Mirror" has evolved from a sci-fi series into something new entirely. Series creator Charlie Brooker revealed as much prior to the sixth season's debut when he told GQ, "I definitely approached this season thinking, 'Whatever my assumptions are about 'Black Mirror,' I'm going to throw them out and do something different.'"

Brooker has always been intrigued by more than just the dark side of tech, weaving in elements of every genre you can imagine across the previous five seasons of "Black Mirror." Back in "Playtest," the second episode of season 3, the creator/writer veered into outright horror territory, combining his typically grim take on tech with a more traditional horror tale that easily made for one of the scariest episodes of "Black Mirror."

Directed by "10 Cloverfield Lane" and "Prey" filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg, the episode was notable for its full-on embrace of horror imagery and tropes, with a literal haunted house providing the setting for the episode's big climax. "Playtest" follows Cooper (Wyatt Russell), a traveling American trying to escape his suburban upbringing and the memory of caring for his dementia-ravaged father. In London, after he signs up to test out a new Augmented Reality video game, he finds himself implanted with a "Mushroom" — a small chip that taps into his deepest fears, manifesting them as visual hallucinations. Things slowly unravel from there, with Cooper confronting all manner of horrific fear made real, including a giant spider creature with the face of his childhood bully. Which, as it happens, posed somewhat of a challenge for the VFX artists.

The spider creature needed to look half decent in order to not completely undermine the horror of "Playtest." Luckily, as Yahoo reported, there were some dedicated VFX artists working on that particularly nightmarish vision.

Specifically, the "Black Mirror" team drafted in Painting Practice, a UK-based visual effects house, and the folks at Framestore to help craft the various effects used in "Playtest." And as Framestore VFX producer Christopher Gray explained in a behind-the-scenes video, when it came to the spider creature his artists took a lot of cues from British director and artist Chris Cunningham, whose own twisted visions of grotesquely distorted figures can clearly be seen in the final spider design.

But there was more to it than that, with Gray recounting how an actor was originally photo-scanned for reference, before the team ultimately decided to render the entire creature with CGI, allowing them greater control over its movements and appearance. Once the whole thing was built, the artists blended the original scans of the actor onto the fully CG creature.

Elsewhere, as Framestore's Grant Walker explained to Den of Geek, a lot of thought went into the anatomy of the giant arachnid. He explained:

"I played around with quite a lot of different iterations of where to put the face, and how to change the anatomy of the spider and the body. The mandible things, they were coming out of his mouth at one point, and then they returned into part of his mouth opened up in the way that it does. I don't know if people notice it or not, but those legs are hands with long nails. They're like fingers. It's got a belly button underneath it and other weird stuff that you might not ever get to see."

Since "Black Mirror" first debuted in 2011, the discourse surrounding it has often focused on how close we as a society are to "becoming a 'Black Mirror' episode." Which, as the literal name of the series implies, is kind of the point. But in recent years that take has gone from a slightly hyperbolic view of our contemporary moment to an increasingly accurate one. What's become simultaneously fascinating and terrifying of late is that much of the stuff we see in "Black Mirror" is literally real now.

Specific technology from a season 2 episode has long been available, though the makers of that particular AI bot trained on the messages of a dead tech entrepreneur stopped short of loading the tech into a humanoid robot. But with Apple's recent launch of the Vision Pro headset, with its emphasis on Augmented Reality over Virtual Reality, how long will it be before we see the eldritch beasts of "Playtest" crawling across our own living room floors? Disney's immersive "Mandalorian" Vision Pro experience, on the other hand, looks like it could be a grand old time. But Apple's uncanny Vision Pro promo video felt very much like something from an installment of "Black Mirror," with the actors obediently donning the unwieldy goggles as they wafted around apartments that appeared to be suspended in a perpetual golden hour.

It's all just a bit creepy, to be honest. And with Joe Russo predicting that AI will ultimately lead to movies that are tailored to our specific desires, perhaps the "Playtest" scenario of an immersive experience that plays off our own fears and emotions really isn't all that far off. Let's hope Framestore and Painting Practice's nightmare beasts aren't anywhere in sight when that happens.