How The Boys VFX Team Pulled Off Season 2's Gory Head Popper Scene

There are few comic books as intensely violent as Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's "The Boys," and the Prime Video series of the same name doesn't pull any punches. Showrunner Eric Kripke ("Supernatural") ensured that the series was as brutally bloody as its source material, with all kinds of superhuman violence. Human bodies (and even some superhuman bodies) just aren't made to withstand intense forces, so many people are popping, starting with Hughie's (Jack Quaid) girlfriend all the way back in the pilot. Poor Robin explodes into a spray of guts and red mist when Flash-knock off A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) slams into her at superhuman speeds. It was only the first of many, many blood-filled explosions in the series, but it would not be the most intense or impressive. 

In season 2, Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) is holding court during a congressional hearing against Vought concerning Compound-V when former Vought scientist John Vogelbaum took the stand. Suddenly, heads start exploding as if someone with a "Scanners" fetish suddenly got the ability, and the entire courtroom becomes a chaotic mess of blood, brains, and people running for their lives. One human explosion is tricky enough, but what about a whole bunch of head pops in a crowded scene? In an interview with GameSpot, season 2 VFX supervisor Stephen Fleet shared all of the secrets behind making the mind-blowing scene come to life.

Fleet revealed that different techniques were applied for each head pop because some needed more detail than others. For the ones that were going to be front-and-center, they built prosthetic dummies without heads that they covered in blood and "bananas mixed with fake blood" to mimic brain matter, which they used as the "after" shots for exploding. The rest of it was done digitally, marrying before-and-after images and adding in the explosions themselves. For other pops, things were decided much more on the fly, as Fleet explained: 

"So that's how we did the first two, and those took a while, but then we kind of came up — you know, you do this a while, you learn that you're going to end up shooting from the hip sooner or later. Nothing's ever going to go perfectly. And so, as the day went and time started running out, I would just look for opportunities. A great example is the assistant lady. There's this great shot, it's one of the last head explosions, where you're behind the lady tracking her and she's running with Neuman, and her head explodes and she drops to her knees and falls. And that was literally just, we just had the actor shoot it, and I just kind of looked at the footage to ask for a replay, and made sure that her head was not overlapping into people, and that we had a nice piece of wall so that we could paint it out. So it's just, with a technical eye, just looking at it saying, 'This will work.'"

Often with big effects shots, everything has to be meticulously planned in advance, but it sounds like things on the "The Boys" set were a lot more chaotic.

Heads explode. People run everywhere trying to get to safety. It's a mad rush of mayhem, and creating that bedlam took a little real chaos courtesy of special effects crew members wielding blood cannons. As Fleet said:

"We had our special effects guys, I mean, a lot of it, frankly, shooting blood cannons on everybody. So we really got people covered in blood. But it's kind of like rain. In movies, you don't really see real rain, it doesn't show up on cameras, you have to get really thick with it. So we ended up adding a lot of that digitally on top of the practical stuff because it's just hard to see. Cameras don't pick it up. But yeah, we had kind of three stages: We shot the whole thing with the crowd, no blood, then some blood, and then a lot of blood on them so that we could cut intercut footage of people covered in blood."

The scene is composed of lots of rapid cuts, moving around from the faces of reacting, terrified onlookers to exploding heads and their aftermath. The camera almost never stops moving, either, which helps the frenetic energy and allows for different clips from those three stages to work together. Now there's just one last important question: where can I get one of those blood cannons?