How Evil made the best horror creatures on TV
For four seasons, Robert and Michelle King delighted audiences with tales of the supernatural and the macabre in Evil. Effectively The Exorcist meets The X-Files, the show follows three assessors working with the Catholic Church to investigate possible supernatural incidents—think a haunted elevator, or a possessed TikTok video—while a satanic conspiracy builds up evil in New York City. It defied what could be done on a network like CBS, constantly delivering terrifying, poignant stories that looked at mundane evils that only got bolder and timelier when the show moved to Paramount+. Think stories about incels turning into mass shooters, parents murdering their child because they think he's evil, the role cop shows play in glorifying violent cops, and many different ways to show why the internet is bad.
Evil delivered nuanced tales about the ills of our reality, with supernatural creatures and monsters straight out of your worst nightmares. Guillermo del Toro has praised the creature design and its combination of whimsy and creepiness, and that's only the start of it. The show explored night terror demons, Baphomet-style demons, massive pig monsters, jinns, mosquito monsters, demon babies with multiple hands, Cenobite-like monsters, and so much more. At a time when CG is constantly used to save money or time (even if it isn't always cheaper or faster), Evil celebrates the craft of making a really cool-looking practical creature. Most monsters in the show are portrayed by actors in elaborate suits or animatronics, and they have stunning levels of detail and even personality, the designs telling a larger story about these creatures.
Now that the show is coming to an end, The A.V. Club reached out to special character designer Joel Harlow and creators Robert and Michelle King to talk about what makes the creatures in Evil so unique and terrifying, which was the hardest creature to make, what creatures they would have liked to see in future seasons, and building a hierarchy of demons.
What is the process of coming up with a creature for the show? Does it start with a story or a design?
Joel Harlow: My first design was the George character, and I luckily got a couple of paragraphs describing it so I knew what they were looking for, based on the description. I did some designs, went in, showed them and they loved them. Sometimes it's the scripts, it's called out "Joel will come up with something here." But a lot of times, as we progressed throughout the seasons, Robert and Michelle would kind of let me just sort of design whatever I wanted and they'd write it into a story. I go to them and say "I want to do a sort of traditional Satan-looking Baphomet, goat-headed demon, or a Cenobite-looking, Hellraiser character" and they put it in an episode.
You never get that blind trust in this business. Evil has been a dream for me because it allowed me to sort of stretch my legs and come up with some really wild characters.
Robert King: There's been very few revisions to his designs. It's mostly Joel coming to us with a great idea for a design and us writing it in. When we were all meeting in person before the pandemic, we'd have all his designs up on the wall of the writer's room so the writers would just pick one and put it in an episode.
Michelle King: Part of the joy of working with Joel is he's completely obsessed with his job. It's not just a job to him. It's a vocation, it's what takes it to the next level.
As much as the show relishes in its episodic storytelling, there's been a fantastic overarching story of Leland and the 60 families of demons. Through this we've seen different kinds of demons, kind of like a hierarchy. Was that mapped out from the start, like different levels of demons would look different yet related to each other, or did that come up creature by creature?
RK: Part of it is an interest that we have in not repeating ourselves after we did George. What we decided is that there was a hierarchy within this demon world, always someone lower down, someone next up, etc. The show would be about Leland, the Michael Emerson character, kind of clawing his way up this hierarchy and killing everyone above him. First, he kills his demon therapist, then he kills the manager. So there's always a sense that Leland is moving up in this world not by stabbing someone in the back, like in politics, but by stabbing them in the chest, literally.
JH: It happened kind of organically from a design standpoint, mostly looking at the hierarchy of their social status. First, it was the Therapist who was a goat-headed demon, then the Manager who is a business owner, he's this five-eyed demon. Then we meet this successful and scary lawyer who is four-horned, multi-faced, and dragging corpses behind him. They fit into the real world, and the show treats them as characters, not just boogey monsters.
A big part of the appeal of the creatures in the show is that they are practical effects, enhanced with CG here and there. What is the process of working with the animatronics and the suits, and then shooting them on set practically?
JH: People who have been doing this for a while have always come to the realization that the best characters can be achieved using both practical and visual effects. The team all love practical makeup and effects, so everything starts from a practical standpoint, whether it's a puppet, a person in a suit, prosthetic makeup, whatever it is, then we augment it via rods, eye blinks, animatronics, or digital wings for flying.
When we got to this final season and we did the pig demon, I thought of doing a combination of something like the Manager or the Therapist, more of a suit, but Robert asked for it to be on all fours. So we made a full animatronic character, like American Werewolf. I would never have thought we could have done that in the first seasons, this was the biggest and most ambitious creature we built for Evil. It's got five servos, three eyes that move, a tongue, lips, and everything moves, the trotters move, it all works.
By the time we got to the stick demon, the lawyer at the end of the season with all the horns and the faces, we knew it was the end of the show, so I put everything but the kitchen sink into that design, more eyes, more horns, the corpses, everything. He has mechanical hands, a giant suit, he's dragging silicone bodies. When I was in the shop I decided he would look cool with heads on hooks on his belt, because we hadn't done that yet.
RK: Shooting the pig creature was hard because it was on wheels and it was supposed to be kind of like someone with arms through it and operating it, but it was just so massive. We also had to create our own field of corn on our set and have it move through it. So I would say we didn't use it as effectively as they thought we would, because it was a great design, but the more you saw of it the less you were scared of it—like with Jaws. That was one of Joel's best designs, we just didn't use it as well as we hoped.
One thing I loved about Evil is how it looked beyond what we're used to in religious horror, like when the show introduced a jinn as a monster of the week. What went into creating that creature and making it look and feel different than the other demons we'd seen?
JH: I mostly worked on staying away from the horns and Catholic imagery, part of the jinn's design was moving toward something, dare I say, beautiful. So the first jinn is a bit more earthy, with cracks on its conical-shaped head, and the one in the final season I wanted to have a cohesive design thread, so the focus was on the head. This one had this giant helmet that glows from within, where his brain is exposed. There is a little of Art Deco to it as opposed to the more fleshier creatures for Catholic demons. I was just excited to incorporate wardrobe and prop pieces into the design.
Robert and Michelle, once you have a design for a creature from Joel, I'm curious what the process is like when it comes to their personality. Because as frightening as many of these monsters are, most are quite funny at times, from George all the way to the Lawyer.
RK: Sometimes that's in the design and we think a creature looks funny or can be funny, and other times it's something really kind of thought about on set. There's a Zoom scene in the last episode and one of the demons has problems with the mute button, or the demon of language getting fatter and popping at the end. The comedy and the character can either come from the designs themselves, and sometimes from us.
Joel, what creature or the type of creature do you wish you had been able to make for the show?
JH: I've got a lot of them. One character that I really would have liked to get in there would be something Lovecraftian, like a Cthulhu or something like that, because I'm a huge fan of Lovecraft. Something tentacled or aquatic or multi-limbed and sort of amorphous horror. That would be something fun.
Speaking of the finale, throughout the final four episodes you play with the idea of the future, and show glimpses of what might happen. Are those vignettes supposed to be what might have happened in future seasons of the show?
RK: Once we realized we had four more episodes to tell the story, we thought the audience would be more interested in the future, because we knew we weren't going to cut to 20 years from now or something like that. We didn't want to jump to the future, but we were concerned about how these characters continued on. So, even if that woman was lying about being from the future, that does focus the audience's mind on where people are going to end up. Then with the goggles, we thought that was the scenario that these three leads and also the daughters are most frightened of. Their personal ghost story.