beast beHaViOUr
Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts reveals the secrets of Kong: Skull Island’s monsters...
SQUID’S IN
“The thing with the squid is just the size. Its tentacles are enormous. We had our concept artist Dennis Chan drawing Kong wrestling these massive tentacles, but we kept getting designs back of normal-sized tentacles, which looked stupid! The squid is like a weird merging of an octopus and a squid; it has more legs than either of those. And part of its efficacy is not showing it – just showing the legs, you leave something to the imagination. It was about creating something that referenced the Toho King Kong Vs Godzilla but also creating this environment where you feel this daily struggle in Kong’s life. What turns a herbivore into a carnivore?”
SPIDER FAN
“We wanted to show the audience something they’ve never seen before. I haven’t seen a giant spider with bamboo legs that towers over you and blends into the canopy above it. I was really interested in using our environment as camouflage – even the villagers blend in with their environment. Also, we’re sort of riffing off the history of the bamboo traps during the Vietnam War. I love the idea of saying, ‘How can you take the iconography of the bamboo traps and turn it into a creature?’”
KONG OF THE JUNGLE
“I want to set the record straight: Kong is not bigger so he can fight Godzilla [in 2020’s Kong Vs Godzilla]; Kong is bigger because I wanted these humans to stand in the presence of something that their brain intrinsically tells them, ‘I’m looking at a god.’ Not, ‘I’m looking at a big monkey.’ So naturally the other creatures had to be scaled up slightly. Some of them, like the bamboo spiders, were designed to be a threat on a human level; they’re the ants of Kong’s world.”
SKULL’S OUT
“I love the spiders and the birds, but the Skull Crawlers were my opportunity as a kaiju nerd to add my villain creature to the lore of movie monsters. I loved the idea of the creature being just unsettling. I didn’t want it to have eyes. I wanted to focus on the big pits in the front of its face. You almost got the vibe that thing’s smiling at all times, giving it a weird, unsettling quality where you don’t know how you feel about it, but you definitely don’t like it!”