‘Sinners’ Oscar-Nominated Makeup Designer on How Vampire Effects Are ‘Rooted In Reality’

During the production of “Sinners,” the film’s pack of vampires caused heavy traffic in one key crafts department.

“There were very few actors who made it through the film without coming to see us,” said prosthetics makeup designer Mike Fontaine, an Oscar nominee (alongside Ken Diaz and Shunika Terry) for creating the movie’s fangs, claws and bloody gashes in the skin.

“The threat to these characters is a physical one, so almost everyone in the film goes through some sort of prosthetic transformation by the end. That’s the element of horror and darkness that we were responsible for amplifying.”

Best Makeup and Hairstyling is one of the historic 16 nominations notched by “Sinners,” which was recognized in every single below-the-line category, in addition to nods for three of the actors and writer-director-producer Ryan Coogler.

But perhaps more than any other, the makeup nomination serves as a tribute to Coogler’s deep commitment to the beloved art of practical, in-camera effects. In terms of creating terror on screen with props and prosthetics, the director has cited the influence of “Jaws,” “The Thing” and Jeremy Saulnier’s grisly 2015 thriller “Green Room,” a sort of low-budget sibling to “Sinners” in which band members are trapped in a confined space by murderous white supremacists.

The gruesome makeup work on “Green Room” was an early credit for 36-year-old Fontaine, a previous Oscar nominee for “The Batman” and an Emmy winner last year for “The Penguin.” He also contributed prosthetic work to “Coming 2 America,” “Maestro” and added pockmarks to Timothée Chamalet’s face in this season’s “Marty Supreme.”

“’Green Room’ has become a cult classic and it was exciting when Ryan told me, all these years later, that it was part of why he reached out about ‘Sinners,’” he said.

Fontaine’s dedication to realism, even regarding Colin Farrell’s elaborate Penguin makeup, was an asset for Coogler’s vision. “Ryan has a great deal of empathy for his characters and you really feel for these people when they get hurt,” Fontaine said. “In ‘Sinners,’ we go into the supernatural, but you still had to feel like you were trapped in this juke joint and that these things were really happening.”

Fontaine and his team researched animal attacks on humans, studying medical photos of the gashes caused by bears, apes and especially dogs. “We turned up the volume a bit, but everything was still rooted in reality,” he said.

The vampires’ shimmering eyes were also based on a real phenomenon — tapetum lucidum, the reflective layer behind the retina of nocturnal animals — which Coogler wrote into the script to intensify his undead antagonists’ ancient mystique.

In a breakthrough for the makeup department, the creepy, hypnotic effect was achieved thanks to the development of a newfangled, shall we say, tool.

Contact-lens designer Cristina Patterson, who also helped create the effect of Paul Giamatti’s lazy eye in “The Holdovers,” spent several years fabricating the reflective lenses, which are showcased for the first time in “Sinners.”

“It’s rare when somebody invents something brand-new,” Fontaine said. “It’s a mesmerizing effect. The lenses are both terrifying and kind of beautiful, and embody that line that Ryan walked throughout the entire movie, where you can be attracted to these vampires but also fear them.” (Patterson is not an Oscar nominee for the film, but Fontaine hopes that her accomplishment will be recognized with one of the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards.)

The contact lenses did cause slight vision impairment, according to Fontaine, who tripped over a chair while wearing them during a camera test. He praised the actors, particularly Michael B. Jordan, Omar Benson Miller and Jack O’Connell, for their collaboration during the painstaking makeup sessions.

“There were times when Jack couldn’t eat because of the massive dentures in his mouth, couldn’t go to the bathroom because his fingers were so long, couldn’t see because of the contacts and had a metal plate glued to his head and tubes of smoke and blood going up and down his back. And the guy never uttered a word of discomfort.”

While speaking of that metal plate on a Zoom call from his studio in Brooklyn, Fontaine held in his hands the frisbee-shaped guitar resonator that’s buried in O’Connell’s vampire head near the finale of “Sinners.” True to Coogler’s approach, the whole sequence was filmed during a real sunrise outside in hot and humid New Orleans, with the makeup brushes ready for touch-ups as the cameras rolled – and several fierce creatures in the midst.

“There were alligators swimming very close to where we were shooting,” Fontaine said. “And I learned that mosquitoes can bite you through jeans.”

During the takes of the scene, O’Connell would pull the resonator from his head (it was attached with simple magnets) and discard it into the waist-deep river water. Then Fontaine or a member of the makeup team would wade it to fish it out.

And eventually the blood-splattered resonator made it all the way back to Brooklyn. It was such a realistic-looking object, in fact, that Fontaine worried when he went to the airport with the piece in his luggage. “I guess I could have explained it was a weapon,” he said with a laugh. “But just for killing vampires.”

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine, which will be published Feb. 19, 2026.

The post ‘Sinners’ Oscar-Nominated Makeup Designer on How Vampire Effects Are ‘Rooted In Reality’ appeared first on TheWrap.