A Cult Comedy Served as a Test-Run for ‘Jurassic Park’s Groundbreaking Visual Effects

We seem to be living through a golden age of Death Becomes Her fandom. 

The Robert Zemeckis black comedy was a box office hit when it first hit theaters in 1992, and has since been embraced by a legion of LGBTQ film lovers, many of whom see the campy Meryl Streep vehicle as a “cornerstone of Queer culture.” These days, Death Becomes Her seems to be everywhere. There’s the musical adaptation, which is coming soon to Broadway…

…and the movie was clearly the inspiration for Sabrina Carpenter’s recent music video “Taste,” featuring Carpenter and Jenna Ortega in the Streep and Goldie Hawn roles, respectively.

While Death Becomes Her wasn’t a runaway blockbuster like some of Zemeckis’ other films, such as Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Why Is This Walking Corpse Taking Me to the North Pole (aka The Polar Express), it was instrumental in paving the way for one of the most successful movie franchises of all time: Jurassic Park. Or Jurassic World for all you Gen Z readers. 

Death Becomes Her, of course, stars Streep and Hawn as bitter enemies who take a mysterious elixir that grants them the power of immortality despite repeated attempts to murder one another. The macabre farce required Streep to play scenes with her head fully twisted the wrong way around, and Hawn to appear with a shotgun blast through her torso. This is why Industrial Light & Magic became involved.

According to visual effects artist John Schlag, ILM worked on Death Becomes Her between Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Jurassic Park. Knowing that Steven Spielberg’s dino epic was going to be a huge undertaking, they “used Death Becomes Her to test a number of things that we were planning to do on Jurassic Park.” Others have noted that its pioneering use of CGI “directly paved the way for the realistic dinosaurs in Jurassic Park,” which came out the following year. 

While there were other movies with CGI before it, Death Becomes Her notably didn’t star aquatic aliens or liquid metal killing machines, just people. Visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston explained that in order to create the “impossible” shots, “you have to push the techniques as far as they’re available, and then a little bit beyond that.” As ILM now brags, Death Becomes Her was the “first time human skin texture had been computer generated” in a movie.

It’s no wonder then that the Death Becomes Her team won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1993.

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t share this video of the animatronic duplicate of Streep’s head that they built for the movie, soon to be starring in all of your nightmares.

In a just world, Death Becomes Her would have also spawned a line of baffling action figures, theme park rides and horrifically oversized fast-food meals.

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