Released last year, the Spanish survival thriller “Society of the Snow” sent shivers down spines and left audiences reeling with its unflinching portrayal. This chilling tale by the visionary J.A. Bayona was based on a real-life 1972 Andes Flight disaster.
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In 1972, a chartered plane carrying a young rugby team to a match gets off course, plunging into the glaciers of the Andes. What unfolds is a harrowing tale of human resilience pushed to its absolute limits.
The tragedy sounds gritty and Bayona did justice by throwing viewers into an unthinkable reality faced by the 45 passengers on board. However, the movie was supposedly way darker before the director cut some screens out!
Director J.A. Bayona Cut Some Scenes From Society of the Snow To Make it Less Gorier
Society of the Snow demanded crazy prosthetics and makeup to make the movie great and they knew exactly where to go. Artists David Martí and Montse Ribé were the brains behind the movie’s prosthetics and they recently revealed some details of the film in an interview with Indiewire.
Per the artists, the movie was much gorier before some gruesome shots were cut from the final movie. These included severed heads and eating flesh from corpses.
“We worked like crazy doing the dummy [corpses] all around with ounces and ounces of silicone,” “If you have a pile of dead people, the actors need to see it, but the audience doesn’t. You just see the actors’ reaction to it. The close-ups were cut. So, I think, finally, it’s a good balance between what you see and what you don’t, how horrifying the reality is, but you’re not gonna freak people out. Because people are not going to see a horror movie.” – Montse Ribé to IndieWire.
Further, David Martí respects Bayona’s decision for cutting some gruesome scenes out as a matter of respect for everyone who survived the tragic incident.
“Bayona kind of hid it, the food,” “It was a matter of respect to the people that died there, and to the survivors that they had to do what they have to do to survive. There’s a lot of stuff that we did. But I hope sometime we can see that version that you have all the dummies that we did.” – David Martí to IndieWire
Society of the Snow is Nominated in Two Categories at the Oscars
The 2023 Spanish superhit has been on the word of many mouths in the last year. An Academy Awards nomination for the brilliant movie was inevitable, and it has earned itself two! Firstly, the movie is nominated for the award of Best International Feature Film.
Secondly, as one might expect, the movie is nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling running up against movies like Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Society of the Snow can be streamed on Netflix.
