Horrifying behind the scenes footage from Titanic movie set shows how they made frozen corpses
Creepy behind-the-scenes footage has revealed exactly how they were able to make it appear as though people had frozen to death in the Atlantic Ocean in Titanic.
By now, you're probably all more than aware of what goes down in James Cameron's Oscar-winning classic, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as star-crossed lovers whose whirlwind romance is cut short by their ship crashing into an iceberg and sinking to the bottom of the sea.
Although Jack and Rose exist only in fiction, the events onboard the HMS Titanic during her first and only voyage are very much real.
The Titanic would never make it to New York City, instead finding a watery grave in the North Atlantic.
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It's estimated that anywhere between 1,490 and 1,635 of the 3,327 souls onboard the ship died in disaster – with Cameron depicting the events in an incredibly chilling fashion.
So, how did they do it?
How did they make the frozen corpses in Titanic?
Like the atomic explosion in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, Cameron and co weren't allowed to chuck actual bodies in the Atlantic Ocean and film them, as that would be both highly unethical and illegal.
But to make audiences feel as though they were looking at the real thing, the make-up department were required to get pretty creative. According to footage captured behind-the-scenes, extras had wax added to their hair to make it look as though there was ice growing on it.
The actors' faces were then smothered in spirit gum and gelatin crystals, with extra Ellen Mower revealing the mix would expand when it came into contact with water, creating the eerie look.
Practice staying completely still while floating about in the water and voila, you have a bunch of believably dead corpses.
Watch a clip of the process below:
The deathly make-up wasn't the only clever trick Cameron utilised in the pre-CGI era either, with crews building miniature sets to film some of the most iconic scenes.
Remember the moment where water was seen surging through the ship's halls as it plunged deeper into the Atlantic? Well that was created with a dolls house repeatedly flushed with water.
The moment was a particularly memorable one for the crew, with model crew chief, Gene Rizzardi saying the scene was 'really fun' to film.
"Even to this day when I show people pictures, they think it's a real hallway... it was only quarter scale," he said in a featurette on the making of the movie.
Meanwhile, a scrapped scene depicting an alternate portrayal of Rose boarding rescue ship the Carpathia alongside other survivors also does the rounds from time to time, showing a more realistic aftermath many real survivors faced.
Brenna Cooper