One of the major trademarks of the smash supernatural teen thriller Buffy The Vampire Slayer is the menagerie of vampires, demons and other creatures that haunt each episode. Creating those monsters every week on a TV budget and schedule is no small accomplishment, requiring the unique skills of many designers, sculptors, lab technicians and make up artists, all working toward a common goal. Their work falls under the supervision of John Vulich, whose Optic Nerve Studios handles the special make-up FX for Buffy; and Todd McIntosh, whose on-set make-up team can often run up to 20-25 people an episode.

The process of creating a new vampire, demon, etc, begins when Optic Nerve gets the script, which generally gives an indication of what will be required of those creatures.

“The one thing they seem to go for a lot is some kind of theme associated with it,” says Vulich. “They also don’t like to tread the same ground, so every time you see a demon, they want it to have a different look or style, or we might have done a lot of one type of demon in the second season, so in the third season, they want something new. If there’s a description in the script, like if horns are mentioned, or maybe the creature has a certain kind of skin which becomes a plot point, we’ll take that into account.”

After the design has been approved by the show’s producers (including series creator Joss Whedon), it’s a matter of waiting until the right actor is cast, which can sometimes delay the process until literally a few days before shooting.

“Each day we lose is extremely valuable to us,” Vulich insists, “so at a certain point in the game, we’ll start manufacturing pieces, entirely speculating on the size of the person. When we did The Judge for Season Two [Surprise and Innocence], we only had three days left, so we said, ‘Look, we’ve got to start doing something!’ so we used a head that we used frequently on Babylon 5 that we felt was our best generic head.

"We’ve developed certain tricks from doing shows like Babylon 5, so we can hedge our bets on these things, to make them more modular. Once we bring the actor in and cast him, we sculpt the pieces and make the moulds, and I’ll often throw two or three sculptors on different parts of one character just to get it done on time."