Cult of ‘Yellowjackets’: Making masks for Lottie’s followers

The undisclosed location where Natalie (Juliette Lewis) was taken in the Season 1 finale of “Yellowjackets” will become more worrisome as Season 2 progresses. In the Season 2 premiere — written by showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer — Natalie finds herself bedridden at a wellness retreat run by Lottie (Simone Kessell), who is just as drawn to her followers as she is. . was in the wilderness as a teenager (Courtney Eaton).

More: Winter is here for ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 — and British Columbia ran out of fake snow to make it happen

At Lottie’s upscale wellness center, there’s more than the smell of the wild: a procession of white-clad followers wearing animal masks burying a naked man is not the usual accompaniment to tasteful neutrals and neutrals. suburban mom wall art. However, production designer Margot Ready and her props team relished the opportunity to create animal masks that are just creepy enough to tip Lottie’s present-day community firmly into cult territory. “It’s like Orwell’s Animal Farm,” Ready told IndieWire. “He’s in this seemingly non-hierarchical cult, but he’s still the leader.”

The masks were inspired by a mix of eerily simplistic animal imagery and the showrunners’ love of organic materials. “Our props team played with natural materials in the props office,” Ready said, “and our props master David Goodman barked up his face with cut-out eyes and looked really good in a creepy, druid look. -like way. So we leaned into this pagan, creepy, anthropomorphic, do-it-yourself feeling.”

Masks of Lottie’s followers on ‘Yellowjackets’

Screenshot from YouTube

Ready and his team chose simple animal shapes and used natural materials and papier-mâché to create the masks, which were meant to look believably handmade by cult members. “(We kept them) very creepy,” Ready said, pointing to the Season 1 inspirations. “What we see at the beginning, the antler queen and the big mystery in the show, also in (Episode 9) ‘Doomcoming,’ there’s this wonderful aesthetic, and those things are probably still in Lottie’s mind — the fight, but embracing nature. So they were made as an animal-human hybrid mask made of natural materials.”

As in the scenarios themselves, the planning process of the past and the present have more in common than it seems at first glance. The layering of natural materials and the process of making them, whether it’s a landscape or hand-crafted quirky white rabbit ears, ultimately tells you something about the characters and who they choose.

“The masks are extremely symbolic in the show, partly because we always deny the wild nature of humans, that we are wild animals. But we are, Ready said. “We often learn to wear a mask to be acceptable to society — we see that in the current timeline with Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and Taissa (Tawny Cypress) wearing community masks. The wonderful layering of the show is that it almost discards these tropes of good and bad and finds a space between them. We always play with these dualities. Are you healing? Are you still traumatized? How does your past affect your present? These are all fun things to work with.”

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