Grease your blade with griffin blood and equip your cantrips, because we’re a little over a month away from seeing Henry Cavill’s butt when The Witcher debuts on Netflix on December 20th. The game series is well regarded for its storytelling and spooky fantasy setting, filled with monsters, mystical creatures and ghosts of aborted babies (that’s not a joke). So, how is the show going to coalesce all of these influences into one coherent vision? By adjusting the tone a bit.
Per the visual effects supervisor, Julian Perry, in an interview with Games Radar, the series is going to be leaning more into horror than fantasy.
“I definitely think it leans more towards horror. We’re definitely taking the fantasy out. I can honestly say we’re not fantastical. I mean, it’s fantastical but in a grounded horror sense. For example, with Striga [a woman cursed to live as a monster], that’s one gnarly-looking thing. That’s very unpleasant!”
Interesting. For those of you looking for a more Lord of the Rings-y type experience, you may be left wanting, I guess. They also don’t exactly have all the armies or swords-and-shield types present in the show, either. You wanna know why? Because that stuff is expensive and a logistical nightmare, as one would expect.
“We’ve got the Nilfgaard armies, which can’t exist because there are 10,000-plus of them. Same with the Temerians and the Cintrans. the armies physically can’t exist here on set,” said Perry.
So, I gotta break something to you guys: I’m not really a huge, like, swords/sorcery fantasy kinda guy. Those Hobbits taking that ring into a volcano is my limit, honestly, and I only like those because of Peter Jackson’s insane vision. I’m a bad nerd, or so I’ve been told.
Personally, I think focusing on the spookier aspects of Geralt’s world is not the worst way to take the show. I do feel like fans of the games, and maybe more-so the books the games are based on, may indeed be disappointed by the lack of Medieval aesthetic. But hey, we’ll get to see Superman taking a bath, so that’s something. Right?
Maybe the fights with the spooky cursed ladies will be engaging in ethereal ways that us mortals cannot comprehend. The Witcher is not a normal man, nor will his show be a normal show. In any case, how the series overall will fare shall be revealed as a possible holiday gift to us all next month.