The Mad Genius of the Wooden Man: How ‘Oddity’ Carved a Genre Icon in Total Darkness

[Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “Oddity.”]

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To designer Paul McDonnell, filmmaker Damian McCarthy is like a lovable “pen pal from Hell.”

The two Irishmen live just three hours apart between Galway and Cork, but to this day, have never actually met. That’s despite co-parenting the monolithic Wooden Man now serving as the screaming centerpiece in IFC Films’ “Oddity,” a supernatural whodunnit which, to hear them tell it, was born of impossible deadlines and Zoom meetings as much as any haunted object of folklore. Its breakout character — rendered both as a wearable suit and as a seated mannequin (spotted these days as a celebrity guest making the rounds at festivals ) — stands 6’4” and, in just a few months, has become nothing short of a horror icon.

“Thank god for Paul because I sometimes think if we had all the time in the world, would it have looked as good?” McCarthy told IndieWire in pair of conversations digging deep into the Wooden Man’s unbelievable roots. (McDonnell, of course, was available separately.)

“People ring me when there’s this mad thing that everybody else has said no to,” the multi-hyphenate visual artist said. “I’m just that person. I don’t know whether that’s because they think I’m good at it or I’m crazy enough to do it.”

McDonnell and McCarthy’s partnership started with something of a jump-scare, when the “Oddity” director’s sister, Miriam McCarthy, rang up her old teacher with a request. Practical creature shops are increasingly rare in the digital film landscape, and the magical world of McDonnell has become something of a central processing unit for fledgling designers, fabricators, and stop-motion artists out of Ireland. McDonnell says he gets calls from ex-students asking him how to do harebrained things all the time, and he initially misunderstood the behemoth task Miriam was pitching.

“She said, ‘No, no, I don’t want to make it. I want you to make it!’” McDonnell said. “And I says, ‘Oh, OK. That’s very different.’ And she said, ‘Would you meet Damian?’ And I says, ‘Of course, I would!’ So she flipped the camera and he’s just there . And he says, ‘Hi Paul!’ And I said, ‘Hi! So, uh, what’s the story?’”

With just three weeks to create the Wooden Man from scratch (the “Oddity” director worked with another designer before McDonnell, but it didn’t work out), McCarthy remembers the designer telling him it would be “impossible” to finish the project in less than three months. But after a long weekend, McDonnell called back (“Feck it!”) and agreed to the make McCarthy’s Wooden Man on one condition: “If I’m going down in flames,” he said, “Miriam is coming with me.”

To make both the dummy and the suit, McDonnell assembled a team of six artists — all of them former students, many of whom took on Wooden Man duties between other projects — and set them to work sculpting and painting in tandem on the staggering multi-day creation. McCarthy was miles away doing his own “Oddity” pre-production, but still very much on the hook for the Wooden Man design.

“I had to get a crew together and get a studio together, and Damian says to me, ‘Do you want to see the script?’ And I says, ‘Damian, no time, man!’” McDonnell said. At the time of his interview with IndieWire, the designer still hadn’t had the chance to read or see “Oddity” — thanks, in part, to an ill-timed case of COVID.

“He just said, ‘Look, you’re going to have to be very decisive because you don’t really have much time to be changing your mind,’” McCarthy said. “Because it was going to have to be a live sculpt. That was it.”

The filmmaker-designer pair met over video chat for the entirety of their lightning-fast collaboration, in a process that sounds vaguely akin to working with a police sketch artist. During these sessions, McCarthy would dictate his dreams for the Wooden Man to McDonnell and then course-correct in real time.

“Damian would describe things to me and I’d freehand sculpt it as he was speaking,” McDonnell explained. “Then, he would go away, and I’d send him photographs, send him videos, and he’d give me notes. I’d flip and change stuff. Then he’d hop on and we’d sit together for about an hour, gibber jabber some more, and I’d keep sculpting.”

“I’d be on Zoom and it would just be like, ‘OK Paul, to begin with, let’s cut off his nose. Maybe he should look more like Voldemort.’ Then half an hour later I’d be like, ‘OK Paul, maybe I need you to put back on his nose because he looks too much like Voldemort,’” said McCarthy.

The writer/director, who spent many of these meetings storyboarding, went in with a reasonably strong idea of what the Wooden Man would look like — but McDonnell’s knack for rendering visually self-possessed creatures helped to hone the vision. For one thing, the designer cut away the leafy tendrils of McCarthy’s “Green Knight” and “Lord of the Rings” inspirations to instead expose those gorgeous, grooved ridges along the body and those five ominous holes drilled into the head. The lack of greenery would be easier for audiences to see, McDonnell argued, and in the context of the film’s clairvoyant protagonist Darcy (Carolyn Bracken), the more textural choice was an easy one for McCarthy to justify.

“Because she’s blind and all her abilities are in touch, it was better when we could really see the grooves and the lines of this thing,” the filmmaker said. “That was easily the biggest change we made.”

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To bring the Wooden Man to life, McDonnell created a wetsuit-like mold of the towering actor Ivan de Wergifosse and used it as the core for both the mannequin and the suit. The performer (whose very existence is something of a spoiler) stands roughly a foot taller than the 5’4” designer who ordered twice as many supplies as he thought he would need “just in case” — and, in the end, almost used them all.

“Ivan arrived into my studio and I go, ‘Oh my god, the size of this man,’” McDonnell said. “Which was brilliant for the character, absolutely brilliant for the character. But the size !”

With as many as four sculptors working at a time, it still took three days to complete the head and two more to finish the body. The suit and mannequin were mostly made from the same materials, with simple aluminum wire running throughout so the Wooden Man’s extremities and neck could be manipulated and bent. McDonnell camouflaged the suit’s back zipper and gloves within the lines of the bark he and McCarthy so painstakingly chose, and further extended the theme of blindness when the head piece demanded de Wergifosse’s eyes also be covered.

“Just in terms of the practicality, because of the nature of the costume, it had to be molded down over his face,” McCarthy said, likening the result to a worse-off Batman. The mouth area was painted out digitally in post, but per the filmmaker, “The poor guy was blind the whole day.”

The task of guiding an unseeing actor around set worried McCarthy at first, who pointed out, “The costume and mold are still only made of silicon and latex and you’re very nervous that they might rip.” But starting with their trip from Galway to Cork, the two pieces survived just fine. And as it turns out, needing to count the steps for de Wergifosse between takes made the Wooden Man no less intimidating on set.

“It was great when we finally got him in and seated him at the table,” McCarthy said. “The reaction from your crew is usually your first audience in some ways. Some of these people, they’ve been on a lot of sets and they go from one movie to the next and it can be easy to get jaded sometimes. But even to get a big reaction from them, that was really, really good and such a relief.”

Despite working in self-imposed silos, McCarthy and McDonnell managed to blend their respective artistry for a near-seamless effect on screen. The austere stone and metal space — which McCarthy selected with production designer Lauren Kelly to reflect the clinical character traits of psychiatrist Ted (Gwilym Lee) — make the warm tones of the Wooden Man pop. And abiding by the ol’ “Jaws”-inspired show-less-scare-more Spielberg rule, McCarthy successfully tricked audiences into seeing the suit and mannequin as one being.

“I’d love to actually have shot him standing up, but I was always worried because we’d be going from what’s essentially a large prop of just this mold that is seated for the whole film to the suit,” McCarthy said. “Even though it’s a perfect match, how would you cut that? So the whole idea became him standing off in a shadow and then him already having moved. It’s something like 45 seconds or whatever it is. It’s just these quick glimpses of him.”

Still not having seen the film or read the script, the first inkling McDonnell had that something big was happening with the Wooden Man came via social media. You can chock that up in part to the savvy PR folks at IFC Films, who have made micro performance art from staging the mannequin at film festivals across the globe. But even without the promise of a surprise photo-op, McDonnell saw “Oddity” going viral firsthand.

“What was mental was when I put the trailer on TikTok,” he said, “Oh my god, I have never seen such responses. It was instantly in the 70 thousands then just kept going up and up. People just love it. They love him!”

The designer and McCarthy already have plans for another project, but somehow still haven’t made the trek to meet in person. McDonnell finally saw “Oddity” at the 2024 Galway Film Fleadh (that’s Gaelic for “festival”) in mid-July and posted excitedly about witnessing the monstrosity he helped make. McCarthy wasn’t in Galway, instead promoting “Oddity” in South Korea for another of the duo’s miraculous missed connections.

“Paul is just very patient and super talented and, honestly, he saved us,” said McCarthy, who dreams of someday keeping the Wooden Man in his office. “When I come back, I’ll have to drive up the country and meet him.”

“Yes, it was a nightmare to get off the ground, but once we got it off the ground, we had fun,” McDonnell said. The Wooden Man creators stopped work every day around six and went swimming when they could, he said. “It was hard, but we had fun. For the next one, I only told Damian, ‘Can I have just a little bit more time?’”

An IFC Films release, “Oddity” hit theaters July 19, 2024. It’s expected on Shudder later this year.