SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains mild spoilers for the new Pixar movie Hoppers. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
The critically-acclaimed Hoppers features a number of moments that are memorable because of how funny and/or weird they are, but there is one particular moment that is extremely memorable because of how legitimately scary it is. In the third act, after Titus (Dave Franco) takes control of a robotic Mayor Jerry, and when the animals successfully tear his face off, the visage underneath is quite a horror. As it exists, it’s an image that will likely replay in more than a few nightmares, but as freaky as it is in the final cut, there was a different version that was actually way scarier and had to be changed.
When I went to see Hoppers late last month, the part in question here delivered vibes similar to the most notorious Judge Doom scenes from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and I opted to ask about it when I participated in the movie’s Los Angeles press day (as captured in the video up top). When I asked director Daniel Chong and producer Nicole Grindle about the scene and how it was approached, the former explained that an earlier version was shown during test screenings and proved to be far too effective. Chong told me,
I mean, you are right to point that out, and that was the shot – in that moment around there – were the moments when we did audience previews where we started to realize that kids were freaking out at that sequence.
In the scene in question, Titus and the animals are plotting a mission to “squish” humans and reorder the hierarchy of the world, but Mabel (Piper Curda), King George (Bobby Moynihan) and their allies work to try and stop him at a political rally. One of the steps in accomplishing the goal is showing the gathered crowd that Jerry is a robot, hence tearing off his face – but in an early cut, the moment of face removal wasn’t only scary because of what was underneath.
As the director explained, what gave the scene a little extra terror juice were the screams that Dave Franco recorded for the moment. Chong continued,
It's more or less the same. I would say one of the biggest changes we made… originally, when the mask was getting pulled off, we had Dave Franco scream in pain. Like it was painful for him, and I think the audiences realized like, 'Oh, that was too much.' So we just had him talk through it. Like, 'Oh, what are you doing? What are you doing?' And that I think solved the note.
I love how not only simple-yet-effective this fix is but also logical: Titus screaming in pain doesn’t really make sense given that he isn’t actually experiencing the physical sensation of having his face ripped off, so the scrambling language is both sillier and sensical.
The moment in the final cut is toned down, but make no mistake about Daniel Chong’s intentions: that scene is included because he wanted Hoppers to make that kind of special emotional impression (the same exact kind of emotional impression that Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit first made nearly 40 years ago. He concluded,
It doesn't take much to just kind of recalibrate it a little bit and make it a little more palpable. But I mean, part of it is I wanted it to be kind of freaky and a little bit kind of eerie. And to me, that's what makes the movie powerful, is that you feel those feelings.
Hoppers is only making its scary impression presently on the big screen (it just won the box office in its opening weekend), but I imagine that it’s going to be seared in the minds of a whole generation.
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