These 5 Movie Monsters Were Basically Built In A Garage — And They're Still Terrifying Us Decades Later

Chewbacca Is Wearing An Actual Yak. We're Not Kidding.

Stuart Freeborn, the makeup legend who'd already sculpted the apes for 2001: A Space Odyssey, built Chewbacca's suit for the original trilogy out of real yak hair, rabbit hair, and mohair, knitted onto a foam latex mask cast from Peter Mayhew's own face. Lucas reportedly wanted the design to feel like "a combination of a monkey, a dog, and a cat," which is exactly the energy this fur delivers.

The Xenomorph Was Built With Real Bones And A Chopped-Up Rolls-Royce

H.R. Giger's nightmare fuel wasn't just concept art — his crew sculpted the alien over a body cast using plasticine, real rib bones, snake vertebrae, and literal parts from an old Rolls-Royce, fused into his signature "biomechanical" style. Special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi then built the animatronic head with 900 moving parts, adding pieces of a human skull for good measure, before towering performer Bolaji Badejo squeezed into the finished latex suit.

Darth Vader's Helmet Is Literally A Nazi Combat Helmet In Disguise

Concept artist Ralph McQuarrie first imagined Vader as a samurai-meets-Bedouin figure, but when military-uniform expert John Mollo joined the team in 1976, he saw something else entirely: the shape of a German Stahlhelm and a WWI-era gas mask. Mollo built the final look from a black motorcycle suit, that Nazi-style helmet silhouette, a gas mask, and a monk's cloak pulled from the costume department's Middle Ages bin — then molded the actual helmet in fiberglass off a life-cast of actor David Prowse's head.

The Gremlins Took Seven Months To Build Out Of Foam Latex And Pure Chaos

Creature designer Chris Walas spent seven months in preproduction hand-building the Mogwai and Gremlin puppets out of foam latex and cable-rigged mechanisms, eventually producing over 100 distinct puppets for the film. Stripe and the rest of the gang were mostly simple, enjoyable hand puppets, while tiny Gizmo needed far more delicate animatronics just to get his face to work at that small scale.

The Predator You Know Was A Total Do-Over, Built In Just Six Weeks

The original Predator suit was such a disaster on set — Schwarzenegger described it as having "the body of a lizard and the head of a duck" — that the studio scrapped it entirely and called in Stan Winston, who was reportedly paid $1.5 million to design a brand-new creature from scratch. Winston's team pulled inspiration from African tribesmen, Celtic warriors, fish, bats, and locusts, building a suit with a servo-driven animatronic head containing nine motors so star Kevin Peter Hall could move the mandibles himself.