spectres

His Dark Materials’ Spectres: ‘I Tried to Find a Way To Not Make Dementors’

When Philip Pullman magicked up Spectres on the pages of The Subtle Knife, he did it without giving a thought to the VFX artists of the future. If Pullman had considered the puzzle he was setting the people tasked with depicting creatures so diaphanous that “in some lights, they were hardly there at all,” he may have had a rethink. Instead, not knowing that his story would be turned first into a feature film and then a stunning TV adaptation, he described monsters that were “a rhythmic evanescence, like veils of transparency turning in a mirror.” Tricky. “In literary form, it’s…
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His Dark Materials: Spectres Explained

Warning: major spoilers for A Subtle Knife, book two in the His Dark Materials trilogy In His Dark Materials season two opener ‘The City of Magpies’, Lyra and Will find themselves in a new land. Cittàgazze is deserted but for a group of children left to fend for themselves after their parents came under attack. Some adults fled the city but others were caught by the Spectres, who drained them of the spark of life and turned them into blank-faced automatons, like the man Lyra and sees numbly and absently refilling a water jug in a city square. Spectres are invisible to children…
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