Witness the frightening effects of One Missed Call. All images courtesy of Zoic. © Warner Bros.

Horror fans will be glad to see that Warner Bros. is opening the New Year (on Jan. 4) with One Missed Call, an all-new version of the Japanese hit, Chakushin Ari. I hesitate to use the term remake because, according to vfx supervisors Randy Goux and Patty Gannon of Zoic, Vancouver, the filmmakers barely watched the original. "The director (Eric Valette) wanted to create his own vision," states Goux. "We knew the whole theme, but there was no plan to do a remake of Psycho kind of thing where they did a cut-by-cut remake. This was almost a new version, a completely new movie."

Although visual effects played a very important role in adding suspense and terror, it was not planned that way. "He (Valette) wanted to be very, very subtle about the effects," Goux explains. "He didn't want to overpower it with CG. He wanted to use the characters to build the suspense. But with that said there are some key moments where he needed visual effects to tell that story. In the climax is where we really kicked in, but all throughout the movie there were points where visual effects added to that just ever so slight creepy moment."

This particular production is an excellent example of how people sometimes have a distorted view of CG and visual effects -- even people in the industry. "The director wanted to play things very subtly, and his comfort level with CG was not real high," adds Gannon. "In his mind, if you do CG, it's going to look like CG. So, that's why he was really trying to go practical on a lot of this stuff."

For this reason, unlike many horror films, One Missed Call did not start out with an emphasis on visual effects, but by the time the film was ready for release, it certainly had more than its fair share.

Some of the face replacement work done on the production was to augment practical effects done on set.

"I think we started off with about 50 shots," notes Gannon, "and by the time we were done it was close to three hundred effects."

A subtle vision can work very well in certain films, but that is not always the case. Sometimes a story needs to have those graphic moments, especially a horror film.

"He (Valette) was very subtle with all of his stuff, so far as what he wanted to see, what he felt was eerie," Gannon explains. "But, when the movie was first cut after shooting, he decided that there just weren't enough scare moments. That's when the (vfx) shot count really ballooned. When they decided that perhaps the very subtle approach wasn't the correct approach or the approach they wanted to go for."

In this case, seeing was believing. "Once we showed him we could do this photo real, it helped him a lot with his comfort level, and the vfx just ballooned from there."

The visual effects team wound up enhancing many of the scenes in post-production to add bigger scares. They took what were subtle moments that lacked impact and made them more effective if not graphic with the use of CG.

"There is quite a bit of face prosthetics that we literally replaced to make it, more effective, more scary and more impactful," Goux maintains. "All of the stuff you see with the girl in the hoodie -- we call her Monster Ellie -- all that stuff you see, the intention was to shoot it with an actress that had pretty extensive face prosthetics, but it just didn't have the impact it needed. So, we ended up replacing it all with a CG face."

Visual effects were used during post-production to not only enhance scary moments but to hint of things to come as Goux relates.

"(Shannyn Sossamon) is running down an abandoned burned-out hospital. It's very dark and she hears this banging, and all of a sudden something is trying to break through a metal door, and you just see imprints of somebody's head. That's what's making the banging. So we'd do all sorts of subtle visual cues that there is something very evil coming your way."

And, when the evil finally arrived, visual effects were needed to heighten the moment.