How Basterds scalped

There might be some SPOILERS ahead for people who haven’t seen INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS so if you have yet to see the movie and you’re especially adverse to spoilers, you might want to move on (though in fairness, I don’t think this really spoils much of anything in the movie as it’s talked about in the commercials…”I want meh scalps!”).

There is some gruesome and brutal stuff to be sure in BASTERDS and one of those things is the scalping of the Nazis as ordered by Lt. Aldo Raine. The scalpings aren’t shied away from like the lopping off of an ear – here they are shown in graphic detail. So how did they do that? To make it look real, the Basterds have to appear as if they are really slicing the scalp off with their blade. So KNB made models of scalps and molded them to the heads of the actors. They were affixed to the actor’s heads and painted with UltraSlime, a product that describes itself as having a “super stringy consistency [that] simulates saliva and body secretions.”

The rest of the Basterds (minus Pitt) were then given a class on how to remove the scalp on film without ruining the prosthetic while making it look real. Sounds like just another day working on the set of a Tarantino movie!