The Intense Way The Last Of Us Brought The Game's Grossest Infected To TV Screens

While HBO's "The Last of Us" has certainly done a good job adapting the game it is based on, and it has mostly gone in lockstep with the game in terms of the Infected it's shown so far. Be it Runners or Clickers, the show has done a great job at recreating the terrifying infected creatures featured in "The Last of Us." And the heartbreaking fifth episode of the series, "Endure and Survive," introduced the most terrifying of them all — the Bloater.

In addition to the gargantuan Bloater, "The Last of Us" also introduced a new variation of Infected not seen in the game, a child Clicker. The child Clicker was portrayed by a 9-year-old child actress who was also a contortionist. This allowed the Clicker to have even more inhuman and unsettling movements than previous versions of the Infected. The amount of practical effects used to create the horrifying creatures is impressive, too. While some shots of the Bloater were digitally altered, others were done practically via prosthetics and special techniques. But how does one recreate a Bloater in real life while making it look almost exactly as it did in the game?

When it came to recreating the Bloater — the largest enemy type in "The Last of Us" — the production team on the show had to find an actor big enough to convey the size of the Infected. In an interview with Variety, prosthetics designer Barrie Gower revealed that the show hired 6'6" British stuntman Adam Basil to play the Bloater shown in "Endure and Survive." Basil already had previous experience working with Gower on "Game of Thrones," and his physique made him a perfect fit for the larger than life creature.

In order to recreate a Bloater, Basil was outfitted with a massive body suit — using casts of his body to get the fit just right — that weighed nearly 90 lbs. And in order to make the suit's spiky features stand out during the nighttime shoot, the suit was covered in lubricant that gave it a more glossy, slick finish. "The suit would be very soft, but very slimy and wet," Gower told Variety. "We covered him in this gel-like solution, which gave him a gloss to all the fungus. We had lots of little spines and spiky hairs punched into his body, like little growths burrowing out." In addition to looking unsettlingly gloopy, the lubricant also reflected the limited light sources in an eerie way that made the scene even more creepy.

The end product is a terrifying sight. Not only is the Bloater in the show horrifyingly huge, it's also shown to be extremely powerful. The practical effects behind these intense monsters is technically impressive, and the end effect is just right.