
Warning: spoilers ahead for His Dark Materials season 3.
After the third season of His Dark Materials, the Land of the Dead is ruled by harpies, and the visual effects supervisor has revealed how they were designed.
Lyra ‘Silvertongue’ Belacqua (Dafne Keen) and Will Parry (Amir Wilson) go to the Land of the Dead in search of Lyra’s childhood best friend Roger Parslow (Lewin Lloyd), who was murdered by her father, Lord Asriel Belacqua, at the conclusion of season 1. (James McAvoy).
Upon arrival, they are met by horrific creatures known as harpies, which instil a sense of dread in the minds of the dead who are stranded in this bleak area reminiscent of purgatory.
In order to appease the harpies, Lyra has the dead in the Land of the Dead reminisce about their lives before they make their way to a window carved by Will, where they can finally rest in peace and disintegrate into atoms, rejoining the cosmos.
The TV show’s depiction of harpies is different from the mythological depiction of the creatures, in which they had the heads of women but turtle-like heads, scaly skin, eyes that can’t see, and raspy voices.
Framestore’s creative director of television, visual effects supervisor Russell Dodgson, elaborated on the team’s decision to depart from the traditional image of harpies as’shrieking ladies’ in the afterlife.
‘Harpies traditionally are shrieking, horrific women mixed with birds. I can’t remember who made the decision, I think it may have been the showrunning team. We just thought, why do we want to represent the tormentors of the underworld as shrieking women? That seems pretty dated as an idea,’ he said.
Outlining what they preferred to focus on when conceiving their design, he continued: ‘We wanted to lean into what’s important. What’s important about those characters is that they’re scary, grotesque, but you also slightly feel sorry for them because they’ve been given this job of tormenting people in the Land of the Dead, but really all they want is to hear true stories and to have these emotional connections to stories, which is a big part of the book.’
As a result, the harpies were designed to be visually impaired due to the presence of cataracts, making them appear “a bit vacant” to onlookers. However, when it came to listening to tales, the harpies were all ears.
‘We leant into that in the animation, because actually it’s about listening to stories,’ he shared.
‘They can’t really look at people but they use their ears a lot, their heads turn away as if they’re listening. We leant into the idea of what they are – they’re blind, but they want to hear. So that was a character trait that we looked into.’
Once they made the harpies look ‘a bit turtley’, they had to add another element so that they would look ‘a bit more disgusting’, which is why the harpies were covered in ‘horribly, flaky skin’.
‘There was this line that we had to keep trying to find where you felt sorry for them but also repulsed by them,’ Russell said.

The visual effects supervisor elaborated on the notion, which he and the production designer and executive producer Joel Collins came up with, by giving the harpies dialogue.
‘Something that I was quite strong on is because of the fact that they’ve been suppressing people communicating and talking to each other in the Land of the Dead. I wanted it to be that talking was really painful,’ he stated. ‘So we ended up with the voice actor having to have really, really hard vocal sessions where she’d have to drink a lot of honey and lemon, put it that way.
‘In the animation, we made it look really strained. So sometimes when the harpy speaks, it has to swallow in a painful way, as if words are a punishment when it speaks.’
Russell also took inspiration from nostalgic movies from the 80s, when the movements of fantastical creatures on screen would look ‘a little bit puppeteered’.
‘We added a little bit of eccentricity to their movements, so they weren’t totally perfect. It was nice to reminisce. Then the guys at Framestore just did an amazing job of making them so you could put the camera really close to them,’ he said.
His Dark Materials airs tonight at 7.10pm on BBC One, and is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.