to this day, the scariest part out of any of the lord of the rings movie still is that fucking nightmarish face that bilbo made when he tried to take the one ring back from frodo
Oh my gosh, the day I spent watching Lord of the Rings with commentary is finally paying off, because the Bilbo nightmare face is the center of why I love Fellowship a little more than the other movies.
So before Lord of the Rings became the CGI carpet bombing that we all know and love (see Legolas elephant surfing), the first movie was obsessed with practical effects to an unsettling degree. Perspective tricks (when Gandalf and Bilbo have tea they’re actually at two separate tables with the camera at an angle to make it look like one table - at one point Ian McKellen bumps his side of the table with his knee and only his side of the table wobbles), miniatures, makeup artistry, the works.
But the Bilbo nightmare face is maybe the best of it all. Because it wasn’t CGI. It wasn’t makeup artistry. It wasn’t even a mask.
They built a life-sized Ian Holm model, gave it a nightmare face, dressed it in the Bilbo costume, and put it in the shot for exactly a half second. There’s pictures (I can’t find them now, but I know they exist) of Ian Holm standing next to the model, and its uncanny insofar as it’s extremely unsettling but you can’t tell why.
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