Matt Damon explained how The Odyssey’s terrifying Underworld scene was filmed, and it’s insane

Christopher Nolan has never been one to rely on CGI if there’s another way to pull something off, and Matt Damon has now revealed the lengths the director went to for one of The Odyssey‘s most unsettling scenes.

While appearing on The Tonight Show, Damon shared how Nolan created the eerie Underworld sequence, where Odysseus comes face-to-face with an army of ghostly figures emerging from a sea of black sand.

If you assumed the entire thing was created with visual effects, you’d be wrong.

The sequence was filmed on location in Iceland, which doubled as the land of the dead, and Nolan opted for an incredibly practical approach. Instead of adding the ghosts in later with CGI, the production literally buried dozens of stunt performers beneath the sand, with only snorkels allowing them to breathe before rising up on cue.

“They had snorkels, they were stunt people, and when we did that shot, obviously safety is the first thing,” Damon explained. “So the stunt people were buried, and everyone had a safety person on them.”

As terrifying as it sounds, the production had plenty of precautions in place.

“They set a timer from when the first person got covered just in case the snorkel didn’t work,” Damon continued. “They all worked fine, but it was a redundancy to make sure everyone was okay, and just in case someone couldn’t come out.”

Thankfully, everything went exactly to plan, and the finished scene is about as creepy as you’d expect.

“And then we shot that, and so when you see these shades, they’re ghosts, basically, rising up out of the black sand, they were really buried,” Damon revealed.

It’s safe to say most people had no idea one of the film’s creepiest moments involved stunt performers lying underneath piles of black sand with nothing but snorkels keeping them breathing. Honestly, knowing how it was filmed somehow makes the scene even scarier.

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Featured image credit: Universal