Trivia
There are 450 special effects in Phenomena.In the scene where Jennifer is being tormented by her fellow classmates, which causes her insect friends to swarm around the school, they used an optical illusion. They filmed the regular school, then they took a kilo of coffee grains, poured them into a tank of water, filmed it, then projected the image onto the school, to make it look like a swarm of flies were surrounding the school.
The mutant child killer towards the conclusion of the film was played by a child actor, but due to circumstances, a midget actor had to play the killer when he was attacking Jennifer and being eaten alive by the flies..Dario Argento, director of Phenomena, uses his hands for the killers' in all of his films.Dario Argento based the concept of insects detecting dead corpses by a story he read in the news.Dario Argento reveals the eye of the killer in almost all of his films.
In the scene, where Jennifer is introduced, and a bee flies in, they attached a string to the bee to move it around, while they were in some built-on contraption on top of the car.
They did not use real maggots for the scene where Jennifer is hurled into the pool of decaying bodies. Instead, they used some other substances to make it look similar to live maggots. Other shots, including closeups of maggots crawling around on bones, were probably filmed separately.
A mechanical hand was made for the scene where the female tourist has a pair of scissors jammed into her hand. Someone used their hand to move around the fingers of the hand with a special device.
If you look closely when you watch Dario Argento's World of Horror, you can tell that it's a body double when Jennifer is plunged into the pool of maggots and decaying bodies. I'm not sure, but I think it was a body double.The midget actor wore a mask for the mutant killer child. The mask was also mechanical, or either they used another one as well.Phenomena was shot in English and dubbed Italian.Daria Nicolodi, Dario Argento's former partner, plays the mother of the mutant child killer.This was Jennifer Connelly's second film role, after Once Upon a Time in America.This was Inga's, John McGreggor's chimpanzee, who's real-life name is Tanga, only film appearance.The midget actor who played the mutant killer child went on to star in a commercial, and land an appearance in Demons 2 (A.K.A. Demoni 2).
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