Last Updated on August 26, 2025 by FANGORIA Staff
Anyone who's ever seen The Babadook knows that monsters being used as metaphors is nothing new for the horror genre. From Guillermo del Toro openly admitting that he identifies with his monsters as an outsider who feels rejected by society to Katharine Isabelle embracing her feminine wiles with her werewolf transformation in the early aughts cult classic Ginger Snaps, the concept of confronting our own personal demons is often a multifaceted experience.
Even in Peter Benchley's original 1974 novel Jaws, which was soon thereafter adapted into Steven Spielberg's iconic summer blockbuster, the shark was originally intended to symbolize the issues in Chief Brody's marriage bubbling to the surface, forcing him to face down the quarrels he had submerged deep within the ocean of his own heart. Yet given the many iterations of this idea, there's something special about Spider One's Little Bites, a movie that continues to play on the idea of battling barbarians, literally and figuratively, but in an entirely new way that feels fresh and authentic.
In the film, a desperate mother named Mindy Vogel, played by genre favorite Krsy Fox, enters into a Faustian Bargain with Jon Sklaroff's monster Agyar in order to protect her young daughter Alice (Elizabeth Phoenix Caro) from the entity's ravenous ways. Stationed in her dark, dreary basement, every time Agyar rings the dinner bell, Mindy must descend the steps into her very own nightmare, and allow the unclean thing to slowly eat her alive, one little bite at a time.
Using his movie as a vehicle to explore his monstrous musings, the director understands the importance of enlisting a visionary who can take his creature to the next level. That's why when it came time to hire the person who would create what is arguably the most vital component of his conception, the creature Agyar's teeth, he brought one of the best artists currently working in the industry aboard his latest endeavor, none other than special makeup and effects artist Ken Calhoun.
“I'd done a fake head for him before for Bury the Bride,” Calhoun tells me about his introduction to director Spider One. “I love working with him. He's really easy to work with, a super cool, chill guy. He made it very easy, because he let me do what I wanted to do, and he would just lead the way.” Whereas some directors might have trouble compromising, Calhoun found that working on Little Bites was first and foremost all about teamwork.
“It was really fun, because sometimes a director will come to you with a very distinct idea in their head of what they want something to look like, and if you can't give them that exact thing, they can get frustrated with you. They're so in love with their idea, they don't wanna change it. Spider was very much the opposite”.
Leading lady Fox, the multifaceted performer who worked as an actor, producer and editor on the film, also played a large part in the brainstorming of their creature. “Krsy was really collaborative, too,” says Calhoun. “She gave her input on the teeth and what she thought they should look like, underdeveloped and gross, not necessarily sharp teeth. I was envisioning really sharp, long, straight teeth, and Krsy gave her input, so they were both very involved in the design of the creature”.
In order to agree on a starting point, Calhoun would quickly sculpt what he calls “clay sketches,” which entails a rough blocking out of shapes, this time being of a set of jaws, which he sculpts in about a minute's time in clay, then snaps photos of said sculpture, and sends them to the director for approval. Based on Spider's notes, Calhoun would then make slight adjustments to his “sketches,” resculpting them ever so slightly each time, according to the director's preferences. Then he would snap more photos, and the process would continue until they eventually found common ground.
“My original design looked like shark teeth, because I thought they would look scary if it was more animalistic,” remembers Calhoun. “I think it was one row, and then a smaller row that was on top of it. Spider's like, ‘Ah, that looks a little too shark-y, because his whole thing is that he has to talk, so it can't be too big, where it's going to take away from his performance.' So, the teeth have to be low, as far as relief goes. They have to be small enough that he can articulate, because he has a lot of dialogue”.
Adds Calhoun, “Agyar talks a lot in the movie, so they couldn't be giant monster teeth. They have to look like they could do enough damage to actually warrant it, but the movie's called Little Bites, so if he has razor-sharp teeth, it wouldn't make sense to take these giant chunks out. I think I did about three clay sketches, and then he liked the last one, where they were tiny, almost like baby teeth. They were sharp and slightly ingrown, and he had a little snaggle tooth. That's what Spider ended up gravitating to, that was it”.
Calhoun's work has appeared in a slew of massive projects, including Dune: Part One, Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, Terminator Genisys, David Bruckner's Hellraiser, VH/S/85, V/H/S/99, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and more. He's a regular teacher at Stan Winston's virtual School of Character Arts, and he's even lent his expertise in special effects on productions like del Toro's The Shape of Water and Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant under the banner of Legacy Effects. Still, even with his staggering resume, Little Bites marks the artist's first time ever making his own set of teeth.
“I literally cut my teeth on Little Bites, making teeth,” Calhoun grins. “That was a learning experience for me. I'd done a bunch of white teeth casts before, but I'd never actually made the teeth myself. Spider liked the design, and it held up throughout the entirety of the shoot, so I was proud of myself for accomplishing that for my first time”. The artist laughs, “I didn't tell Spider that I never made teeth before. I was just like, ‘Yeah, for sure, I can do that'. Then I'm like, okay, I can figure this out. I can do this”.
When it came to the making of the creature Agyar's teeth, Calhoun admits that he went a little old school.
“We did a dental alginate the same way that a dentist would do it,” explains Calhoun about his process, “To take a cast of your teeth, to make you a veneer or something like that. We used alginate, which is derived from seaweed, and put that in a little tray, and shoved it in [Sklaroff's] mouth. It sets up in about five minutes, then we pull it out and we fill that with dental stone. I make my positives from the dental stone, and then I do my sculptures on top of that”.
According to Calhoun, what a lot of people don't realize is that wearing fake teeth affects your speech. “Your tongue is used to moving in your mouth in a certain way, so when you put something in it, especially where your tongue hits the top part of your mouth, it makes you sound funny, and causes lisps and things like that.”
To help deter any oncoming speech impediment, Calhoun made Sklaroff practice speaking with the fake teeth in his mouth, having the actor engage in exercises like reciting the alphabet and attempting to say words with lots of syllables, like “Los Angeles.” Based on the actor's level of difficulty speaking, Calhoun would have the actor take the teeth out, make little tweaks to the canines, then have the actor put the teeth back in, listen to his speech again, and repeat the process until together, they reached a mode of speaking that pleased everyone involved.
“It's a fine line because the teeth are made out of acrylic, which is very fragile,” relays Calhoun. “If you grind it down too much, it could break the teeth. You could spend half an hour doing it, okay, it's almost there! It's almost there! And then you grind it down too much, and it breaks. Then, you have to start all over again”.
Aware that other artists might have chosen a different path, Calhoun defends his '80s style, “old school Tom Savini way” of making chompers. “I'm sure that for other artists, if I described how I made the teeth, they'd just be like, ‘Oh, well, that seems kind of amateur'. I'm like, ‘Yeah, it is, because I didn't know what I was doing. But you know what? It worked, and I'm proud of myself for doing it.' Regardless of if it's the most complicated thing in the world or not, sometimes simple is the best answer. I like simple things. Simple things don't break”.
Although making the teeth proved to be a bit of a challenge, Calhoun was delighted to learn that his creativity inspired Sklaroff's performance in more ways than one.
“When we did the initial test makeup at Spider's house, we put the teeth in and everything, and the voice that [Sklaroff] did was a different accent, almost Hungarian, I think,” Calhoun recalls. “It wasn't English like it is in the movie. When we actually started filming the first day, he was very grateful that I gave him the teeth to practice with, because the teeth informed where his tongue should go, and what he thought the character should sound like.
He changed it to more of an aristocratic way of speaking, because that's what the teeth basically told him that he needed to do in order for him to sound like he wanted the creature to sound. So, it was cool that he had this idea, put the teeth in his mouth, and then the makeup informed his performance. The teeth inform how this creature talks.”
Apparently, the cast and crew of Little Bites are just as enthused about Calhoun's work as he is, because a handful of them took home sets of the artist's gnashers as souvenirs.
“I made four pairs, and we only ended up using one on set,” says Calhoun. “The actor took really good care of the teeth. On the last day, they finally broke, but only because he had to bite Krsy. He had actually bitten so hard that it cracked through the teeth, but by that point we didn't need them anymore.” Calhoun smiles with his own set of sterling ivories as he reminisces. “I gave Krsy and Spider the other two unused pairs, and they have them at home.”
Little Bites is streaming on Shudder February 21. For more, check out our list of the best horror movies streaming on Shudder this month.
