An ode to ‘Dune’s sandworms, the coolest creatures you’ll see on screen this year

Just over an hour into Dune, something magical happens: We see our first sandworm.

A flash of its thick hide as it surfaces all-too-briefly. A shot of its toothy maw devouring a spice harvester whole. We don’t get the full worm just yet, but we don’t need to. What little we see tells us enough. This is a creature straight out of science-fiction legend, one so iconic to the Dune novels that messing it up would spell immediate failure for any adaptation.

Luckily, Dune director Denis Villeneuve’s version of Arrakis’ sandworms succeeds on all levels. He and his team have managed to create worms that are awe-inspiring and just the right amount of scary, with a distinctive look that sets them apart from previous iterations of the creature.

There isn’t a blueprint to creating the perfect sandworm. In Frank Herbert’s novel, the physical description of the beast is brief. He focuses instead on the worms’ impact on the environment: how they sound moving through the sand, how their movement affects the landscape, how the people of Arrakis react and adapt to their approach. What little we get of their appearance is still plenty evocative, but there’s a lot of room for interpretation:

A silver-gray curve breached from the desert… It lifted higher, resolved into a giant, questing mouth. It was a round, black hole with edges glistening in the moonlight.

One such interpretation was that of director David Lynch, who, like Villeneuve, had the monstrous task of translating Dune (and its sandworms) to the screen. Lynch’s 1984 film was a critical and commercial failure. But I’ve got to give credit where credit is due: His sandworms are awesome.

Lynch’s worms have the key feature of a tripartite mouth, something they share with artist John Schoenherr’s iconic Dune illustrations, which Herbert endorsed as “perfect.” Lynch also included the lightning that signals a sandworm’s impending breach in his film, something which Villeneuve left out (or is perhaps saving for Dune: Part Two).

A number of other sandworms have graced the screen, with films like Beetlejuice, Tremors, and even Star Wars getting in on the desert monster action. With so many different versions already out there, Villeneuve and his team had to work hard to create something different that still felt like it belonged to the world of Dune.

Denis Villeneuve’s version of Arrakis’ sandworms succeeds on all levels.

Villeneuve did not take the process of designing the sandworms lightly. In an interview with Empire Magazine, he revealed that perfecting the shape and look of Dune‘s worm took a year.

The result is something Villeneuve describes as “prehistoric”: Skin thick enough to survive the harsh elements of the desert, the giant “questing mouth” of Herbert’s work, and the long crystalline teeth that the Fremen use to make their crysknives. According to production designer Patrice Vermette, the teeth were inspired by whale baleen — think filtration devices instead of terrifying chompers.

Look upon the worm, Timmy.
Credit: Chia Bella James

Despite the familiar elements of the design — we all know what whales and worms look like — Dune‘s sandworm still looks completely, awesomely alien. In particular, I love how the ring of teeth comes to resemble the iris of an eye. Dune concerns itself with ideas and imagery of sight, from the Fremen’s blue eyes to Paul’s visions of the future. So, to see that reflected visually in one of the film’s most iconic images is a reminder of just how much thought went into the making of this world.

That’s another thing I love about the sandworms, and about Dune in general: how real it feels. This may be a movie featuring space drugs, human computes, and a man named Duncan Idaho, but gosh darn it everything feels grounded and lived in.

Even the 400 meter-long worms.

To make those worms seem as real as possible, Dune‘s visual effects and sound design teams had to take some unique approaches to their work.

For visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert, that meant making his green screens brown in order to match the colors of the deserts where Dune was shot. This “sandscreen” technology, described in WIRED, allowed even the biggest special effects-heavy shots, like those featuring the sandworms, to look more natural.

Lambert also had to figure out how to capture the worms’ displacement of sand in their native desert. He created a simulation based on the movement of water — when a sandworm comes to the surface, it’s hard not to think of a whale breaching.

But those scenes when the sand is trembling and the characters are sinking? That’s all real. Villeneuve told Guillermo del Toro in a conversation for Interview Magazine that those scenes were the result of vibrating plates under the sand. The practical effect, and actually seeing the effect of the worm’s passage on the characters and the landscape, lends even more texture to Arrakis and the mystery of the worm.

This may be a movie featuring space drugs, human computes, and a man named Duncan Idaho, but gosh darn it everything feels so grounded and lived in.

On the audio end of things, sound team Mark Mangini and Theo Green told WIRED that they strived for a sense of fake documentary realism. To get the sound of the worm’s approach right, they recorded audio of moving sand in Death Valley, the moving of tree bark, vines, and animals to create a natural soundscape that would fit in with the environment of Arrakis. Mangini even put a whole microphone in his mouth to produce the sound of the sandworm sucking down a spice harvester.

For all the effort put into getting the worms just right, we still don’t see too much of them that they stop being astounding. This was a deliberate choice by Villeneuve, who shot the scene of the worm devouring a spice harvester from a distance. He told del Toro that:

It’s more frightening to be far away. The feeling that the thing will get closer to you, but for now it’s far away. To create the effect of distance with the monster coming towards you is something I was obsessed with.

That philosophy reminds me of the shark in Jaws: We don’t see the monster right away, so our anticipation and excitement increase over time until it reaches a fever pitch. I spent the entirety of the spice harvester sequence leaning forward in my seat, just waiting for the moment when the worm would finally reveal itself. When it did, it was well worth the wait: epic, ancient, and the perfect amount of weird.

What I appreciate the most about how Villeneuve and his team brought Herbert’s sandworms to life is their understanding of the worms’ importance to Dune, beyond just being big cool worms. Early on in the movie, we see a massive mural of a sandworm in the palace in Arrakeen, where the worm’s mouth resembles the sun.

It’s a quick detail, but it establishes the worms’ cultural significance to the people of Arrakis. Vermette told Esquire: “The locals, they respect these worms. Yes, it’s a dangerous animal, but they see it as the one that you should respect, the most powerful thing on Arrakis.”

Similarly, Mangini recalled to WIRED how Villeneuve wanted the worms to create more of a sense of reverence than a sense of fear, describing them as being “more god than Godzilla.” An appropriate description, considering how the Fremen view the sandworms as manifestations of the divine.

Honestly, after seeing the movie, I can understand why.

Dune is now in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.