How HBO Made Sure To Get The Clickers To Look Perfect In The Last Of Us

The hierarchy of the infected in The Last of Us contains several threats to Joel and Ellie on their journey throughout the game and now the HBO adaptation. In this week's episode, we meet the second stage of infection with clickers.

They are called such for the noise that they use almost like echolocation. As we learned in Episode 2, they can't see due to the hardened fungus over their eyes, but they can hear you, so in the game, dealing with them involves plenty of stealth and shivs to take them down quietly. We got our first quick look at clickers in the first trailer for the series, and fans praised the screen accuracy of the prosthetics.

"To present the clickers on screen correctly, my feeling was we had to make 5,000 decisions exactly right," explained showrunner Craig Mazin. "We brought Barrie Gower in...who had worked on our prosthetics on Chernobyl. He's the best."

Gower said that with initial talks with Druckmann and Mazin, he went through a lot of preliminary art for the clickers, as well as the rest of the infected, and used that as their first step in adapting the look of them for the show.

"Even though we were creating new, refreshed versions on the same brief, we kept going back to the original designs that Neil and his team created for the game," Gower stated in the behind-the-scenes look.

It's interesting to note that when Gower is being interviewed, we can clearly see a maquette statue of another kind of infected, the bloater. Bloaters are at the top of the hierarchy, and also the rarest, and most dangerous stage of the infected in both The Last of Us games. They take years to develop and only reach this stage after years of exposure to fungal brain infection. They're difficult to kill, but also like clickers, can only hear their prey using echolocation.

New episodes of HBO's The Last of Us hit the streaming service Sundays at 9PM EST.