In a show packed with hot, young stars, no character has been more buzzed about this season on Riverdale than the surprisingly well-preserved corpse of Cheryl Blossom’s (Madelaine Petsch) brother, Jason Blossom (Trevor Stines). The inanimate, bloated body has been living with Cheryl and, uh, talking to her — sort of — since she was drugged by a cult last season. But as I discovered when I hopped on the phone with Sandra Lindala and Emersen Ziffle of Lindala Schminken FX, who built the Jason dummy, this is actually the same exact body that showed up in the very first episode.

“Season One, that was the pilot, when we first found him in the water,” Lindala said. “And then basically the same body has been repurposed throughout the various seasons.”

Back when The CW’s hit show first debuted, the sleepy town of Riverdale was rocked by the shocking murder of their beloved son, Jason Blossom. Though the mystery went through many twists and turns throughout the years, it started with the discovery of Jason’s body in the Sweetwater River with a bullet wound in his forehead. In order to create the dummy, Lindala and company — a team of approximately 20 to 24 people who handle every aspect of bringing a body like Jason to “life” — first life-cast the actor playing him, Trevor Stines. That involved creating a duplicate head with a sculpted bullet wound, and exit wound on the other side of his head. In addition, they realized that having soaked in the Sweetwater so long would create a little bit of bloat; meaning the silicone model was puffier than the chiseled Stines is in real life.

To make things even creepier, the FX team left the Jason body’s eyes and mouth open, then, “we steam it, paint it, hair punch each individual hair in the eyebrows, lashes, everything is individually hair punched, we had to put in the eyes — glass eyes — to match. Everything has to be identical to him.”

There was one part of Jason that wasn’t based on Stines, though: his hair. Since Stines’ hair was colored in the show to match Petsch’s shade, the wig added to Jason’s body was also dyed to copy that color. The wig itself is made of human hair, which is punched into the head and then glued down, allowing characters like Cheryl to brush his hair without fear of ripping any out. “It would take just as much effort to pull hair out of your own head as it would out of the body,” noted Ziffle.

Through the first three seasons, Jason’s body has popped up, but only sporadically, and never as a featured player in the action. Usually he’ll be seen glimpsed in the water, on a morticians table, or in a brief shot propped up in a wheelchair. More often, the series has brought in the actual Stines to play a living or dream version of Jason; though as of yet, neither Stines nor his inanimate double have uttered an actual line of dialogue on the series. Therefore the only big change from the FX team until Season 4, other than some general clean-up, has been switching Jason’s hands. Really.

“The bloated hands, distortion that we saw in the water, wouldn’t look good on camera,” Lindala said, “so we actually had to run new hands that matched his and detach the old ones, attach the new ones. And since then he’s played like that.”

As mentioned, at the end of Season 3 Cheryl was tricked into conversing with the body of her corpse (don’t worry about it too much, it’s complicated), and made the relatively spontaneous decision to bring said corpse home in the season finale. In Season 4, Cheryl has been hiding the corpse in her house’s chapel, as well as dealing with a haunted doll and other, assorted gothic freak show type plotlines. But because of the increased use of the dummy, additional changes needed to be made. Specifically, Jason Blossom’s corpse had to get a hot, new makeover.

First, since Cheryl was taking care of him, the dummy was cleaned up, given a new wardrobe and as — according to Lindala — “silicone acts like skin,” they added makeup as if Cheryl had actually put it on her brother’s corpse, or she would put “on him like a doll.” Oh, and one more change: since this Jason dummy was initially discovered in Season 3 with his mouth sewn shut, the FX team had to create an entirely new head.

In fact, this wasn’t the only head that needed to be created… Fans have noticed that this version of Jason doesn’t seem to have a bullet hole in his forehead. That’s at least partially because, according to Lindala, Cheryl stitched his forehead and the exit wound shut. However, since gluing a hole in a silicone head shut would “look awful,” they instead created an entirely new head for the body, transferred over the original wig, and gave the head a new paint job to match.

There’s also the matter of having “Jason” sitting up in a wheelchair, lying on the floor, and generally moving a lot more than one might expect a corpse to move on an episodic basis. Luckily, that wasn’t a big issue for the team as the body was built with a skeletal wiring structure in the arms, legs and torso. “We can actually hinge them and pose them into whatever pose you want it to, whether it’s sitting or crossing its legs,” Lindala said.

Ziffle chimed in on this, noting that there was one other change from Season 1 Jason, to Season 4 Jason: removing the weights inside of him. “For the first season because he had to be submerged, oftentimes we have to weight those bodies,” Ziffle said, “and also create a porous substructure that still represents the body, but can float and take on water.”

After removing the weight, they added back in the poseability to the body and aimed to make it as “multi-functional” as possible. “From what we’ve heard from what’s happened on set, it’s worked quite well,” Ziffle added. “He’s a bit of a … Swiss army knife style body that just sort of does what it needs to do as far as poseability and functioning on set.”

That’s all fine and good, but what about when a rat needs to crawl out of the body? That’s exactly what happened during “Dog Day Afternoon,” and if you thought they faked that shot? Nope, an actual rat crawled through Jason’s body.

“There was the animal wrangler, he said ‘Here is the compartment that a rat will travel through, can you fit this into your torso?’ and then we had to retrofit that to accommodate that,” Ziffle recalled.

In order to accomplish the effect, the team had a tube running through the back of Jason’s chair, through his torso and out of his chest. Then the animal trainer would click a button to cue the rat, who would run through Jason’s body and fall out of the front.

“We did tests with the rats crawling through his chest and then tumbling out,” Lindala said.

“Afterwards we would reset that hole so that there wasn’t any sort of depression or a shape that would augment the surface texture of him at all,” added Ziffle.

Another challenge? In order to continue pretending her brother is “alive,” Cheryl keeps dressing him up in different outfits. As it turns out, every new outfit presents its own challenge. Jason’s arms and legs do come off in order to get him dressed; but when it comes to the silicone material, it actually “grips the fabric like crazy,” meaning they need to bag each limb in order to actually get the clothes on the body. And while button-up shirts are “like heaven,” every time the costume department puts Jason in a tight turtleneck, it becomes a bit of a nightmare.

“Dressing a mannequin is not fun,” noted Ziffle.

…Which all seems relatively realistic — and the team has created extremely realistic corpses throughout the years on various projects — but there is one big question about Jason’s corpse: why isn’t he more decomposed? After soaking in the river and actually getting buried, as well as sitting in the almost definitely unseasonably warm Blossom household, there’s no reason Jason should look puffy, but otherwise well preserved. Even with Riverdale‘s extremely variable timeline, at least two to three years have passed since he died. So shouldn’t he look a little less late career Hollywood star, and a little more Walking Dead?

“That’s TV, that’s Riverdale being Riverdale,” Lindala said, laughing. “After that many years, he should be rotting, decomposing, smelling. But yeah, it’s Riverdale. No offense to Riverdale, it’s just TV, we run into it all the time for other shows, where if somebody’s been dead they should be decomposed after this amount of time… But you can write whatever you want… Cheryl’s family is rich, who knows, he might be preserved somehow.”

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.

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