CRTs & Slurpees: The Making Of The Yellowjackets Opening Titles
The story behind the glitchy analog introduction to Showtime’s creepiest thriller.
It’s easy to take opening titles for granted. In the age of streaming, it’s more convenient than ever to just skip over them. But they hold an important role in the TV-watching experience: In the first moments of a marathon, the opening titles are a viewer’s first clue as to what’s coming ahead, even if it might take weeks before it pays off.
It’s hard to imagine a opening sequence that made a bigger splash than Yellowjackets’, a grungy, distorted camcorder sequence showing the characters before, during, and after the plane crash that changed their lives, all set to “No Return,” a face-melting punk song by Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think and Anna Waronker of That Dog.
The titles are the work of creative studio Digital Kitchen, which worked with the series’ showrunners to create a captivating, eerie, and ever-changing title sequence that required some surprisingly old-school techniques. Inverse spoke to the minds behind the titles about how they came to be, what was left on the cutting-room floor, and what could possibly come ahead.
Working Titles
In the world of opening titles, creative freedom varies. “Sometimes the showrunners have a very clear idea, and sometimes they’re just like, ‘Hey, read a script and see what you think,’” Digital Kitchen Executive Creative Director Mason Nicoll tells Inverse. “[Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson] were a little bit in between. They did have an idea, but they also wanted some other ideas and we usually go in with a handful.”
One of those boards was for something incredibly close to the finished product: a nostalgic montage of teenage joy in the ’90s, but chopped up and corrupted by distortion. “We did see the pilot, and they had already had some of the licensed ’90s tracks,” Nicoll says. “There’s these two timelines, and the one that takes place in ’96, we are going to lean into a lot of the vibes and nostalgia of the ’90s.”
But the ’90s covered a lot, so there needed to be some cultural touchpoint to drive the vision, and Digital Kitchen found that in a movie from the last gasps of that era: 1999 cult found-footage horror movie The Blair Witch Project. “It’s almost like a set of lost tapes, as if the girls started recording their lives leading up to Nationals, so a lot of just fun kind of crazy high jinks,” he says. “Then we bring in the darkness that they brought back from the forest that is almost like a ghost in the machine. It’s those layers of interlaced feedback in the tapes.”
Canonically, these characters weren’t able to take their own shaky-cam footage in the wilderness, but Shauna’s journals from her time in the forest are key plot point in both the ’96 and modern timelines of the show. These titles are like the visual version of that record, documenting what happened — and the darkness that creeps in at the edge.
The Road Not Taken
The rest of the “handful” of ideas brought into the pitch varied wildly. “We were really interested in potentially using lidar scans, almost like radar scans of a forest that give a really a ghostly image,” Nicoll says. “There was another one that we used collage cutups, almost like a scrapbook one of the girls had, and it was shards of images that started to overlap.”
One of the other contenders took a different aesthetic entirely, something more Over the Garden Wall than Riot Grrrl. “The idea that they first came to us with, which was pretty amazing, had to do with folk art and specifically Russian folk art from the ’20s. It was these fairy-tale-like folk art drawings of depictions of the forest as well as some of the characters,” Nicoll says.
The art for this concept still communicates the same message. We see a young girl walking down a suburban street, but the wilderness is still inside her, echoing how the survivors of the crash can’t escape what they did in the forest. However, the medium is completely different, looking more like paper cutout art than a video montage. The art may look like it belongs to a completely different show now, but that just proves how the final titles have become inextricably tied to what the name Yellowjackets evokes.
Field Work
The “slice of life” moments in the opening were shot using period-accurate camcorders.
Unlike an animated opening, the “found footage” title concept posed an issue: It required actual footage. Art director Rachel Brickel was tasked with shooting footage that could be believably from the tape stuck in Jackie’s or Nat’s camcorder found in the wreckage. “We were trying to create what everyday life was like for these characters before they got stranded in the wilderness,” she tells Inverse. “So we’re trying to show them having a good time, hanging out house partying, getting a Slurpee at the liquor store, doing everyday things where they didn’t have to worry about anything.”
While there are plenty of clips of the actual series used, the team used similar-looking actors for a fittingly analog filmmaking trick. “We started putting glass prisms in front of the camera to create these ghostlike effects and distort them just to show their psyche and how they were being affected by everything,” Brickel says. The result is a haunting image that is even creepier because you can’t see exactly who is supposed to be depicted.
Rachel Brickel using flashing lights and a glass prism to create a terrifying moment in the titles.
But even that wasn’t enough distortion. In order to get that “decaying VHS tape” feel, Brickel went right to the source: CRT TVs, the old “tube” TVs that ran rampant around the millennium. “We took that and piped that into a CRT setup with different channel mixing boxes where we took the signal and we flashed them into each other to create that illustrate that clash of psychosis,” Brickel says. “And then we put that into After Effects, and then we sliced it up even further.”
Devolution
However, as the story, central mystery, and cast change from season to season, so do the clips used in the montage. Because of Yellowjackets’ mystery-laden plot, the clips used in the opening become a treasure trove of what’s ahead for the characters, with fans picking them apart frame by frame looking for clues. It’s something that happened almost accidentally.
“We actually shot a lot that didn’t end up in the title but acted as a placeholder,” Nicoll says. “Once we got close to actually sending the final title for Season 1, we started integrating more of these Easter eggs of what’s to come in the actual season. It’s one of the unique times when a title takes on a different conceptual purpose after it’s released. This one became much more for the fans a bit after the fact.”
The rough cut of the original Season 1 titles.
Season 1 established the mood of the series and the characters, while Season 2 brought the harsh winter, so more snowy imagery was incorporated. Season 3, on the other hand, overcompensates. “It’s flipped,” Nicoll says. “It’s this almost like caustic blown-out sunlight with bits of surreal aspects.”
The other major change was removing images of characters who are no longer part of the show, like Juliette Lewis as Adult Natalie. However, there’s one big cameo that will never change: Ella Purnell’s Jackie in her soccer uniform, smirking at the camera. That moment never appears in the show — it was an outtake from Purnell herself, but Nicoll reassures that that iconic image will never change.
It’s a symbol of everything that’s great about the titles: They feel homemade, off-the-cuff, but equally incredibly polished and technically complex, full of nondescript images that may be incredibly laden with meaning.
“You can really see the heart of the fandom, and it's definitely served us with great joy to put these titles together because we’re making it for them as well as the showrunners,” Brickel says. “We’re making it for the fans too.”
