This Stop-Motion Hairy Leg Could Help Decide The 2026 International Feature Oscar Race

Lurking under cover of darkness before attacking its unsuspecting victims, the Hairy Leg, a disembodied and decaying limb, is the wonderfully bizarre protagonist of one of the most memorable sequences in the Oscar-nominated Brazilian historical thriller The Secret Agent.

Like the rest of the film, set in the 1970s during Brazil’s military dictatorship, the presence of the Hairy Leg holds political significance. Specific to director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s hometown of Recife, the urban legend of the Hairy Leg was developed by Raimundo Carrero, a local journalist and writer. This macabre entity served as code to bypass censorship in the media at the time, acting as a stand-in for the oppressive military police.

Instead of writing articles that could get him in trouble if published as entirely factual narratives, Carrero wrote about the events with the Hairy Leg as the perpetrator, benefiting from “the climate of irreverence and transgression in Recife,” according to Mendonça Filho. In addition to the printed newspaper stories about the Hairy Leg, a second journalist, Jota Ferreira, created radio pieces with sound effects about the evil extremity.

“It became a phenomenon because it caught people’s imagination,” Mendonça Filho added during an interview in Los Angeles. “I was a little kid who was afraid of the Hairy Leg.”

In the film’s passage, the director features the Hairy Leg attacking people at a park late at night, a place where gay individuals and sex workers would gather. Those groups were indeed targeted during the dictatorship. As the action unfolds, one of the film’s characters, an Angolan refugee named Tereza Victória (Isabél Zuaa), narrates while reading from a newspaper. The sequence has the feel of a delightfully salacious B-movie, and it borrows its soundtrack from the 1962 Mexican horror film The Witch’s Mirror (El espejo de la bruja).

But how did the Hairy Leg come to life on screen? That’s where animation enters the picture. “Once I wrote it into the script, of course, I began to wonder, ‘How am I going to do this?’” said Mendonça Filho. Initially, they tried shooting the scene with an actor wearing a green suit with only one leg uncovered, but the results were disappointing.

“It was terrible because it looked exactly like what it was,” he says. “Your brain can recognize that this is a real leg, which probably belongs to a real person. We can’t see the person because of the green suit, but it simply didn’t work. It had to be faster and more rebellious and stranger and more fantastical.”

People in the production suggested animating the Hairy Leg using 3D CG animation, but Mendonça Filho didn’t want the visual smoothness of that option. “I wanted the movement and the feel of stop motion, which is more mechanical and more physical,” he explained.

“When we had the human leg, it would just be very boring. I really wanted the leg to zigzag, to be unpredictable and a little bit like the Tasmanian devil,” Mendonça Filho said. For that erratic quality to exist, he thinks the audience must believe this is an autonomous limb that is not carrying the weight of the rest of the body it was once attached to. “It has to look independent. It has to look like it’s out of control,” the director added with a laugh.

Since The Secret Agent is a co-production with the Netherlands, France, and Germany, Mendonça Filho and his team eventually enlisted the Dutch studio Holy Motion.

Mascha Halberstad, founder of Holy Motion and director of the stop-motion feature Oink, recalls watching the reference material Mendonça Filho sent and discovering for the first time the context of the sequence involving the Hairy Leg. “It was very funny because in the script you don’t read that it’s a cruising park, so when we first got the material, I watched it with my son and it was very explicit,” she said via email.

The Holy Motion team, based in the city of Arnhem, received the life-size prop version of the decomposing leg that Mendonça Filho had used for another scene in which the limb is found in the belly of a shark. “It’s a pretty gross leg and it was here for about two months,” said Halberstad.

Based on that prop, SFX propmaker Rolf te Booij crafted a puppet version of the leg, measuring about 30 centimeters (around 12 inches). Its skeleton, which made it possible for its toes to move separately, was created by another multifaceted artist on the team, Peter Mansfelt, who also served as the stop-motion sequence’s director of photography.

Over three weeks, animator Rosanne Janssens animated the Hairy Leg against a green screen using Dragonframe, a software program for stop-motion animation. Given that this amputated body part is a unique figure, the team relied heavily on Mendonça Filho’s direction.

“The leg is a character, but it doesn’t have facial expressions. Kleber was very particular about the way it had to move,” said Halberstad. “At a certain point he sent us a clip of his hand holding one of his son’s toy dinosaurs and making movements so we could see how he wanted the leg to hop. Because the leg had to hop, of course.”

Back in Brazil, Mendonça Filho had shot the plates for the sequence, onto which the stop-motion Hairy Leg was later composited. The live-action sequence was shot using 30 meters of track laid on the ground in the park so the camera could shoot from a low angle, at the height of the Hairy Leg. Janssens used onion skinning in Dragonframe, with the live-action plates underneath, so she could see how the camera moved in that footage.

Halberstad explained that lighting was the trickiest aspect to get right. “The leg moves, so the light has to be moving too, and you have to get the shadows right. And it was also very dark in the park,” Halberstad said. Mansfelt set the camera to match the angle of the shot Kleber sent them and adjusted the lighting accordingly.

In turn, Mendonça Filho recalled that the sequence also entailed a far more lo-fi technique. When the Hairy Leg is hopping around, that’s stop motion. But in a moment when the Hairy Leg attacks a couple kissing, Mendonça Filho was off camera, wearing a green glove and manipulating a full-size prop. “I was just attacking the actors with a big prosthetic leg,” he said, laughing. Since that moment required physical interaction between the actors and the leg, he opted for that more realistic approach.

As offbeat and outlandish as the Hairy Leg in The Secret Agent may seem, the filmmaker believes the way the scene is structured, connecting back to the main storyline, will prevent viewers from feeling too lost when witnessing the violence the limb can unleash.

“I was really into the idea of making the audience confused, but then not long after that it should work, and I do believe it works. But it is jarring, and I love films or books that keep ahead of me. If I’m patient, I will be satisfied with the information,” Mendonça Filho said.