Are The Clickers In HBO's The Last Of Us Created Using CGI?

In the second episode of HBO's "The Last of Us," we finally got our first look at the Clickers. This terrifying variant of Infected has been infected for so long that the cordyceps fungus has completely overtaken their face, rendering them blind but granting them incredible strength and the ability to echolocate by making a clicking sound with their mouths, hence the name.

In the games, Clickers are a force to be reckoned with, as getting near one almost always means instant death unless you have a shiv, which is hard to come by on most difficulty settings. In the show, co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann aimed to create the same feeling of tension and terror by making them appear as real as possible.

Here's what the creators of HBO's "The Last of Us" had to say about how they brought the terrifying Clickers to life within the show.

Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann discussed how they adapted the Clickers of the games to the Clickers of the show in the companion podcast to the series, titled "HBO's The Last of Us Podcast."

In the podcast, the host and actor of Joel in the games, Troy Baker, asked Mazin and Druckmann how they decided to portray the Clickers in the show.

Mazin said the first question they asked was whether or not to include the Clickers at all, although it was obvious to him that they would feature them. The second question was how much they would look like the Clickers of the game, with the answer being: as much as possible.

"If you go into a CGI characterization right off the bat, it just starts to feel like it's not there. So we really wanted to find prosthetics to actually turn somebody into a Clicker," Mazin said. "We found great performers who could move like Clickers and even sound like Clickers."

From there, Mazin said the team decided to have Ellie reliant on Joel throughout the encounter, which takes the scene from just being a scary fight to having emotional stakes as well.