Labyrinth's Nastiest Shot Looks Even Worse Behind The Scenes
Jim Henson's 1986 movie "Labyrinth" fills the screen with some of the strangest sights imaginable. The fantasy movie is a highly intricate piece of work, and as such, the untold truth of "Labyrinth" includes many secrets and hidden details from behind the scenes. One such secret concerns the "Helping Hands" scene, in which Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) descends into a pit full of hands that grab her, control her direction, and even form crude, talking faces that give her a choice of going up or down. Being at the mercy of countless groping, disembodied hands is a nightmarish scenario for anyone — especially a young woman — even before they start talking, and the claustrophobic scene has a fairly good shot at being the creepiest one in the entire movie. However, seeing how it was actually shot might just make it even worse.
The scene is definitely one of the many things only adults notice in "Labyrinth." It's tempting to think that the scene is some sort of patented Henson wizardry where the action takes place in a fairly small, contained place with the upward and downward motion achieved with effects and camera trickery. No such luck for Connelly, though. They actually built a full-sized shaft of hands that she had to descend through while a camera rig moved alongside her.
The Helping Hands set was a towering, groping mass of real and fake hands
The Helping Hands scene started out as the brainchild of "Labyrinth" screenwriter Terry Jones, one of the stars of Monty Python. Henson expanded Jones' original idea of an individual talking hand with eyes and some lipstick for a mouth into the talking hand faces you see in the movie, and incorporated them into the giant set that featured both prop hands and puppeteers wearing special gloves.
Being a young actor in a major movie, Connelly didn't outright speak out on how creepy she may have found the experience of filming the scene, but it's worth noting that the way she described the Helping Hands set makes it seem like a fairly uncomfortable place to be. "The shaft of hands, it's a slimy green substance, and it has these hands sticking out from all over the place, tons and tons and tons of them," Connelly said, describing the structure in a featurette on The Jim Henson Company YouTube channel. "And it's really high. It's about 40 feet or something."
While "Labyrinth" as a whole is well-liked by both critics and audiences, the groping, trapping Helping Hands that Jones dreamed up can easily seem extremely uncomfortable by today's standards. It remains to be seen how the scene will be seen in the years to come.