Here’s What The Joker Looks Like as Designed by Movie FX Legend Rick Baker

It’s been a couple of days since you saw new photos of Jared Leto’s version of Joker, which means you probably just now stopped laughing about it (until we see more pics from Suicide Squad, anyway). But here’s something to interest (and maybe frighten) you: special effects master Rick Baker has created his own rendering of Joker, one that is not only great, but kind of unnerving — you know, the way Joker should look. It’s too bad we might never see this version on the big screen.

You know Baker’s FX handiwork from classics like An American Werewolf in London and Videodrome, as well as contemporary films like The Frighteners and the Men in Black trilogy. Baker is a celebrated practical effects artist, and in his downtime, he had a little fun with the Joker. Specifically, with the version from Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s New 52 version of the character from the Death of the Family story.

Baker took to Twitter to post the evolution of his Joker design, which is quite striking:

The title of Snyder and Capullo’s Death of the Family is an overt nod to the classic A Death in the Family comic, in which Joker murdered Jason Todd. In Death of the Family, Joker looks very different (and Harley Quinn warns Batman that he is very different, as well) — in the lead-up to the comics, Joker had fellow Batman villain Dollmaker surgically remove his face, which he pinned to the wall of his cell in Arkham Asylum as a symbol of his “rebirth.”

Baker’s design of the Joker reflects this, with the skin from his face removed in the first black and white rendering; in the color shots, that skin has been reattached with safety pins. It’s kind of horrific, but it’s that sort of inventiveness that seems to be missing from Leto’s version in Suicide Squad, which looks like a Mall Goth gone wild.