GERALT of Rivia has battled all manner of monsters on Netflix fantasy drama The Witcher.
The silver-haired hunk, played by Henry Cavill, laughs in the face of danger time and time again as he dispatches of magical beats on the daily.
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From the Striga to the Kikimora, the show draws on the rich Polish folklore that inspired the Andrzej Sapkowski novels.
Now show runner Lauren Hissrich has spoken out about the creative process behind rendering the creatures on screen.
Straight off the bat she was quick to distance the series from the successful Witcher video games.
“What we’re trying not to do is to borrow from the video game plot, we’re not trying to do a bunch of side quests, we’re trying to stick to the source material,” she stressed.
“That being said, to make the source material work for us, then we do have to add new things in occasionally.”
Nonetheless, Hissrich works closely with designer and illustrator Tomek Bagiński, who is familiar with Polish myths and legends and worked with CD Projekt Red on the games.
“So what we try to do – and this is part of the fun of Tomek and I working together with the rest of the writers,” she continued to Express Online.
“For instance, if we want a new monster we will go to Tomek and say, like, what are the stories that you were told growing up?
“What are the monsters that you were scared of? How do we start to like build out this world so that it feels appropriate to the original source material, even if it’s new?”
The references to fairy tales are definitely apparent in the show’s first eight episodes.
For example, Urcheon (Bart Edwards) is cursed and transformed into a beast until he finds true love, a clear nod to Beauty and the Beast.
Elsewhere, Renfri (Emma Appleton) is banished from her kingdom and fights for survival with seven warriors at her side – a nod to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
In other Witcher news, spin-off film Nightmare of the Wolf was announced earlier this week.
The Witcher season 1 is available to stream on Netflix now.
