‘Yellowjackets” new title sequence is an unsettling fever dream you can’t look away from

Yellowjackets is back with more chaos, more wilderness—and a main title that is grungier than ever.

Ever since the first season premiered in 2021, the show’s opening credits have been one of the most frenetic on television. Blink and you’ll miss something. Set against the grungy song “No Return” by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker, the title is meant to feel like an assault on the senses. It is 90 seconds long, and the longest frame lasts about a second.

This makes for a tense intro, in which our brains are bombarded with flickering images faster than we can process them. And that’s precisely the point. “We want this to be glitched so much that if someone takes a still, they can’t really figure it out,” says Mason Nicoll, executive creative director of creative studio Digital Kitchen.

Digital Kitchen, which has designed main titles for True Blood, Narcos, and Dexter, first dreamed up the concept for the Yellowjackets’ main title in 2021, when season one premiered. The show is set in the ’90s, and the team drew inspiration from ’90s skater videos, and drew from the jittery, low-fi aesthetic of the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project. The result was borderline chaotic, but the distressed look provided an additional benefit: it helped disguise key shots by distorting them beyond recognition.

[Image: courtesy Digital Kitchen]

The team has replicated this approach ever since. But with each season, they swap old frames for new ones that hint at what’s to come. Season one teased the show’s mysterious symbol, season two introduced eerie snowy landscapes and blood-soaked imagery. Season three now features dark caves, an upside-down image of a bleeding Jesus, and a lot of screaming faces. It’s also glitchier than ever. “We went to town,” says Nicoll, noting that the first cut was about 30% more hectic than the final version.

Does this hint at even more madness to come? “It seems like it,” he says. “It does feel like every season just escalates and gets crazier.”

Season 3 title sequence: No context, just vibes

The truth is, Nicoll doesn’t know what will happen this season. Not exactly. Sometimes, main title designers get a full synopsis to help them sprinkle in clues. Other times, they only see the pilot and work with the showrunners to create the right tone. With Yellowjackets, Nicoll says he knew the most in season one—and the least in season three.

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This year, the showrunners sent the team a whopping 70 shots to work with, but Nicoll explains the shots were all out of context, so his team had to piece the story together and interpret it themselves. It goes without saying they have more insight than the average viewer, but when the shots arrive at random, some mystery remains inevitable.

[Image: courtesy Digital Kitchen]

Sometimes, the team gave away too much without even realizing it. That’s what happened when the team initially included a new shot of the Antler Queen from season three in the title sequence. If you remember, the identity of the Antler Queen was shrouded in mystery for the first two seasons. At first, we thought it was Lottie. Then—spoilers ahead—we learned it was actually Natalie.

So, when Digital Kitchen added this new shot of the Antler Queen, the showrunners’ reaction, as Nicoll remembers it, was something along the lines of: “hell no!” The team quickly reworked the shot, glitching it so much that viewers could no longer tell who was under the antlers. The obscured frame now appears around the one-minute mark—and we are left to wonder: has the wilderness chosen a new Antler Queen?

A ‘Blair Witch Project’ fever dream

About half of the shots in the main title come from the show, but the intro wouldn’t be the disquieting fever dream it is today without the other half. From the very beginning, Digital Kitchen leaned into The Blair Witch Project’s “found footage” aesthetic, making it seem like the images were filmed by the high school girls themselves.

[Image: courtesy Digital Kitchen]

To make this footage appear authentic, the team hired lookalike actors in L.A. and shot additional scenes with an old DV camcorder from the ’90s. In one scene, art director Rachel Brickel filmed the actors running into a parking lot while she was crouched inside a shopping cart that Nicoll was pushing. “I remember thinking ‘I see a speed bump in front of us,’ and I’m like ‘oh man this is going to hurt,'” she recalls with a laugh. It did hurt, but she got the shot.

[Image: courtesy Digital Kitchen]

To achieve the look of a worn-out VHS tape with a “corrupted” signal, Brickel’s team played the footage through a “really old” tube TV from the ’90s and ran it through special equipment to further remix and distort the picture. Then, they took that altered footage and glitched it even more on the computer. “We wanted to show the beauty of glitches,” she says.

[Image: courtesy Digital Kitchen]

The resulting aesthetic of the Yellowjackets season 3 title sequence may not be ideal for someone prone to migraines. I, for one, can’t watch it more than twice in a row without needing to rest my eyes. But for the average viewer who isn’t poring over every single frame, the intro isn’t meant to be fully absorbed in one sitting. It’s designed to reveal itself as the season unfolds—and to keep you away from that dreaded “skip” button.

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