HULK SMASH!

Richard Carter is an impressive man. His physique is ripped with the sculptured forms of a dedicated body builder, and his acting ability means he can turn on a mean, scary expression at will. But despite the big, looming, angry mass of a man that he is, working with him was actually great fun. He was actually a very cool guy, easy to get along with, and not in the least bit scary. But those combined physical and performance talents made him the ideal candidate for Horrify Me's HULK project.

"But HULK isn't horror!" I can hear those very words ringing though your mind right now. Well I disagree. HULK has many qualifications to make him not only a figure of horror, but one of the more terrifying horror icons in the world. Let's look at the facts that make HULK horrific:

1. HULK is a genetic mutation brought about by man's interfering with things that should be left alone. A scientist playing god. A very clear and obvious reference to Frankenstein, or Jekyll and Hyde.

2. HULK is a transformation, a physical change from human to monster. This transformation is extreme, brutal, and violent. The transformation from man to beast is a staple of the horror diet, seen in the Wolf Man, The Fly, and many other horror classics.

3. HULK is a character driven by rage, anger, fear, aggression and hostility. He is a negative reaction to a negative situation. The creature is often out of control, very brutal, causing untold damage as he goes about expressing his wrath. In HULK stories, he usually has to be given equally powerful villains to compete with, because if he attacked a human, the result would be utterly devastating.

4. The design of HULK is designed to frighten us. His skin is green, a completely unnatural colour for anything human. Green is the colour of nature, suggesting he is an unstoppable force of nature like a tornado or an earthquake. His bulk is so massive that it can do nothing but intimidate men. And the fact that he is virtually indestructible makes him utterly terrifying.

Of course, Marvel tone down these design features by implanting just enough humanity that HULK doesn't cross the border into horror territory. He's a super hero, a very primal and unconventional good guy, there to entertain kids and deliver some sort of weird message of empowerment. But this friendly HULK is of no interest to me.

I'm interested in the scary, primal rage that beats through the heart of this unnatural beast. In my mind, HULK is a supreme being of horror in terms of what he could be capable of, if his authors only allowed it. With all that rage, all that strength, and all that out-of-control power, this monster could be a force of destruction so terrible that the likes of Dracula, the Wolfman, Jason Voorhees, and any other horror icon you care to name, would be rendered insignificant alongside him. I'd wager that even the Alien xenomorphs would find the HULK hard to face-hug, and their acid blood would just run off him like water. How much more scary does he need to be for me to prove my point?

But HULK is a Marvel hero, and he has a moral compass somewhere among all that rage and power. I get that. But I still wanted to take a look at MY version of the HULK and show him as a scary being, not to be fucked with. I wanted to show him in the dark, a mountain of muscle and dread that could rip a man apart in seconds. I wanted to show him with the blood of a victim on him but leave the actual violence to your imagination.



After conducting a head-to-toe body paint on Richard, the shoot commenced. Richard is a huge guy but was not big enough to portray the classic image we now have of the HULK. This is because the HULK is too big for any human to achieve and stay healthy. HULK is more a caricature of a muscle man with impossible size to his limbs. So a lot of Photoshop work was needed to morph Richard from a big guy to a super-huge HULK. To be fair, Richard made a damn fine HULK and even if I didn't pump up the limbs in digital editing, he would have still been an impressive rendering of the character. But the extra bulk possible with Photoshop transformed Richard away from the man and into the monster.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s, the TV series of the HULK was an exciting weekly show. I have an enduring memory of a promo shot of Lou Ferrigno from magazines at the time, with a red backlight and a green filter. The result was a weird, otherworldly image of the HULK as a green muscle man with a red glow. I decided to apply the same red back light to my HULK to pay tribute to that old TV show. It was TV rather than comics that introduced me to the HULK after all. I did buy HULK comics as a kid, and this older, less complex mutant has stayed with me over the years.

HULK would be a tremendous character of fear and horror if Marvel let him. But they won't; he's a family entertainment figure, plain and simple. So folks, if YOU have ever thought the HULK is a scary dude then make the most of this photo shoot in which I attempt to see him through a filter of fear….

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Death and the Maiden

Back when I was studying fine art and design (roughly 1991-93), part of my exam assignment was to study the work of a well known artist. I chose Edvard Munch for no other reason than I loved his painting of The Scream. I also knew a few of his other works such as his Vampire, which depicts a girl with long red hair biting the back of a guy's neck, and his very weird Self Portrait with a Skeleton Arm, and a few others. Along the way I discovered a piece of work by Munch called Death and the Maiden. It was a loose sketch of a nude female embracing a skeleton which appeared to have emaciated flesh on some parts, much like a modern Hollywood zombie. It was probably the likeness to a zombie that initially caught my attention, but being a morbid sod anyway the whole concept of this erotic, near-necrophiliac rendering captured my imagination in an unexpected way.

Edvard Munch: Death and the Maiden. This painting literally affected my life!

It wasn't long before I started to discover that the Death and Maiden motif was not exclusive to Munch, but that he was just one of many artists who had tackled this subject. Away from the assignment, I started to look into this motif, which seems to have a depth of meaning so intricate and complex that you could think about it for years.

And that is exactly what I did. I have thought about Death and the Maiden for literally years!

One online source claims that Death and the Maiden had its origins in Greek myth, in the story of Persephone's abduction by Hades, which was a clear preconfiguration of the conflict between Thanatos and Eros. By the 15th century, Death and the Maiden became a morbidly sensual theme based on the Medieval Danse Macabre (Dance of Death), but rather than depicting a female dancing with a robed skeletal figure, this new concept showed the two locked in an erotic embrace. The motif of Death and the Maiden was explored throughout the Renaissance, and survives to this day as a fascinating theme expressed in art, music, theatre, and literature.

Death and the Maiden can mean whatever you want it to mean. It's one of those highly unusual images which allows you to project your own subtext based on your own worldview. For some it is nothing more than a work of perverse pornography showing a healthy young woman engaged in unhealthy thanatophillia. For others it is a work of visual poetry which acts as a reminder that all beauty must die; that beauty, as life, is tragically short. Another slightly more cynical view of the theme considers that all romance is doomed, that there is no "happy ending" in life, while some view it as an expression of not wanting to let go after a bereavement. Some have even described Death and the Maiden as revealing a dark truth about life and about the unbreakable bond between sex and death - that how every act of sex and subsequent birth ends in eventual death - a perpetual cycle of life and death without end, all captured in a simple image.

What makes Death and the Maiden so impressive and important as a motif is that it is always subject to very personal and intimate interpretation, and is one of the most universal themes ever captured in art. No matter what our background or lifestyle or beliefs, we all want love and we are all guaranteed one death. When our time comes, will we embrace the Grim Reaper with such enthusiasm as the Maiden, or will we resist the dark calling into the void?

The Death and the Maiden photo shoot is one that I have been thinking about for a long time. It was possibly one of the most inevitable shoots of my life - a shoot that I just knew I had to do. The legend of Death and the Maiden has been around in my life for a very long time, so it had to come out at some point. The Grim Reaper was the difficult choice to make, whether to go back to old traditions of using a skeleton or get someone to wear a robe. I opted for the robe for the simple fact that the skeleton would only ever look like a life-size medical model and is difficult to pose (as it worked out, the robe was difficult to pose too!).

I made the robe from a decorator's dust sheet, which is made of coarse fabric that frays to hell when you rip it apart and it holds dirt and grime really well. It was dipped into buckets of water and food colouring and paint to make it black. By varying the amount of dips and the type of colourings used, I was able to achieve variety in the tones and create some "depth" in the otherwise flat colour. I didn't want this to look like "zombie cloth", I wanted to make it look ancient, so that meant giving the robes a few mud baths, kicking it through muddy puddles, emptying vacuum cleaner bags over it, and applying a few cobwebs. My wife Claire bravely wore the robe which was alive with bugs and I even spotted a spider crawling around on the hood while she was wearing it.

The scythe used in the shoot is real. It's very old, with a long black handle and an almost-black rusted blade, neither of which showed up on camera very well, so I gave the whole thing a quick spray-paint from a couple of old rattle cans just to bounce some light from it.

The Maiden was a young 19-year-old nude model named Jodie who had all the qualities needed for this image. Youth, innocence, and a slight frame were important but with so many female models sporting awesome tattoo art these days, even the fact that her skin was free of illustrations was essential. I have absolutely nothing against tattoos on females (in fact I kinda love them) but the Maiden required a "visual purity" in order to make her character work in the context of these photos. The Maiden is the muse that inspires these works, so she needs to be a "blank canvas" upon which the viewer can identify their own fears and apply their own meanings about Death.

I did a big shoot and applied a very basic narrative on the theme, based loosely on the idea that the Maiden is seduced by Death and must become Death. Within my narrative, the "old" Death had been reaping souls for many thousands of years and was finally expiring into the great void of nothingness, but in order to do this he must first recruit a new Reaper. He does this in an act of seduction which requires a beautiful, innocent young Maiden to die and fall in love with Death. Once she was bound by this love, she then took on the role of Reaper. Her appearance as the Reaper is still that of a young Maiden, and we see that over the coming millennia her beauty will crumble away as she reaps souls, until eventually she will be a skeletal figure herself. And then the cycle will repeat, as it always does.

 Click here to see the full shoot of Death and the Maiden by Horrify Me

Dawn of the Dead Zombie Tribute Shoot

Why I love the original Dawn of the Dead:

There's really not much new to say on Dawn of the Dead's poignant, prescient, almost prophetic narrative commentary on modern consumerism. George A. Romero's satire on our zombie-like trance when lured towards retail is one of its great strengths as a piece of cinema, but, of course, it's been studied and discussed to death. I can't add anything new that you haven't already heard. But I do love its still-relevant social satire.

The make-up effects tend to divide opinion these days. Pioneered by Tom Savini with low budget but sky-high imagination, many have stated that the FX work has badly dated and looks ropey these days. The grey greasepaint makes the zombies look like smurfs under certain lighting and the red blood looks like spilled paint. It's easy to say these things when it's been copied and improved-upon over four decades, and equally easy to forget just how shocking and groundbreaking this stuff was back in 1978. It's also easy to forget that Savini had very little in the way of a special effects "industry" to fall back on. Today, if you need a cool zombie prosthetic, just head to the internet and one will be on a next-day courier. Savini had nothing like this. He had to invent, fabricate, innovate, and craft his way through this whole production. This was state-of-the-art back then, and it still works pretty well today.

In fact the zombies are some of the best in any film of this type. How so? Think about modern zombie movies, or the Walking Dead TV show. Think about their zombies. They are all beautifully sculpted, painted, designed pieces of shuffling artwork. Teeth protruding over lipless mandibles, leathery skin hugging broken cheek bones, eyeballs hanging out of sockets, intricate wounds festering and weeping, bloody, veiny contacts in the eyes. Even the clothing is sliced, diced, stained and rotten to create a whole piece that is designed to look great on camera. Zombies look incredibly cool these days. While this is an inevitable state of their evolution in the entertainment media, as more artists try to create more memorable and exciting zombies, the one issue that arises from this is that they have become very much works of design. In fact many of them slip so far into the realm of exhibiting fantastic design and craftsmanship, that they lose something of their everyday mundane humanity.

There is a sense in Dawn of the Dead that the zombie extras were asked to just turn up with some old clothes. The result is a mis-matched hotchpotch of randomness; a distinct lack of design. What you have is very close to reality. With a few notable exceptions where Savini allowed himself some indulgence with the design (such as the airport zombie), most of the zombies in Dawn of the Dead are just normal, everyday folk the likes of which we all know. They feel like "people" rather than "monsters" and that's important. After all, they are us and we are them. The layer of heavy design in modern zombie entertainment separates them from us a bit too much. Between them, Romero and Savini created zombies that are uncomfortably close to us.

To be honest, there isn't much I don't like about Dawn of the Dead. I love the performances of the cast, I love the zombies, I love the location, I love the gore, and of course I love the music - both the library tunes and the amazing tracks supplied by Goblin.

It was inevitable that I would one day do this tribute shoot. After all, Dawn of the Dead was instrumental in shaping my young brain towards horror, as I discovered it so young. I was lucky enough to have a dodgy old copy on Betamax as a kid and it was watched and re-watched far too much to be healthy. Doing this tribute shoot to one of the films I love most in the world has been wonderful, fun, and exciting.

Thank you to Emma for letting us blow her lovely face open.
Thank you to Dan for bravely shaving all his hair off - just to do this shoot!
Thank you to Mike for patiently letting us glue rubber all over his face and chest.
Thank you to Luna for tolerating my sick gory zombie eating requests.
Thank you to James for performing well under heavy make-up, even though you had a major hangover.
Thank you to Dashee for vital help with make-up.
Most of all, thank you to my wife Claire for letting me stick a REAL machete in her head, and for generally tolerating and supporting the very weird guy she married.

See the rest of the Dawn of the Dead zombie shoot here

A proud moment for me!

Santa is gonna kill you.

It's almost Christmas. So I thought it was about time I did an evil Santa. Seeing the number of zombie Santa costumes appearing on Facebook this year, alongside the release of Krampus, I am starting to wonder if Santa is now on a slippery slope towards becoming a horror icon. Maybe the Halloween gang are slowly claiming the festive season! Now that would be AWESOME!

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Family Day Out at Horrify Me

It's a strange, weird, unusual day out for most. But for me, this is normal. This is life! A family turns up for a horror shoot.  Every single time, they turn out to be really lovely people (my guess is that miserable, boring bastards simply don't do activities like this - lucky for me!), and because of how nice they are, they prove to be very pleasant and easy to work with. I dare say not many jobs can lay claim to such a luxury as this.

The latest family day out at Horrify Me was no different. Mum, dad and teenage daughter, all of them extremely nice people, excited at the prospect of being "horrified" and just a little bewildered too. The topic of conversation typically ends up on horror movies, one of my absolute favourite subjects of course. I usually try and make the messy makeup process fun and engaging, asking the victims to splatter each other and get involved creatively with the clothing and grime.

And then we shoot photos! I have fun, they have fun, everybody has fun. I really do think this is the most perfect job in the world.

Head towards www.horrify.me.uk to book yourself the weirdest family day out ever!