Thinking  about and discussing monsters and horror films often makes people anxious and uncomfortable. More often than not, people get sick stomachs from discussing bloody and diseased beings, but I tend to have a very different reaction. A few years ago, I had an art teacher, Jess Clark, who forever changed my views on blood and gore. After watching her turn me from a boy with blond hair and blue eyes into a mangled corpse using only some face paint and fake blood, Ms. Clark had shown me the fundamentals I needed to know about special effects make-up. From then on, whenever I saw a horror film or had the chance to dress up for a costume party, I immediately would think of “monsters” from an artistic point of view rather than  as if they were something to be afraid of. When I see Dracula, I think of ways to re-create hollow cheeks and bloody teeth instead of how far away I would run if I ever saw him in real life. When I see Frankenstein, I imagine different ways to make scars and sunken-in eyes on myself rather than how scary it would be to see an 8-foot-tall man with bolts in his neck. 

Zombie make-up I did for Halloween a few years ago.

A closeup of the same night

On any normal day, seeing someone dressed like this would probably make you run screaming, but for some reason there is a time of year when dressing like this is the norm. On Halloween, people are able to make themselves look as scary as possible and no one even thinks twice about it. Why is it that we find ourselves so obsessed with turning ourselves into something so horrific? More importantly, why do I find turing myself into these horrific creatures so interesting? Truth of the matter is, I find doing this to be very relaxing and enjoy testing my abilities to see what sort of creature I can turn myself into next. Re-creating monsters is something which seems to be contradicting of our every-day repulsion of these creatures and is definitely something worth examining more closely. 

This was a make-up trial I did on myself for a character in a school play.

For anyone interested in special effects make-up, here’s a video that shows you how easily you can achieve a zombie look. You don’t need to use any expensive make-ups ether, just whatever face paints you can get ahold of.