I've been into make little mounted beast heads lately, one of those prop ideas I came up with years ago and threw on the backburner since I wasn't really sure how I could pull it off. I just finished my third one, a mini Cthulhu head. I've been keeping them small-ish to keep the price down since they do take a lot of time and money to make a single one.

I did a Pygmy Blood Troll and an Albino Cyclops Faerie, so Cthulhu seemed the next logical step.


I had recently purchased a small jar of Glow Worm, from Smooth-On, it's a really strong glow-in-the-dark powder that gave me the idea to give him glow in the dark eyes just for fun. I wasn't going for an ultra-realistic final piece, but something slightly cartoony and stylized - it kind of has an unintentional Mike Mignola feel to it I think, which I'm pretty happy about.

I wanted to keep the paint job bright and simple as well, I didn't want it muddied down with excessive details and colour schemes, just a nice bright, clean green with a little red and yellow accenting - again, keeping it cartoonish.


The eyes just pop into place, I don't bother gluing them or anything - since I didn't want to risk getting glue everything pressing the eyeballs into the sockets, but they didn't need it anyway, they slip in really easily while the latex is still fresh-ish, it tends to stiffen up a bit after a couple days from the mould, which should hold the eyes in as well as anything - but I'm sure if you go looking to jab them out, you probably can, like anything if you want to destroy it, it's pretty easy.

The glow-in-the-dark effect is pretty awesome, the Glow Worm is really bright and even obvious in broad daylight if you're in shadows. Overall I'm really happy with how it turned out, it's a totally different take on Cthulhu than I usually do and I think it's one of my better pieces.

I'm selling them in a limited run of 10 right now, $85 each. I'll be selling a small handful at the few Cons I attend each year as well. The plaque is almost 7" and the head itself is around 6", made from latex skinned polyfoam. Comes with the hanging hardware already attached, so it's ready to hang right out of the box.

Mounted Albino Cyclops Faerie head.

Made of latex and filled with polyfoam and a resin eyeball, the head measures 2 1/2 inches long and comes mounted on a stained plaque with mounting hardware attached. $27.50 +shipping.


A rare mutation of the Seer Faerie, a species with prophetic abilities. It's unclear whether the mutation is caused by a genetic disorder in the parents or something environmental that results in these unusually violent creatures.

While the Seer Faeries abilities are usually limited to minor visions of random future events, the Albino Cyclops Faerie's abilities are limited to only seeing the death of any number of random individuals - it's thought that the constant visions of death is what drives these creatures to madness.

It's also believed that if an Albino Cyclops Faeries prophesies your death, the fate can be avoided altogether by destroying the creature, possibly resulting in immortality.

This post is a little premature, but I wanted to post something. I decided this year I'd start selling regular latex masks in my shop. I've been meaning to for some time now, but there was just never the time or something else always came up. I don't know.

These here are the first group that'll be going up for sale. The lower centre one is a test painting version that I'll be keeping for myself.

The idea with this shape came from seeing some LARP orc masks, no full neck with the chin and lower lip cut out - it means no Batman neck and you can totally eat, drink, whatever without the mask interfering and depending on the colouring, it can blend in decently well to give the illusion of a prosthetic. I thought it was brilliant and since I hadn't really settled on a specific design or methodology behind what masks I'd make, this was my starting point.

Things just keep coming up and taking up more of my time than I'd planned so I just haven't been able to crank these things out like I'd planned. But the mould is all done and I'm going to do them in small runs - since I don't have the space to keep a pile of them around and stored properly.


I'm planning two versions of this mask, haven't decided on a name yet, there'll be a caucasian flesh toned version - meaning it should blend in naturally with worn to the wearers exposed chin and neck. And I'll be doing up a red version, which I can supply some red creme makeup with to make it ready to wear right out of the box, the customers won't have to buy anything additional.

They're designed off an average sized male head, so that's who they'll fit. They might require a little padding in the back of the head since it can slide forward, impossible to fix that any other way since it'd require the mask be skin tight (and utterly uncomfortable). It's an issue I've noticed with all latex masks.

I'll be offering up blanks for sale as well, I know there are some folks out there that like getting them just to practice or they like customizing these things themselves. The finished versions will be $90 (plus shipping) and the blanks will be $45. I'll only be making about 20 of them at most I think, all depends.

So I'm hoping the rest of this week goes as planned, amidst sculpting other stuff, organizing photo shoots and actually doing them, to some small custom jobs, we'll just have to see what happens.

Since I'm only selling them in small runs, I may only sell them on Etsy, but with a link from my own website, it's easier when selling small numbers. I'll play it by ear for now I think and see how it all works.

I'm also planning to do female versions as well possibly, or at least do masks fitted for women (or smaller heads). These are way too large for the average female head so I thought I'd do up male and female versions.

I think they might go over decently well in the Haunted Attraction community as an alternative to makeup. They're easy to slip on and off, if cared for could last years - way cheaper than silicone masks so it's less of an investment. As awesome as silicone masks are, I know not every Haunted Attraction can afford more than a couple before it's just too expensive unfortunately.

By Friday you might see four of them online for sale, all depends on how this week shapes up. And over the course of the year I'm hoping to release 5 more different masks, 3 male sized ones and 3 female sized ones - and of course one of those sets will be an obligatory zombie design.

I came up with the idea for making wall mounted beast heads years ago, of course I never got around to it and since then I've seen several others making them - that's always annoying. However, I finally got around to it, it was mostly the finer details of reproducing them consistently that stopped me from doing it right away.

The biggest stumbling block for me ended up being two relatively simple things, the plaque itself and the eyes.The biggest problem was sourcing locally and then sourcing within Canada online. Neither really panned out in a way I felt would work for me without driving the cost of the final piece up. Then I suddenly happened upon some small plaques that were very inexpensive and it went from there.

As for the eyes, I didn't want to paint them, so I wanted something I could just plop into place. I found some glass black glass beads that would give the troll that soulless look. The tricky part was designing all this to be done with just a single mould with a minimum amount of work involved to reproduce the piece.

So I took one of the stones, glued a wooden stick to it. Because that how you make eyeballs, right?


I made a mould of that and created to silicone copies.


 So I could sculpt around them to create a socket and pull them out without distressing the sculpture.


It worked perfectly. It took less than a day for the sculpt. I pretty much just made it up as I was going. I knew I wanted a fat little weird troll-like head and that was it.


I was happy with the result, and that it didn't take me days of agonizing over details to get it to turn out. From there I made a stone mould, with a flat back to it, drilled a hole in that and the mould was done in less than a day as well.

I thought the best and least expensive material would be latex filled with expanding foam, I'm used to it and I had all these supplies onhand already, so that was a pretty easy choice.


And there you have it. I had minimal cleanup around the edges, no other post-mould adjusting, cleaning or detailing to do, I just had to paint it, glue in the eyes and stain the plaque and mount the sucker. It was a lot more work than I'm making it sound, but it's fairly easy work overall, just takes a couple hours to produce one of these - unless I do them in bulk.

So yes, I am selling these. At the time of posting this I've just made the first prototype one, I'll be running off a couple more and doing a run of 5 for now and seeing how well they sell. Now that I've done the whole process and know my costs, I came up with a price of $40 for each one. Anyone interested can contact me, themonkeyrodeo@gmail.com.

So, after all that, what is a Pygmy Blood Troll? Here's some information on this ugly little critter.

The origins of this vile species is rather complicated. While most all creatures of Demonic origins are peaceful, docile beings, Pygmy Blood Trolls are quite the opposite.

It begins with the Blood Parasite, a leech-like worm that is responsible for most modern Vampire myths. They infect a living host, leaving them mostly dead in all appearances, using their bodies to then feed on blood from living victims. Normally this process simply works with the parasite taking over the internal functions of both Demons and Humans, Humans being much more susceptible because of their weaker physiology.

Demons are more resistant to the Blood Parasite on average, 27% of all Demonic species are completely immune to them. Trolls specifically are immune to Blood Parasite, however one species, Earth Trolls – who can hibernate deep in the earth for hundreds of years – actually absorb the Blood Parasite.

In most cases the parasite is simply consumed internally with no ill effect, however in pregnant Earth Trolls, the fetus is bonded with the parasite, altering its entire biological structure. One Pygmy Blood Troll (called as such since they never grow over a foot tall and most trolls range from seven feet to several hundred feet tall) is a somewhat hazardous nuisance, several are a much different matter. Pygmy Blood Trolls procreate much like modern day rabbits, within months there can be as many as one thousand.

Pygmy Blood Trolls usually feed on smaller animals, but have, on occasion, attacked larger creatures in packs. They are incredibly dangerous in high numbers since their Trolls physiology makes them strong for their size, and very tough to kill. The Blood Parasite physiology makes them very fast healers and immune to pain – it’s is believe the only true method of killing a Pygmy Blood Troll is to decapitate it and burn the body immediately. They will also, like their parentage, burrow deep into the earth where they can hibernate for hundreds of years and are near impossible to find in this state – this makes controlling Pygmy Blood Troll outbreaks a very difficult task and on that must be handled immediately before they either procreate or enter hibernation.

I've had these lurking around my workshop for some time and thought it'd be interesting to see a side by side comparison of a prosthetic stored properly and one stored very improperly.

The white-ish one was obviously stored properly, the one that looks like overbaked bread was not. These were both made around the same time, give or take a couple weeks, approximately 3 and a half years ago.

The one on the left is still totally usable, the foam is slightly stiffer (but then again it could have come out like that in the beginning, I don't recall) but otherwise totally useable - in fact I'm planning on using it tomorrow perhaps. It was stored in a sealed bag away from direct light.

The one on the right was left in the back seat window of a car, during the summer, for maybe 7 months or so and has just been left out ever since. It's incredibly delicate, in fact a few tiny pieces crumbled away just picking it up to do this shot. It's totally stiff, the underside (not in the sun) is a yellow-ish colour and you can see the topside is that golden brown (slightly burned) bread crust colour - although totally rigid and a little shiny.

This is a good demonstration to customers who by prosthetics who wonder why things need to be stored properly and how long they can last. In a sealed bag (everything prosthetic piece I sell comes in a zip lock bag anyway) out of direct sunlight - and definitely not in the back window of a car for several month during the summer.

As I said, it's been about 3 and a half years and the piece is still totally useable. You hear some people go on about how foam latex (and latex in general) will degrade over time, it will, but it will take a LONG time, so there should never be any concern about buying a prosthetic piece like this and no using it right away - just store it properly and you can still use it years later.

Another prop I've been wanting to make for ages and for some reason it just never happened was a Mummy Head. It seems like every time I have an idea for something, by the time I get around to it I see several others have already attempted it - gets a little annoying because it makes me feel like I'm copying, even though I had the idea long before I saw anyone else's attempt.

The hardest part of a Mummy Head is getting it to look decent, it's not a zombie head. I went though a couple variations, basing my sculpt off a couple actual mummy head images I found, altering where I felt it just looked better.

I has sculpted and moulded it quite some time ago, I even cast it - although it was a pretty rough attempt with a really bad, broken seam. I had brushed the latex in, using up some old tinted stuff just to get rid of it. The polyfoam was kind crap as well, it just kept collapsing, but it worked well enough to make a prototype for painting.






I pretty much did the paint job without really planning ahead. It was several layers, going from dark to light until I felt it was decent looking. The teeth were done quickly with a brush somewhere inbetween the layers on the head itself so they received a little extra "aging".

So that's it. It turned out pretty well I think for what I'd call a "budget prop". I'm planning on making about 5 or so for sale eventually and I'm planning on 1 or 2 "museum" pieces. I'd love to find a cheap bell jar to  display this under - unfortunately that's just one of those items you can't easily find in my corner of the world.

I finally got around to getting these things finished up and I'm pretty happy with how they turned out given how simple they are.

I'd posted a while back about having the idea do my own version of these, and having seen a few other folks do them, I thought I could do a little better - I know that sounds a little arrogant, stuff like this is hard work no matter what, so all due respect to them. The reason I say that is because I decided to mould mine from real ears, not a one sided sculpt like most of the others I was seeing out. This makes them a little harder to make though, but does offer some random defects which I think make them turn out a little nicer - and ensures that each set is pretty unique.

They're cast in latex and all individually hand painted and strung together on a leather cord, although in the new year I'm planning a limited set of silicone ears which look and feel a little more realistic.


They sell for $25, shipping is only $5 worldwide - unless something comes up and I can't ship them as planned, but it shouldn't be an issue. You can email me at themonkeyrodeo @ gmail.com if you're interested.

I've finally got the Mummy Hand all ready for proper sale. I have 2 versions. There's the "Standalone" piece, that's just the hand itself for $30 (limited to 20) and the "Museum Piece" version for $70 (limited to 10).

The "Museum Piece" includes a stained box with plexiglass lid (so no worried about it breaking in shipping), it's hand stained and lined with Spanish Moss and includes a label on the front of the box indicating the number of the piece out of 10.

The "Standalone" version is just the hand itself, wrapped with gauze and comes with a card indicating the number of the piece out of 20. The hand itself is a latex skinned polyfoam that's hand painted.


A properly coloured picture to show what the hand really looks like, as well as the staining on the box.

I make these to order, so give about 1 week for manufacturing.

If you're interested, you can contact me at: foxhenderson @ themonkeyrodeo.com. Payment can be made through Paypal, or Email Interact if you're in Canada. Right now I've no idea of shipping costs, but I'd estimate around $30-$40 in the US, possibly $20-$30 in Canada for standard delivery. And at least $30 for overseas - at the lowest rate, 4-6 weeks as well.

So this scene, in the script as 4A - where the character Freebird (Heather Panton) encounters some zombies and first comes up with the idea of the Spiked Zombie Head Mace. In the original script these elements were much more drawn out and it was just a bow and arrow she created, in the 2nd major revision it was the mace. In this version, there are about 3-4, possible more sequences all mashed down into one sequence.

It got postponed from June 30th, we were going to shoot it on my birthday, but had to cancel due to illness. No worries, because we got to do it today and it turned out awesome. I already edited it and I was a little worried at first I might've missed a few things and whatnot, but it all went together really well and I'm pretty damned happy with how it turned out.

The scene is significant in a couple ways, it represents the first really FX scene. Not overly huge on FX, but it did take while to do it all - and you have to consider, I'm doing all this myself with no help. It's a lot of work to break all this down and try to get it done on time and done well at that.

It involved one of our hero zombies, referred to as Angry Zombie - played awesomely by Angela Corrigan. Angela is fairly tall and thin and athletic, so not only was she the right size for a zombie, but could probably handle the physicality of it as well. First thing was to outfit her with some Out of Mouth Dentures, it was a little problematic since I don't have a vehicle and neither does she so we had to do this whenever there was even the slimmest of opportunities, and eventually it worked out.

Here's the finished dentures. Now, I've not even done enough work with this stuff to even be called an amateur. These were my 2nd attempt at them and they worked pretty well for what was needed. I ended up making a mould for the teeth themselves rather than trying to sculpt them by hand. That turned out to be a good idea.

It took a couple fittings, but we got them working well enough for the shoot.


And I had to create all these. It doesn't look like a whole lot of work when you see them just sitting there. But each head had to be cast in latex, cured and filled with polyfoam. The latex can take awhile to cure and with one mould, it can take a while to do this many. Once cured I had to damage each one, seal that up and once cured added some gory bits and wait for it to cure again and finally painted them all.

Then came the task of finding the right size and shape sticks to mount them on, which required a lengthy hike into sweltering hot, mosquito infested territory, the stick had to be cleaned up, all the little branches and crap removed and finally sharpened on both ends and head the heads jammed on. It was a lot of work, it took a long, long time and they're only onscreen for maybe 20 second in this one scene, but longer in another.
If you're thinking, "Wow, that's a lot of work, what a waste of time since you only see it for a couple seconds" then quite frankly, fuck you, you're probably an idiot and please stop reading, go away and find something better to do with your life, like help lepers or something. The whole point of this project was to go this distance, to create more work than you'll really notice onscreen. Why? Because I wanted to, that's it. This crap is what I do and I love the shit out of it, so if I can find an excuse to make a bunch of messed up severed zombie heads and jam them on sticks, than I'm going to do it.

Next is the Single Spiked Zombie Head Mace. The idea here is that Freebird grabs one to defend herself, realized it's a decent weapon and jams more spikes into it later on. So I had to make a 2nd mace with just one spike. The full spiked head will now be painted up to reflect the mess made on this one.

The staff from the original full spiked head was taken and put onto this head, since originally I didn't have the time to make a new staff. Since then I've made a new one and fixed the wobbly staff problem, so the Spiked Zombie Head Mace you'll see in the rest of the movie will look much better now.

And now, on with some pictures from the shoot. Here's Angel and Heather before we started.

The blind eye look was sort of a last minute idea. I had the contacts and since I knew Angela was fine with them, I figured we give it a try and hope it didn't mess up her depth perception to much. Luckily, even though it did, she was still cool with going for this look. It really added an extra little bit to the character and I think this will end up being some of the best zombie makeup in the movie.

Here I'm trying to get a locked down shot that will be combined with footage being shot in Scotland. We'll have this one shot with our footage and theirs combined, otherwise Freebird will just be watching the zombies in the other footage wander about.

I was just testing the camera and got this shot. No reason to post it other than it was a really decent picture of Heather.

I made this goofy looking little rig to mount my camera in, it kind of allowed me to steer it a bit more comfortably than just holding it. It could even be weighted and made into a sort of steadicam.

Some heads.

And another.

Kim took this random picture of herself while we were shooting I guess.

Finally, some zombie fighting action.


If I didn't know this was Angela lying there in makeup, I would swear this was just a prop.

Freebird after her first major zombie fight.

Angela and Heather in a couple extra "after" cast photos.


In the end Heather got bloody, Angela couldn't wait to get out of makeup, my camera survived a near whomping from the mace and we finished right on schedule. As I mentioned, I already edited the footage and it looks pretty awesome.

So a huge thanks to Heather and Angela for coming out to do this today. And to Kim for getting some awesome pictures. And now for the Line of the Day:

Not sure when we're shooting next. I've got a tentative date set on the 28th, but that all hinges on a lot of things coming together perfectly. We'll see what happens.

Not a huge update, just some minor in between type stuff. We've made it through 4 days of shooting, I've got potentially 3 more this month, all fairly simple stuff that doesn't require zombie extras, just an opening sequence, a one on one fight scene with a hero zombie and a quick cutaway of one of the leads after a zombie attack.

Right now we stand at 13 of 24 scenes down. There's a couple shots I'd like to retake here and there that won't be an issue or take more than a couple minutes during another shoot. If all goes as planned, end of June should see us at 18 of 24, with 3 relatively decent shoots and 3 majorly complicated shoots. The complicated ones are the last 3 of the movie and things start getting pretty messy, lots of zombies, blood and FX stuff going on there.

I've taken stock of what's left to create and it's still a lot. I've got a long way to go before I can just stop working in between shoots. There's about 10 or so custom prosthetic pieces, ranging from various zombies, to our lead villain to some rather mess wounds. Most of the props are done, although I'm running low on supplies and need to restock somehow - no budget left so I'll have to scramble some funds up somehow. That's what the fundraiser's for, so feel free to help out.

For this weekend I've been working on a hero zombie character called Angry Zombie. The Angry Zombie is our first major action type sequence with the character Freebird.  Whenever we're doing a hero zombie, I try to go a little overboard with creating them, just to give it a bit more than just some ugly, dirty face painting.

Here's the sculpt for the Angry Zombie piece, it's drying out right now, should be doing the first copy of the piece tomorrow morning. You can see the mouth is pretty messed up, that's because we'll be using the Out of Mouth Dentures with it. I didn't sculpt it taking the extra bulk from the dentures into account on purpose, it didn't effect anything with the Half Zombie and the piece can be used on anyone afterwards, not just someone with dentures.

Rather than attempt to sculpt the teeth on the fly with the dental acrylic while it's curing, I sculpting out a set of teeth and moulded them. Makes for less work on future teeth and really speeds the process up and makes it look better.

Here's the Out of Mouth plates, not attached to the teeth caps yet, next to the mould for the teeth. They turned out much better than the first pair, although the bottom row is a little wonky - but Angry Zombie is a redneck zombie, so perfect teeth seems a little unnecessary.

I'll attached the pieces for the dentures later today, won't take too long - unfortunately I'll have to wait until the day of the shoot to fit them to the actor, so hopefully they aren't too off, but at least they're quick to adjust.

 As well, I'm working on more severed zombie heads and a the first stage of the Spiked Zombie Head Mace prop. The first time it's used it'll only have one spike, since it's been impaled on a sharped stick, it's only after this one scene does it get modified. So I had to do up another zombie head - using up nearly the last of the latex. And made a new spike as well. The head didn't turn out so awesome, the foam collapsed so it's a little more solid than I'd have liked. It'll still work just fine.

The staff had to be removed from the final one already made since I didn't have enough material to make a second. Kind of sucks, but it did make it go faster in the end since I don't have to paint a new one.

Here's the single spiked zombie head, I'll be attaching this pretty much as soon as I'm done writing all this.

And a new batch of messed up heads. I'd love to have made more, just ran out of supplies. Should be enough for the scene though so I'm not too worried. I will have to make more though before we can continue shooting.

I'll be wandering out to the woods to get some sticks to jam these on after they're painted tomorrow. Should be fun. And I get to shoot all this on my birthday too, can't think of a better way to spend it.

We finished Day Three of shooting on Moonshine of the Damned. This was a repeat of footage from last year and while I forgot my shot list for the day, it was all slightly familiar and we even finished pretty close to schedule.

We shot in a place we've been to before, the old car museum in Dunstaffnage. I think we're pretty fortunate since we have a good connection with the folks that own the place. It's a great location, no immediate plans to use it again, but nice to know it's always a decent option.

Things pretty much went as planned, nothing uneventful. We had a tricky schedule to work around and it all panned out. Had some on the fly makeup to do and it held things up a little, but not too much - and it came out decently at that.

PICTURES!!!

Me and John, getting things ready. Always great to work with John, he's always up for most anything.



This sequence was nearly dropped from this last draft of the script, but after some consideration I realized it wasn't slowing anything down and while it didn't add to anything, it was a funny little moment that was my weird homage to one of my favourite movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - a very vague reference, but one nonetheless.

We even got the original actor back to reprise the role, this time with better makeup. I neglected to get a decent shot of it though, kind of disappointed about that.


You can kind of see the makeup a little better here. James was blind in one eye but it didn't slow him down at all. Here James Davey (Piss Zombie) and John MacDonald (Bo) show off our jug of fake pee. I actually tinted it this year, for no real good reason other than just to do it - I've no idea if it'll even show up on camera as being yellow.

And I had to do this again.


Didn't get too many pictures inside, but the lighting wasn't great for still shots - looked awesome on video though.

Eventually Jillian showed up and we got down to work. This here shot was one of the few locked off shots because a zombie will eventually be bluescreened into it.

Doing some very simple makeup here, needed to do a messy gunshot wound to the face - something we skipped over last year. Nice to be able to add all these little touches back into it. I just did black around her actual eye, it'll be darkened out in post to appear deeper and remove her actual eye.

One of the last shots of the day, Jillian (Daisy) peeking out of the barn.

And that was it. It was a beautiful day, not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon either.

We got three cast shots this time around because of the stages of when people arrived and left and makeup.


That's it. Got another small shoot tomorrow, should be quick and relatively painless. For me at least.

And of course, here's the line of the day: