About the Blog

What is this blog about?

As the title should give a hint, it's an archive of makeup effects. Mostly a visual archive, but also an informative one as well. 

It's been a lot harder to find visual references for especially 'monster' effects in recent years, especially with the surge of shitty wikis and listicles. 

And even a bad film - and quite a few of the films covered here are bad - has talented people working on it. Each article attempts to tell their story in their own words.  

What do you mean by 'makeup effects'?

It's a bit much to get into 'special makeup effects' generally encompasses sculpting, prosthetic appliances, masks, creature suits, puppetry and animatronics. 

So you mean 'special effects'?

Well, not really. Quite often it's a matter of what's in a name.

'Special effects' means how you get your on-screen chaos - car explosions, gusts of wind and squibs. 'Visual effects' used to mean back in the day matte paintings and miniatures, but these days mostly refers to CGI. 

'Makeup effects', generally, is a transformative artform; how to turn a person several years older, or with a deformed visage, or into a totally non-human creature.  And when puppetry or suits are in the equation, how to keep the illusion of unreality going even further.

So is this all about makeup?

Prosthetic makeups yes, 'straight' makeups no.

For example, an alien achieved via facepaint, contacts and a wig would be ignored, and  'straight' violence makeups - cuts, bruises, a squib coated in makeup - also ignored.

This isn't to denigrate 'straight' makeup work or wigmaking which are artforms in their own right, but more setting a limit of what we have to cover!

Ah, you mean practical effects?

Half true.

This isn't for *every* type of practical effect in a film, as much as I love the art of miniature effects, matte paintings and so on. While there will be articles on stopmotion monsters and puppets, they have to be, how should I say, simulating life?

Or to be a bit less high-falutin', yes it's gotta be monster puppets. 

So there's no CGI stuff on here?

For the most part, yep.

The few CGI 'creature effects' included in this archive are from early 2000s films, when computer-generated effects required physical maquettes to be sculpted first, and the field still had more of a connection to practical miniature effects.

Is this a monster blog?

Yes and no. The focus originally was on 'monsters', but the scope expanded for a few reasons.

Generally, yes this blog has a focused on 'creature effects', as thats what the bulk of special makeup effects has went to realizing.

However, having it be just styled on 'monsters' opens up semantics bullshit on 'what is a monster', something we really can't be arsed with.

Add in that gore makeups, surrealistic transformation makeups, and disfigurement or disabled makeups are included quite often. None of these are 'monsters'. 

With disabled makeups in particular; Christopher Tucker's makeup effects work on The Elephant Man is some of the best in film history, but it would be purely bad taste to have the word 'monster' over an article for a film dramatizing a real person's life.

And really, the focus of the blog was always to highlight artist's work, and it's deeply unfair to exclude that based on some pedantic criteria. So a more general approach was preferable. 

Is this a gore effects blog?

Again, yes and no.  

While elaborate gore makeup effects are included, generally it has to be in a film or series already with unique or fantastical makeup effects.

So while there will be articles on certain slasher films, don't expect articles on the Saw, Final Destination or CSI franchises any time soon.

Do you specialize in genres? 

A little bit.

The horror, science-fiction and fantasy genres do indeed get the lion's share of coverage, because that's where most of cinema's creative makeup effects lies in. 

But there are specific arthouse or drama films which were seminal moments in makeup effects, and thus are also included on the archive.

I noticed you never say what the movie itself is like?

Because this isn't a review blog, end of. 

If you want to know more about a film, then IMDB or Letterboxd should be your next stop.

Similarly articles will not have any individual warnings on gruesome imagery. Again, this is a mostly horror-focused blog, and grisly or uncanny visuals should be expected regularly.

Why is there no concept art or design drawings in your articles?

Okay, so this one's moreso to make articles easier to read, and to slightly ease up my workload.

Every production out there has concept art done for it to some degree, often a lot! In some film productions, the concept art reaches to 100s of drawings!

That's too much to put in the average article, let alone thinking how to space it out. I try to only include photos of the physical props and makeups in action.

Maybe some day I can post the design drawing in different articles though. 

Where do you get all these images from? 

For the most part, many of them are already publicly available; online promotional photos, screenshots of behind the scenes featurettes, and scans of magazines such as Fangoria, Cinefantastique, Cinefex, Starlog or Gorezone. 

Quite a few others are found from the social media accounts of various makeup artists, and for some cases have been kindly sent to us by the makeup artists personally after contacting them. We are always thankful for their help!

And as a last resort, screenshots from the films or episodes themselves are used too, if there's little or no behind the scenes images that screenshots are the only way to go, but the language of filmmaking often means it's not the best view of a makeup or creature suit!

No ownership is claimed on *any* images on the blog, and this entire project is just a hobby project for fun. Or at least scratching an obsessive itch.