Michael Meyers as Pinhead
"Well let's see. I am basically a halloween freak. Have been since I was very
young. I think in my entire life I have never worn a store bought costume. I always
tend to get a little carried away. My costumes have ranged from "Pinhead" to "Predator",
"The Kurgan" from "Highlander" to "Lobo" of DC Comics to "Freddy Krueger". The
list goes on and on.
This particular costume I made to go to a huge Halloween Party that used to be an annual thing for the Pasadena (California) J.C.s. It would take place at a sprawling condemned mountainside Sanitarium called La Vina~, (until they tore it down and built homes in it's place a few years ago.) Anyway, there were literally thousands of people who would go to these things, and I was more or less hired to decorate for them.
Being a huge Hellraiser fan, I thought I would try my hand at the old Pin-man. And I wanted to make my wife the female Cenobite, (with a couple of extreme touches of my own). Here's how I went about it:
I took plaster molds of my wife's head, and then my own, (that was a bit of
a challenge). Then I cast positives in plaster of paris. I sculpted the cenobite
characteristics in clay onto the plaster busts. Then I pulled molds from those
and cast foam latex appliances in those molds. My wife and I both have nearly
waist-length hair, so what I did to conceal it was to actually sew hoods out
of Lycra that go around under the chin, (kind of like a scuba hood), and cement
the prosthetics to them. This made them very durable and took the stress off
of the actual apliances. The facial applances were glued directly to our faces,
and then I airbrushed the whole thing while we had them on.
The nails were real stainless steel right from Home Depot, with the points snipped off. I made little sockets out of 1/8" cross sections of the plastic tubing type Q-tips, that were glued into the prosthetics, so I could just slip the nails in when I got where I was going, so as not to knock them off in transit. Even though I am 6'2", 230, and fully capable of taking care of myself, the costume was relativlely cumbersom so I hired a bodyguard to keep people at a distance and from knocking any of the nails into my melon, Ouch! My wife's head peice was designed to look like a section of flesh was stripped from the center of her head, (kinda like a sideways mohawk), leaving the muscle tissues exposed. Then the front and back peices are pulled together with barbed wire and and massive fish hooks. The hooks were real with the ends snipped off, (althought they still dug into here head a bit, what a trooper she was), and the barbed-wire I fashioned from lead solder. It looked great!
I sewed the costumes from backed vinyl, which looked like leather. This was a very arduous process because going into this, I had never used a sewing machine. Baptism by fire. Anyway, I used closed cell foam, foam rubber and wire to give some of the parts rigidity. Some hidden parts were made of lycra to facilitate flexibility and vetilation. If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn't use vinyl as it does not breath, and it is very heavy. With your face completely covered with rubber, the last thing you want is wrap you body in plastic."
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