Horror Movie Franchises in Space
In honor of the space shuttle Endeavour flying over LA today, we’ve been thinking about the best horror movies set in outer space. In terms of quality, nothing can really beat Alien and its sequels/prequels. (Who else is excited about Prometheus coming out on DVD next month?)
Check out the 1979 trailer for Alien:
But who can forget the horror movie franchises that have gone to space simply because they can:
What horror franchise should go to space next? Saw in space? Paranormal Activity in space? Let us know in the comments!
By the way, if you haven’t already, check out our alien and sci fi props.
Dapper Cadaver on Syfy’s Hot Set
Did you see us on Hot Set on Syfy last night? If you missed it, check it out online: Crash Landed Astronaut episode. Congrats to Grace, who made her TV debut. It was so much fun working with this show! We can’t wait to see what they do next.
Halloween Casket Rentals in Los Angeles
Looking for a coffin to rent this Halloween? Book your casket rental now while some of the most gorgeous prop coffins in the LA area are still available. We have all kinds of caskets, from modern caskets to spooky toe-pincher coffins. Sale prices are listed on the category page. See the product description for much lower weekly rental prices. All coffin rentals will need to be picked up at our store near the Burbank Airport. Check out our Halloween casket rentals!
Zombie Costume Ideas: Game of Thrones White Walker
There are certain zombies that stand out from the horde. The White Walkers from HBO’s Game of Thrones are extremely unique and iconic. (Not to mention terrifying!) Why not try being a White Walker for Halloween? If you have the FX chops to recreate their blue-eyed leader, you have our total respect. Here is a closer look at the White Walker makeup and prosthetics by Creatures Inc., LTD. But if you have a long brown cape, some furs, ice FX makeup and zombie FX makeup, you should be able to make a pretty convincing White Walker.
Any great White Walker costume ideas or sources you’d like to share? Put them in the comments! And if you end up doing this for Halloween, send us your pics. We love to share.
Dapper Cadaver Featured on HalloweenCostumes.com
Nice write-up on the shop by Marlon over at HalloweenCostumes.com. Thanks guys! Check out the blog post.
Happy Back to School!
Happy back to school week, horror moms and dads! I hope your kids are adjusting to the classroom better than Wednesday and Pugsley.
It’s Alive!
Halloween 2012 is upon us and through the power of mad science this blog has miraculously come back to life! Stay tuned for fun Halloween madness.
Halloween Zombies with Buckets Tutorial
Short on cash but want some scary zombies for your front yard this Halloween? We’ve put together a handy tutorial on how to make zombies with buckets!
Start with this:
End up with this:
They are perfect on a front lawn popping up between tombstones.
Read the full Halloween how-to here: How to Make Zombies with Buckets.
GO: The Hive Gallery Haunted House Themed Show
The Hive Gallery Haunted House Themed Show
When: Saturday 10/1 8 – 12:30 am
Where: The Hive Gallery, 729 S. Spring St.
Price: $8 door / $5 with costume
Info: Up to 60 artists take on the haunted house theme for the Hive Gallery and Studios show this month. Featured artists include Jamie Johnson, 3RDI and Macsorro. Plus bands, burlesque, sideshow, tarot reading, live painting and fantastic people in fantastic costumes! For more info, see the Hive Gallery website.
New Photo Galleries
We’ve been getting fancy with Flickr and just added some new photo galleries to the Dapper Cadaver website. Check them out:
- About Us – We added a gallery of photos inside the shop and production stills.
- Props in Action – This new page includes a gallery of production stills and a list of some of our clients.
- Dapper Cadaver Models – This new page includes a gallery of Dapper Cadaver model photos by Marianne Williams.
And one hot model shot for the road:
Enjoy!
The Walking Dead Zombie Costume Inspiration
Eulyn Womble costume designer for The Walking Dead - via the AMC TV blog
Starting on your The Walking Dead zombie Halloween costume already? Get inspired by costume designer Eulyn Womble as she literally slashes and burns the outfits you’ll be seeing in season 2, starting on October 16th. There are a lot of online guides on how to make a zombie costume. This Threadbanger video has a good visual guide to distressing and bloodying zombie clothes starting at 6:36 (with great zombie makeup tips earlier). But most don’t include taking a lighter to the edges for a cool burned-out effect. Watch the Eulyn Womble video at AMC.
Or if you’re strapped for time, Rubie’s Costumes has licensed The Walking Dead costumes that are available at sites like SpiritHalloween.com BuyCostumes.com or at your local Halloween store.
Freaky Beetles Prey On Frogs
The small prey does a little shimmy and attracts the attention of the predator. The big predator lunges at the prey and attempts to take a bite, but the prey latches on to its jaws. No matter how hard the predator shakes, it can’t shake the prey which jumps up onto its back and makes it clear who is the prey and who is the predator here. As the new predator sinks its jaws into its much larger prey, the big prey is paralyzed and will remain paralyzed as the little predator devours it alive down to the bones.
No, this isn’t the Alien prequel. These are the gutsy ground beetles of the genus Epomis that take on and kill much larger amphibians even as little beetle larvae.
Epomis Beetle Larvae Attacking Frog - via Wired Science & PLoS ONE
Quite a discovery by Tel Aviv University researchers Gil Wizen and Avital Gasith, who described the strategy of Epopmis beetle larvae as an “extremely rare anti-predator behavior.”
Epomis beetle larvae in action
Epomis adult beetle in action
(note: not for the weak of stomach)
To learn more, check out the full study or the story at Wired Science.
Haunt Openings & Link Round-Up
Knotts Scary Farm and Universal Halloween Horror Nights open this weekend. If you go, let us know which mazes and scare zones were the best in the comments section.
Eli Roth at the Hostel Maze at Universal Halloween Horror Nights - via his tumblr
If you are staying home and getting your scary kicks on the interwebs, check out the links below:
- The Human Centipede 2 is out and receiving some scathing, but highly entertaining reviews. Quote from the Bloody Disgusting review: “The Human Centipede 2 serves as nothing more than a reminder that there is no God, and, if He does exists, then he sent Tom Six as punishment for our misdeeds.”
- MTV Geek is featuring gore-geous art from Roman Dirge’s new book Taxidermied.
- Scare Zone has a great post on common haunt themes with a helpful list of where you can find them.
- Suicide Girls has posted the super hot third chapter of The Killswitch Review. If you like to balance out your steady diet of horror with a little gothic/sci-fi steaminess.
Happy freaky Friday!
GO: The Empire of Death Book Signing
The Empire of Death Book Signing
Tomb of Enrique Torres Bélon (Lampa, Peru) from Empire of Death
St. Valerius (Weyarn, Germany) from Empire of Death
When: Saturday 9/24 7 – 10 pm
Where: La Luz de Jesus, 4633 Hollywood Blvd.
Price: Free! The book is $50 and worth every penny.
Info: Dr. Paul Koudounaris presents and signs his new book, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses. The book reveals religious places where human remains were laid to rest en masse on four continents. The word “amazing” has been over-used in our society. However, “amazing” is the right word to describe the power of Dr. Paul K’s photographs of the bone churches, jewel-encrusted skeletons and decorated skulls. I can’t wait to read the book and learn more about the stories and cultures behind the gorgeous images. Original photographs will be on display at La Luz de Jesus until October 3rd. Learn more at La Luz de Jesus and see a sample of what will be on display. The official publisher site has full pages to view. If you are out of town, you can pre-order the book on Amazon. Highly recommended.
Yummy: Gunther von Häagen-Dazs
A delicious new video from our pals at Art of Bleeding:
If you are in SF on 9/30, make sure to see Art of Bleeding perform at Chicken John’s book release!
For Immediate Release: 13 Halloween Prop Ideas for Killer Halloween Party Decor
We just sent out a press release with 13 Halloween party themes and killer prop ideas that will help you out-do the extreme haunters down the block. Here are some of my favorites.
1. Theme: Crime scene. Killer prop: Plastic blood pools. Guide your guests through a bloody crime scene without leaving fake blood tracks through the rest of your house. Bloody shows like Dexter use shiny red plastic blood pools to get the look of wet blood without the mess.
5. Theme: Vampire. Killer prop: Safety wooden stakes. Divide your blood-sucking guests into Team Edward, Team Bill, Team Eric and Team Dracula. Select vampire hunters and give them rubber wooden stakes. Let the hunt begin!
Safety wooden stake – $15 on sale!
8. Theme: Extreme gore. Killer prop: Realistic corpse. If you have some over-the-top bloody Halloween corpses, add one extremely realistic corpse to the bunch and wait until a concerned guest approaches you to let you know someone may have died of fright.
Anatomical male Joe with hair – $900
13. Theme: Dinosaur park. Killer prop: Dinosaur skulls. To really wow the neighborhood, rent replica dinosaur skulls and bones. For some unforgettable fun, bury some dinosaur bones in sand for the kids to find dinosaurs in their own backyard.
50 piece dinosaur skull rental for 1 week – $2,200
Read the rest of the release with all 13 Halloween party decor ideas! If you have any friends that work in the media, please pass this on.
Barnum Brown & The First T. Rex
First T. Rex Skeleton at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History around 1950 - from NPR
NPR ran a great story last week called Bone to Pick: First T. Rex Skeleton Complete at Last. Carl Mehling, curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, found a stray bone labeled 973, identified as belonging to the first T. Rex and gave it to the Carnegie Museum to finally complete the first T. Rex skeleton.But the best parts of the story for me were about the man who discovered the first T. Rex skeleton and sold it to the Carnegie Museum in the first place: Barnum Brown, “the Indiana Jones of dinosaur hunters”.
Barnum Brown in 1914 doing field work in Montana - from Wikipedia
Named after P.T. Barnum, Brown was a pioneering dinosaur hunter who traveled extensively, dressed nattily, lived through personal tragedy and had many a romance, including his second wife Lillian who wrote a memoir called I Married A Dinosaur. He also served as a dinosaur expert on such films as Fantasia. Remember the amazing dinosaurs in The Rite of Spring? There is a good Barnum Brown biography at Strange Science if you want to learn more. I’m going to have to pick up the book on him that came out last year, Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus rex. From the review at the Smithsonian blog, it sounds like a great read.
GO: Suspiria at Hollywood Forever & CarnEvil Musical
For your horror-lovin’ enjoyment in LA this weekend:
Suspiria at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
When: Friday 9/16, gates: 6:30 pm / movie: 8:00 pm
Where: Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard at Gower
Price: No reservation necessary, $10 donation tickets available at gate, $10 parking
Info: Bring blankets, drinks and picnic dinner for this screening of Dario Argento’s classic Suspiria below the stars. Amazing, visually stunning ’70s horror film by a true master. Even if you’ve seen it before, there’s nothing like seeing it in a cemetery with friends. No one under 17 will be admitted without a parent or guardian. Learn more…
When: Friday 9/16 & Saturday 9/17 at 8:00 pm
Where: Sacred Fools Theater Company, 660 N. Heliotrope Drive
Price: $25 – buy online
Caticorn Magic
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Years ago in a haunted house in Azusa, BJ found an amateur taxidermy bobcat. But only half of it. And with a nail sticking out of its nose for some strange reason. Always the resourceful propmaker, BJ stuck a horn over the nail. Voila! The Dapper Cadaver Caticorn was born.
When legendary sideshow artist Mark Frierson bought the Caticorn earlier this year, we knew he would create something magical with it. Step right up and see:
The Amazing Three-Eyed Rocky Mountain Caticorn!
Mark fully restored it, moved the horn back to the center of its head, added a third eye, a snake-like tongue and pheasant wings. Simply gorgeous. And this is coming from a girl who likes cats, unicorns and most of all, supremely mystical three-eyed flying caticorns.
Check out more amazing sideshow gaffs and wonders on the Frierson Studios Facebook page. Don’t forget to hit the Like button!
Summer Blockbusters: Props in Action Roundup
I can’t believe that summer is almost over. We’d like to give a quick shout-out to the summer blockbusters that used our props.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon used our bones, including some of our elephant bones.
Cowboys & Aliens used our animal props.
Final Destination 5 used our safety weapons.
Hope you get a chance to check these out in theaters. If not, that’s what DVDs, On Demand and Netflix are for!
Site Upgrades & Outages
We’re upgrading some of our sites this week! CasualtySimulation.com will be down for the next 24-48 hours or so. On Thursday, DapperCadaver.com will be down for an hour or so and may be a little buggy throughout the day. If you have an urgent order, please give us a call! (818) 771-0818.
Gilded Maggots
If you’ve ever been face down in a creek and seen the twigs and grains of sand sprout legs and scuttle away from you, then you you’re familiar with caddis fly larvae. These little underwater worms glue dirty bits of the world around them together to form a shell. The ground moves, the perfect hiding place, they are clever but they are not pretty.
However, the mind of this worm is not only clever, it’s downright artistic. The shells that they make form little patterns and stripes. In a brain smaller then the dot of this i, the caddis fly possesses artistic intent.
And when put in more opulent environs they create jewelry
Conan and The Giant Sloth
I got the call Thursday, the 21st of January from NBC. “We need a full size Dinosaur Skeleton and we need it tomorrow.”
Conan had been doing sketches all week supposedly designed to cost the studio big cash as a comic form of revenge for his abruptly ended contract. He had previously claimed to “buy” an exotic sports car and a race horse. I’m glad to know that for his ultimate revenge he wanted a dinosaur. I know ever since I was 5 I wanted a revenge dinosaur. There’s a saying in my house, “revenge is a dish best served dinosaur”
The thing is, Dinosaurs are huge. We all know that, right, but we lose perspective on how big they are when we see them in a museum. I run a 5,000 square foot warehouse and an adult T-Rex is longer then my building and taller then my ceiling. And while the average millionaire has sports cars and horses to spare, unless you’re Nicholas Cage, you just don’t HAVE Dinosaurs laying around. I had a few smaller dinosaurs ready to go, including an 11 foot long Dimetrodon, but everyone knows Dimetrodon can’t hold the hose to spray the picasso with caviar. So that was out.
The wrong way to display fossils.
The right way to disply fossils
I was able to set aside a giant ground sloth that was about to be installed in a museum, but he had the weekend free. It was a rental, not a purchase, from a prop shop, not the Smithsonian, and cost nowhere near the $65 million dollars they said on the air. The bones are not real, but they are a museum quality reconstruction. The skeleton we used now stands in some solemn museum hall somewhere, curators and patrons blissfully unaware of Mr. Sloth’s wild weekend.
He partied with all the audience and crew, and I’m proud to say may go down in history as the most monumentally absurd set piece ever used in a comedy sketch. We here at Dapper Cadaver are proud we got to contribute to such an epic episode.
We still have access to the molds and can do the same prop for anyone else who needs one.
Buy it now! It’s not $65 Million!
Halloween Decoration Scenarios 2: A Haunted House
Haunted House Decorations
Exterior: The Cemetery
Leading up to the doorway are dozens of gothic tombstones, strewn with moss and ivy. Amidst the headstones are larger more elaborate tombstones, sad faced angels, and the twisted branches of a tree screaming and half man. Set in folding chairs in the cemetery are a couple of decomposed corpse props enjoying the night air, playing cards and drinking booze. Around the doorway several rubber skeletons seem to be climbing the walls
Entryway: Fortune Teller
The first scenario guests come to in the Haunted House will be a fortune tellers parlor. Décor includes occult oddities such as the mystic hand, the hand of glory, phrenology head, fetal skeleton, cat skeleton, human skulls, Indonesian devils, the bust of a mourning widow and a severe bearded man, and several haunted portraits, whose vintage characters transform into ghosts and ghouls as people pass by. At the center table sits an actual fortune teller who welcomes guests, tells fortunes throughout the night, and tells the tale of the evenings cursed surroundings. The glowing light of plasma balls illuminates the room. An anamatronic fortune teller can be set up as well.
“This room is the very spot where 100 years ago the wicked young baron liked to torture his servants to death for sport. Dozens of poor indentured souls were brutally murdered and buried in the very floors and wall the guest now walk on. The Young Baron himself was never found, but his damned ghost now walks the halls.”
The opening to the rest of the party is through a curtain marked with signs such as “Beware” and “Haunted House”
Inside the House:
Inside the house is the scene of the horror, the room where the young baron tortured his victims. Hanging from the ceiling are several gibbet cages with spotlights pointed at them to cast an eerie criss-cross of shadows. Hooks and chains also hang from the walls and ceilings. The furniture all has chains and shackles coming off of it to hold victims in place. In the rafters hang ghosts of all sizes, large skull headed ghosts, medium ghosts with arms, and small ghosts that are little more than shrouded heads. Cobweb covered heads, screaming heads and reaching hands are coming out of the walls. Around the floor are gothic iron candelabras and on each table are prop bones, skulls, ribcages, and table top candelabras. A bloody ax hangs behind the bar, which has been outfitted with blacklights. The specialty of the house? Ectoplasm gin fizzes and Ectoplasm vodka fizzes. The drinks glow neon blue in the blacklight. Use tonic water in a vintage bottle or with a homemade label marked ectoplasm. The quinine in tonic water is the only food that naturally glows under blacklight. A cobweb covered skeleton in a bartenders uniform stands behind the bar. Another sits on a barstool, passed out drunk, his glass turned sideways and rubber blood leaking out. Behind the bar amidst the bottles are human body parts suspended in jars of glowing fluid and skulls that seem to float in the air.
Torture equipment such as guillotines, interrogation chairs and stocks are set up so guests can have their last photos taken screaming in pain.
Everything in the main room is covered in cobwebs. Blood drips in the bathroom, and patrons find they often leave with blood on their hands, a trick done by powdering various items with magic blood powder, which looks invisible but turns to blood when wet.
The floor is littered with skull piles and lights flicker in the fog. A ghoulish butler stands guard, watching, breathing, laughing. Bat demons fly above.
