The Silence of the Lambs Guard Prop

The Prop as He Appeared in 1994
The movie themed house occurred in 1994, within a year of the movie Silence of the Lambs. Believe it or not, I am not much of a horror movie fan. However, I had seen this movie on video after it received its Oscars. I was in charge of the Wyandotte Haunted House in 1994 and I thought that the security guard scene might work well in the movie house. Fortunately, I was able to find a photo of the finished prop in a fan magazine that I could use as a reference. (Yeah, this is back before I had a DVD player that I could just freeze the scene and copy the image.)

I started with a one piece work jumpsuit and built the arms and legs up using foam and 2x4s. The chest was actually a 2x4 structure into which I stapled foam painted red. This matched the photo of the prop fairly well. I purchased a fake latex chest cover and cut a flap out of it to match my reference photo. The head was created using Model Magic and the polyurethane foam skulls just like all my other heads. The hands were latex props as well. (Lots of latex left hands out there, not so many latex right hands. The hair was as wig that was as close a match as I could find, chopped up badly.

The Disfunctional Prop
After the movie house closed, I took the head and put it into the bins I used to store all of my head props in at the time. There it stayed for several years.

When I decided to start the HEDZ business, it occurred to me that this head was never going to be used for anything else because it just wasn't that interesting as a stand-alone prop.  It did have a nice buildup of 'skin' on it, though, and could save me some prototype buildup time.. I had been tossing the idea of a medical Frankenstein experiment gone wrong around in my head. I decided that the Silence of the Lambs head would make a nice basis for this head, so I cut some of the skin off and re-sculpted the piece. Viola! It became the HEDZ prop Disfunctional - seen at right. (Ok, it took a little more time than 'Viola!', but you get the idea).