Alien Within

The Alien Within prop was designed to be a head which had an alien (natch) coming up some poor guy's throat and out of his mouth and other places as it (for some strange reason) attacked its host. When you think about this logically, it makes no sense at all because that means the dumb alien's host would soon be dead and he or possibly she would have to move on to more fertile pastures. But let us not tary over logic or the intelligence of parasite aliens, shall we?

My friend Randy Robertson helped me with this one, He almost certainly did the wonderful paint job. (I made him paint all the eyes because he was so good at it.) When I came up with the concept, I knew I had to have at least one tentacle going into an eye socket. That's a nod to the horror principle that you must show the thing that will make people squirm the most. (And, in horror movies, you must then make a joke about it to ease the squirming. Go fig.)

The idea is admittedly very similar to (or perhaps stolen from) the popular chest-burster from the movie Alien (although they probably stole it from somewhere else...). I had put together a (very lame) Alien chest burster room for the Wyandotte Jaycees haunted house the year before this was made and I suppose that was fresh in my mind. If so, it translated nicely into HEDZ line.

This was one of the HEDZ props that was designed specifically for mass production, so no re-modeling was required (as it was on several of the other props. Looking at the alien in the mouth, it seemed I had learned a bit about making props with easy-to-mold, yet still effective recesses in them. (You have to avoid undercuts in molds - spaces where the hole tucks under the outer skin.) Anyhow, below you se the, er, 'beauty' that is Alien Within. This might have made a nice mask.

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