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The OREGONIAN
Modern Frankenstein
creates frightening monsters

E. Larry Day, a professional makeup artist and mask designer and builder, displays a few of his creations in the workshop at his Portland studio. On his knee is Man Eater," a mask mold of a lion’s head munching on the head of a human.

10/30/88
By Nelson Pickett
Photos By Roger Jensen
of The Oregonian staff

E. Larry Day turned an early fascination with the bizarre into a successful career as a professional makeup artist, monster-maker and designer of elaborate and gory special effects.
"If you have seen it done in a film, we can do it here," Day said from his Portland workshop, where he operates Chimera Studios. "I’ve been known to do some weird things."
Resting on a bench in his workshop is a disgusting-looking octopus perched atop a human head with a long green tentacle snaking out of the man's eye socket. That creation is called "Sea Food."
Another mask, "Man Eater," is a huge lion head with an open mouth revealing the bloody head of a human inside.
Some masks have parts that move with the help of cable-articulated mechanisms and hydraulic and pneumatic devices.
Other masks, stored among coffins and skeletons, include life-like images of George Bush, Michael S. Dukakis, Jessie Jackson and Alfred Hitchcock.
Day says he sells his mask molds to a company, The Great Cover Up, for worldwide distribution. He is now designing masks to be marketed for Halloween of 1989.
He uses the talents of about 40 Portlanders, many of whom are actors, who help with the sculpting, molding and detailing.
For nearly 16 years, the 29-year·old Portland native has been creating fantasies and admits he suffers from a Frankenstein syndrome:
"It's great to build something and see it come alive."

Although he once spent months working with movie companies in Hollywood, Day said he prefers to work in Portland with independent film groups. He said he also enjoys working on industrial and commercial accounts.
He said he idolized the late Walt Disney and would never forget a Disney quote: "It's kind of fun to do the impossible."

Day said he decided at age 14 to follow a career as a makeup artist.
As a youngster he said he spent a lot of time in libraries, reading what he could about makeup.
He learned to make stage blood as a child and recalls creating his first "scars" from congealed latex paint.

He sold fellow students what looked like serious "paper cuts' that could he glued to their hands. When these "injuries" were pointed out to sympathetic teachers, Day's devices would give students a good excuse to leave class.

Day said he later created synthetic flesh so realistic that it is used to train nurses in certain techniques at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Day said that while at Marshall High School in Portland, he was an off-beat student who liked monsters and nearly got expelled for his various exploits.
He said his counselors could not find a college or vocational school that could teach him makeup. His interest, he said, was far beyond learning to become a mere cosmetologist.
"So I got books and studied and said, ‘I can do it.' I eventually learned beauty makeup and later monster makeup, and one is just as much fun as the other."
Day said while major Hollywood companies that film productions in Portland benefit the local economy, they don't help the city's few professional makeup artists.
"They come to town and offer us much less than we are paid for commercial or industrial projects here," he said. "So they end up hiring local cosmetologists, who don't do a good job, then say Portland has no good makeup artists."
Other facets of Day's operation includes building prototypes for inventors and supplying Halloween haunted houses with masks, actors and special effects.
He also helps children who have been traumatized after watching realistic horror films.

He said those children, referred to him by schools, tour his shop, touch the monsters and masks and learn how they work in an attempt to defuse their fears.

Despite his work with gore, Day says he is the most squeamish person he knows when it comes to viewing real blood, particularly his own.
"I recently cut my foot on glass and had to have a friend bandage it," he said. "I just can't handle it because I get sick."

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