Meet the Guy Making Horror Movie Masks for 40 Years

[Narrator] These other worldly masks and monsters,

along with thousands and thousands of others,

were made by this man,

a master of monster masks

and creator of countless creatures you know.

Seriously, look at his IMDB.

[eerie, upbeat music]

You'll notice it looks a little big.

Welcome to my studio.

This is where I do my job

of designing creatures for movies and television

and video games.

[Interviewer] Alright, can you draw something

on the fly for us?

I probably could. Yeah.

[Interviewer] Alright, draw something aquatic,

ancient, and a hunter.

[soft music]

I would say that the first step

is just start laying down geometric shapes

and the large forms

to try to get the look you're after.

Some gills.

What I like to do is sketch it out

and then get more definition.

There're pencils and then there're inks.

So the pencils establish the rough layout,

and then inking is where you really define

the specificity of your look.

I don't know if this necessarily captures

exactly what was described.

It's a fish man.

I don't know if it gets across hunter.

It certainly looks mean.

[Interviewer] And what's his name?

I don't know, he looks like a Dave to me.

Dave's kind of a jerk.

He's not really a monster, but he's a monster of a person.

[soft, upbeat music]

I think monsters represent a powerful being,

but it's something that is concrete

and can be dealt with very directly.

David slays Goliath.

King Kong falls off a very tall building.

These dangerous bad things

can just be dealt with, and they're gone, and it's over.

And that's kind of a fantasy because

rooting out evil in real life is much more complex

and much more difficult than that.

[soft, upbeat music]

[Narrator] Putting down his pencil and pen,

Jordu picks up a new set of tools

to sculpt, mold, and paint his designs

from the page into a three dimensional mask.

In order to start the sculpting process,

I take water based clay

and I just start building up a face shape.

And I'm just gonna do this outta my imagination

for expediency sake.

I'm just sort of establishing some unusual features

and, to be honest, I don't exactly know where it's gonna go.

You know, as a matter of fact,

it might change a great deal as I go.

I use an enormous amount of clay.

Every month, I probably order several hundred pounds.

[soft, eerie music]

One of the things about creating

is that you do get into kind of a zen mode.

Time goes by,

and you don't even realize how much time is passing.

The act of creating is so pleasurable.

I mean, it's addicting.

It really is.

So I'm putting eye forms in which are just spheres,

plastic spheres that establish the shape of the eyeball

that once we mold it, will make a nice clean shape in there

because the plaster will

record the nice clean shape of the sphere.

But what we're always going for is

what is going to bring us the most character?

What is going to affect the viewer the most?

If it's adding teeth, it's adding teeth.

If it's giving the eyes a more sinister feel,

if it's scrapping it and starting over,

the whole point is to

bring out the most and the best character you can.

So it's not necessarily going to look exactly like this,

but almost all of this is just by way of establishing

the kind of feel I want.

I know I want these horns to be full of intricate detail.

I've added these sort of braided looks to them,

and, eventually, I want them to kind of feel

almost like tree branches or gnarled roots.

So everything I've done is very deliberate

in the sense that it takes my character

to where I think it should go.

[Narrator] Jordu's love of monsters

has been a central part of his imagination

since his childhood.

I grew up in the 1970s and the early 80s,

and latex masks

were becoming, actually, a very competitive art form.

I wanted to know how these things were made

from a very early age.

So when I was 14 or so,

I started trying to figure out how to make latex masks

on my own.

I got little snippets of information

from magazines like Fangoria and Cinemagic,

and I started to kind of get a general idea.

The first really professional mask I ever did

was a very simple demon mask that I did when I was about 17.

It had a slick finish to it

that I just hadn't achieved before.

Eventually, I got offers

from mask companies throughout the United States

to come work for them.

The first film I worked on

was a piece of [beep] called The Bride of Re-Animator.

It's the sequel to The Re-Animator,

which is a kind of fun movie,

but the Bride of Re-Animator is terrible.

[Narrator] But no matter the movie, he loves making masks.

[soft, upbeat music]

After a multi-day process

of layering plaster onto a sculpture

and pouring latex into a plaster mold,

a final shape of a mask is produced.

So now we're at the beginning of the painting process.

And we've got our blank latex piece here,

and I mixed up a base color in acrylic paint,

and I'm just gonna start by brushing it on

with a big chip brush just like this.

The colors you use and the base colors you choose

can be anything under the sun.

It all depends on the effect you want it to have on viewers.

I want people to feel like this is sort of a whimsical,

almost H.R. Pufnstuf kind of character, so.

For you young kids,

that was a show on TV like, 50 years ago.

Then the next step I often do is spattering.

So I take a very thinned down acrylic ink,

a cut down chip brush,

and I start spattering the color on it.

The point of the spattering

is to make the skin more convincing

because skin of almost any kind isn't just one flat color,

and this helps to kind of simulate that appearance.

It's really just a matter of what I think is going to work.

And I've painted so many things

that it becomes sort of second nature.

You know what's going to work and what isn't going to work.

[soft, upbeat music]

[airbrush hissing]

Now, I'm using an airbrush,

which is to a spray paint can

what a baseball bat is to a toothpick.

It can do extremely fine mists of paint.

In fact, this particular airbrush

can get down to a hair's width.

Painting realistic characters

means layers and layers of color

and blending them as artfully as you can

and that's how you will result in good looking art.

[Narrator] After painting in the eye details,

Jordu applies his own epoxy mixture

to create a natural wet look for the eyes and nose

as a final touch.

So this is what a finished mask looks like.

It's got the epoxy on the eyes and the mouth and the nose.

The paint job is finished.

You could always take it further with hair work

or more intricate painting if you chose.

But for now, this is essentially how I do a mask.

[Narrator] This is just one example of a finished mask.

Jordu could add infinite details to make each mask unique.

So this is one of my masks.

This one is meant to feel considerably more realistic.

You can see that there's

a tremendous amount of detail in it.

This is an example of mask making

taken to its most elaborate conclusion.

Most of the hair is glued on in the back,

and then as you approach the hairline,

it's punched in one by one with a needle.

The sculpture isn't very complicated,

but the hair makes it feel very convincing.

This one is my interpretation

of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

This one also comes complete with a translucent acrylic fin

that has to be cut and made separately.

To attach the fin, you have to go in with layer after layer

of thickened rubber to put it into the trough

that I sculpted into the mask,

and that way it's totally part of the mask.

It's really cool to be [soft music]

well known among the mask community at large.

But I think the most gratifying thing

is knowing that I've influenced a generation of mask makers

who now are doing their own stuff based on my work.

And there're a lot of young up and comers

who are quite extraordinary.

Way better than I was at that age.

What's interesting to me

is that I've taken such a niche part of the planet,

something that's really quite absurd,

and turned it into my life's passion.

It's endlessly fascinating to me.

There's something about the idea

of coming up with a new life form

and breathing enough life into it

that other people believe it.

It's just the most exciting thing in the world for me.