Next to BJ Winslow’s office desk stands an iron maiden carved from wood. Instead of housing a torture victim, it’s filled with a stack of emailed requests from people looking for shark eyes, a two-headed fetus, a bottle of edible blood or a ‘mutilation combo’ – BJ’s special deal on a package of severed arms, legs, torso and head; burned or bloodied to your specifications.

But BJ’s not a freaky serial killer. He owns Dapper Cadaver, a prop shop in Sun Valley, California, which supplies terrifying set-pieces for films, nightmarish music videos, haunted houses and flamboyant parties.

He’s made ghoulish corpses and bloodied limbs for Pirates Of The Caribbean, Midnight Meat Train and Saw, and regularly supplies props for Dexter, Law And Order and Cold Case. If there’s a severed hand involved, it’s likely to be his hand. If there’s blood involved, it’s likely to be his blood.

ROCK! HORROR!

Today, BJ’s drying out some fake blood made of resin on the lid of a 100-year-old steel casket, and forming it into a splatter shape. “We probably have 10 projects on the go each day, which makes it hard to remember every movie scene we’ve made,” BJ says. “But I do remember the music videos, because the band members often come in to pick out the props themselves, and some of them are also private collectors.”

The collectors include Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Korn, My Chemical Romance and Slipknot – and some have strange requests. “The father of one of the Slipknot members came in once to buy a severed head for his son as a present,” BJ tells Bizarre. “And a member of Cypress Hill once asked me to help him build a historically accurate Aztec temple for a unique haunted house of ancient rituals and human sacrifices…”

BJ can make most nightmares come true. But if he can’t, he knows someone who can. The iron maiden in his office was bought from a man who commissions pieces from an Indonesian tribe of four-foot-tall wood carvers. The same man also sold BJ a door carved with a six-armed Devil, overlooking a grotesque scene of people shagging each other… and goats. Unfortunately, some of BJ’s eccentric customers were too taken with it.

“Two women visited and liked the door so much they told me they’d put a spell on it so that no-one else could see it but us three,” he says, pointing to the place where the door used to be, which is now occupied by a cabinet filled with surgical tools and a bookcase stuffed with jars containing pickled hearts, lungs and baby sharks. “They did some chanting, and left.”

Two years went by, and the door hadn’t been sold, but then a Satanist who was stalking members of Marilyn Manson’s band – regulars at Dapper Cadaver – came in wanting to sell him a jar of his scabs, and noticed the doomed door. “He walked up to it and started chanting, telling me he was taking away the curse,” BJ explains. “An hour later, my neighbour of three years saw the Devil door and asked if it’d just arrived.”

With the curse lifted, the door was sold to a member of Californian punk rockers the Murder Junkies.

LIMB FROM LIMB

BJ didn’t buy the scabs from the Satanist, because he draws the line at human body parts. Sometimes, people claiming to be gravediggers turn up to the shop trying to flog human arms, but BJ always turns them away with a polite, ‘We don’t deal in human remains.’ “I could be busted for holding them,” he says. “If I don’t have the authentication for them, it’s evidence of murder. One of the girls that models our caskets works as a mortician and coordinates organs for transplants, and she knows there are better things to do with a dead body than using parts for props.”

But Dapper Cadaver does do a haunting line in spookily realistic fake bodies for police and fire-fighting training simulations. Today BJ’s creating a selection of bomb victims, and shows me how the wounds have been formed to show the force and direction of the blast. In the car park behind the shop, BJ’s team of three model-makers carefully paint the exposed muscles on open-mouthed faces.

“When you work with as many rubber corpses as I do, you discover every possible use of a fake dead body,” BJ says. “It’s my job to know how to open ua body and what onp e looks like at a certain stage of decomposition in a certain environment. I do my research. I study crime scene photos and photos from train accidents.”

SIDESHOW GEEK

Before moving to Los Angeles to set up Dapper Cadaver in 2004, BJ was a carnie working on the Santa Cruz boardwalk, where he’d construct shooting galleries.

He’d eat his lunch in the “graveyard for old games”, among steampunk-style Victorian wood and brass attractions, and giant props including a huge gargoyle, a high-heeled shoe and a pair of dice. “It was like the Joker’s lair in there; I loved it,” he beams.

BJ’s interest in props from the afterlife was sparked by seeing the sword-fighting skeletons of Jason And The Argonauts (1963) and zombie movie The Return Of The Living Dead (1985). “The punk rock kids at the start of The Living Dead reminded me of myself,” he says, “and there was a realistic biological supply warehouse and morgue in the film, too.”

BJ got to leave his stamp on the franchise when he made props for the designers of Night Of The Living Dead 3D (2006), and was also a zombie extra in the movie. “We were shooting in a working cemetery, so during breaks I’d wander around in full zombie gear scaring the mourners,” he laughs. “I still enjoy a good horror movie, but I watch them less than before I got into this business. I’m an expert on what’s scary. It’s fun to figure out what makes people scream.”

DAPPER SHIN-DIGS

For haunted houses, Dapper Cadaver provides all the essential elements of a cemetery or dungeon, depending on the chosen theme. One private customer, George, visits every year to rent their guillotine, 3m-angel and a selection of caskets to decorate his Beverly Hills pad.

For many years, BJ has picked out props for the Playboy Mansion Halloween party, which always requires a set of stocks to trap Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends. And this year, the White House asked him to provide a freak show to entertain the Obamas and returning Iraq war veterans. They wanted, among other oddities, two-headed frogs, a Big Foot print, a chupacabra – a mythological animal that sucks the blood of goats – and a Feejee mermaid.

BJ constructed the half-mammal, half-fish creature using a bat skeleton.

“The first Feejee mermaids shown in the US were half a monkey skeleton attached to a fish tail,” he explains. “Now people won’t believe that because we understand how evolution works. But I figured that because bats could use their wings to swim, they could evolve to eat fish instead of insects in the right environment. So I extended the spine to make it long and snaky, webbed the hands to make paddles, and added fur and fangs for a highly evolved Feejee mermaid.”

FOLLOWER OF FASHION

Death design follows trends, and there are strange waves of demand, such as a two-month period in which BJ had so many different orders for goats’ heads that he made 50 in as many days.

“There’ll be months when our dead cats will just sit on the shelf, and then all of a sudden I can’t keep them in stock,” BJ explains.

Having been in the business for seven years, BJ’s a dab hand at death, and he’s got enough experience to make sure he has a tasteful funeral. “I buy and sell caskets and headstones every day, so when it comes to choosing mine, they’re sure to be beautiful,” he says.

“But ideally, I’d like my skeleton to find its way to the Volga River in Russia. The water is filled with iron oxide, which creates pyrite, or ‘fool’s gold’ as it’s known. There’s a depository in this river where bones turn to gold. I’d like to be put in there when I die, and come out as a golden skeleton!”