HOW TO: create gory wounds, bruises and a slit throat using FX make-up! PLUS make perfect fake blood!

HOW TO: turn yourself into a zombie in five easy steps!

HOW TO: make a gobsmackingly realistic disembowelment!

PLUS: We speak to kings of horror thrash Gwar about how to create perfect stage make-up and prosthetics!

Stepping out of the torrential New York rain and into an unassuming office block, we’re met with a pile of corpses. Burnt, severed limbs are strewn in corners; weapons are scattered across the floor; a dead baby sits in a glass jar while another hangs from the wall, a nail blasted through its tiny, screwed-up face.

A legless woman lies on a table, her head sliced in two. Are we in Leatherface’s meat locker? Freddy Krueger’s basement? One of Eli Roth’s wet dreams? No. We’re at the Demonic Pumpkins FX headquarters in Queens, and the perpetrator of this carnage is standing behind us, holding a meat cleaver. It’s too late to run now…

Fortunately for us, as with everything else in the room, the cleaver is fake: merely one of the hundreds of props that Anthony Pepe, owner of Demonic Pumpkins FX, has created over the last 15 years.

“These corpses are from a movie that I just finished working on called Offspring,” he explains, pointing at a couple of dismembered torsos. “And this was from a short film about a woman who hates her mother-in-law, so she axes her right through the head,” he says in reference to the cadaver on the table. The whole studio is crammed with masks, props and mangled organs: it’s a horror film fan’s dream come true.

 “I wasn’t a horror fanatic as a kid,” says Anthony. “I always wanted to be a Disney animator. But one day, in my college library, I came across a book by Tom Savini (make-up artist for Dawn Of The Dead, Day Of The Dead and many more) called Grande Illusions, and thought that it’d be a really cool job.”

Anthony signed up for a 14-week course at the Joe Blasco make-up school in Florida, landing his first job soon after on Troma’s Rockabilly Vampire. He then decided to set up his own SFX company, and spent the next seven years taking gigs wherever possible while waiting tables to pay the rent.

The hard work finally paid off, and for the last eight years he has run Demonic Pumpkins (a name he came up with while trying to think of a cool title for a mix tape) full time.

Since starting out he’s worked on over 150 projects, from TV to theatre and films, creating everything from old-age effects to zombies – and even a psychotic killer breast.

“I did this film called Boob that’s on the festival circuit at the moment,” he grins. “It’s about a woman whose breast implants come to life and start killing people. I had to make this big fake boob and hide a remote control car underneath it, so it could run around the room attacking people.”

The Demonic Pumpkins studio consists of four separate areas. First there’s the props corner, stuffed full of leftover hands, heads, intestines, legs, rifles, daggers, ray-guns and anything else you could possibly need.

Then there’s the sculpting area, where Anthony makes detailed prosthetics, such as fake noses and ears. This innocent-looking desk, with its large mirror and simple fold-out chair, sits ominously close to some large shelves that hold gallons and gallons of fake blood – a commodity that, in this line of work, you can never have too much of.

Opposite this is a standard workbench area, where animatronics or frames for making moulds are put together. With every inch of surrounding wall space crammed with screwdrivers, pairs of pliers and vicious-looking saws, it looks like a lost scene from The Toolbox Murders, especially the rack of boxes carefully marked: ‘Eyeballs’, ‘Knife Blades’ and ‘Bullet Casings’.

Finally, there’s the spray booth, or as Anthony calls it, ‘the toxic room’. This well-ventilated area is where he spray-paints props and works with potentially hazardous chemicals, such as liquid latex. All in all it’s a costume obsessive’s playground, but one where you need to watch where you’re going if you don’t want to lose an eye. Or a head.

Anthony’s work has led to him meeting luminaries from the horror genre, including George A Romero, Linda Blair and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper. “That man can drink anybody under the table!” says Anthony of Tobe. “He’s awesome. He told me lots of stories about the making of the movie, but you couldn’t print them.”

Anthony has also applied make-up to an eclectic range of celebs. As well as doing straight make-up for John Waters in US TV show ’Til Death Do Us Part and making Eric Roberts look like he’d been smashed in the face with a brick, he did a severed arm effect for Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man and even applied a fake goatee to Dr Dre for a music video. “He could kind of grow his own goatee, but he couldn’t make the moustache and the beard connect,” laughs Anthony. “He was really pleased with the one I gave him. He wore it out to a club that night.”

Despite having worked on some cult horror favourites – including Satan’s Little Helper and The Attic – it’s the sillier projects that stand out in Anthony’s memory. “I had to build a six-foot penis once,” he says. “It was for a really stupid zombie movie called Love Potion 666, when I was just starting out. People get drugged and turn into erotic zombies, and one guy’s penis grows to six feet long and starts ejaculating all over everybody. I made the penis out of a pipe and some foam, and filled the pipe with three gallons of hair conditioner. I was watching the scene being shot and just thinking, ‘that is fucking bizarre’.”

As with any business, things can go wrong. But when things go wrong in the SFX industry, it can get spectacularly messy. “I was working on a movie called Dead Serious, and there’s a scene where a vampire gets shot up by machine guns. I’d hired a guy to build an apparatus that’d shoot the blood out, and when we filmed it the machine wouldn’t stop! There should have been four bullet effects, but it did about 30.

Blood was shooting out at such a high pressure that the cameras got drenched, the camera crew got drenched... even PAs standing right at the back got drenched! Everyone got blood on them that day. They had to stop filming for two hours while they cleaned the cameras and scrubbed the blood off the walls.”

With our tour over, it’s time to get into the make-up chair and learn some tricks of the trade. Anthony is about to make me look like I’ve had my throat slashed, then been brought back to life as a zombie, then disembowelled. It’s just another day at the office.