Thank you. And welcome everybody to the Spooky Movie Podcast. Real quick today, I'm joined here as always with my dad Charlie and our good friend David David Van Es. And we're going to do a quick tutorial on how to make your own mummy, a Karloff-inspired original mummy. And I'm not going to lie, I didn't have too much part in this. This was 99.99% all my dad's. So, Dad, why don't you get people started on this whole process on how to make your own mummy? Sure. Okay, so this, if you watched last month's podcast, I had a life-size Bela Lugosi in the background that my friend Michael at Plot 13 Studios made, and it looks beautiful. But the problem with this and COVID and everything going on this year, you know, typically we would pick something like this up at a horror convention, meet Michael there, bring it home. He had originally intended to build this for us and just wasn't going to work out this year. Like shipping it would have been impossible without getting it destroyed and everything else. So I decided to take the challenge on myself and have a little bit of model kit painting skills. But this is the first time I've ever attempted to do anything this goofy and ridiculous. So but, you know, we took I took a lot of photos during the build process and I kicked them all over to David. So if David kind of wants to just lead us through and, you know, we'll try to keep this interesting for the people on the audio only side. But we encourage you to go to YouTube and check this out and and see all the photos and everything. But but, yeah, the pictures are up. The pictures are up. Let's just kind of talk them through. This is obviously just a Boris Karloff reference photo. Kind of what you've shown what we were going for. this is charlie making a superhero so anyway uh this is how my dad wishes he looked he's bald-headed and beautiful just like me um yeah so basically you start out with a mannequin and that's what we're showing right here and and this thing came off ebay and uh the reason i bought this particular model was he was tall thin and had positionable elbows so we could kind of cross the arms like boris karloff does in the film uh but i did not expect it to come in wearing some weird uh bondage mask so i was a little creeped out so the mask you didn't do the mask i did not do the mask uh i bought the mannequin off ebay for i don't know it was like 130 bucks and that's how they shipped it what it comes with the free mask all right moving on here he is in pieces you can see the joints and the elbows and again trying to keep this interesting for our audio people but uh for those of you on youtube you can see it all i'm encouraging you to do this um yeah he literally comes in a box that was about i don't know maybe three and a half four feet tall and just various pieces all fiberglass and even comes with a base that you can stick in his foot which didn't really need in this application, but it's cool to have, you know, if you're building other at-home monster or superhero props or whatever, you know, putting costumes on. So this photo here would be the Boris Karloff sculpt. It's a Henry Alvarez sculpt. Actually, we bought it off of a company on Facebook called Muckle Bones, and the best part about this is the The head is solid on the outside. It's foam-filled on the inside, which we'll talk about later. And it comes with the hands because I have no idea how to make a pair of mannequin hands actually look like the mummy's hands all distressed and cool. So it's a good place to start. Muckle Bones is really cool. I actually met Muckle Bones at the Spooky Empire Convention, a really cool guy. Yeah, and top-notch quality props and pieces. And the sculpts are, of course, Henry Alvarez is an absolute legend. And there's a naked man standing in my wife's office with his arms closed or crossed. Like eventually the final product will be just testing it out. But, yeah, what was really cool is Thanksgiving dinner came along and, like, our, you know, the couple of friends and family that actually could come over due to everything that was happening walk in. and this is standing there like uh hello it's literally the first thing you see when you walk into their house because it goes door yeah this is my prop i'm gonna hold it all episode it goes door to the bedroom to the kitchen and the bedroom and he's just standing in the back and they leave the door open for everybody to just walk on by it's literally in uh bug's old bedroom which is now your mom's office because you became a homeowner today kid congratulations yeah as of today i've sold my soul to being a homeowner and this is like welcome to 30 years of uh debt it's gonna be magical but anyway you can build your own horror props but yeah now that i'm a homeowner i can like paint my walls whatever weird color i went with purple because haunted mansion and I can throw the holes in the walls to put like cool stuff up and I can distress things and I can do whatever I want it's way better than renting where you don't really have a say in anything yeah cool you can make your own mummy prop here so uh what you see here now is literally this is foam uh from our local menards it's two inch thick base foam and uh one inch thick and they're all just four by eight sheets uh and just literally got some screws run through the back with some gorilla glue you spray one side with gorilla glue or coat one side with gorilla glue and you spray a little water on the other side and screw them together and uh it forms a rock hard surface that will not come apart so you better make sure you get it right but these are just the basic panels kind of one side is cut to a shape and uh fits in the corner of my wife's office just starting to distress this here i actually bought a hot wire sculpting tool and honestly i i did a lot of this with just a drywall saw a cheap little three dollar menards hand tool drywall saw and just start roughing up the edges and scratching in some cracks and things here and there and you know the inside is still smooth but you'll see later how that becomes more like sand or concrete just more details and again this is the middle of my kitchen i don't recommend doing this in the middle of your kitchen lies you're doing it again next time never say never but i'm gonna try not to yeah how in specific are you just chunking out the sides like that because like you had a perfect square earlier are you legit just taking a knife and going through and chipping away adding a distressed look or because i always felt when i purposefully try to distress something on an art project I somehow managed to make it look manufactured terribly instead of distressed naturally um the trick to me is to not be careful about it just start hacking uh i mean you know that like if stone is being water worn it's going to go down because gravity pulls water down and it will erode things that way. But, yeah, just don't be too careful. And you can chip, scratch. It's like a Bob Ross thing, man. There's just happy accidents. If you make a mistake, you just gouge it out a little more until it looks the way you're happy with it. This is the same piece now out of our kitchen. And you can see, like, on the bottom pieces and stuff, I've hacked away some more of the corners and rounded things off. But literally all I'm doing is spraying this with a water bottle. like you would use on your cat if it was being naughty. Looking at you, David. Bad kitty spray spray. So that's what you're doing. You spray this with a little bit of water and a blowtorch, and you just keep going down the panel a little bit at a time. And it tends to leave it burned up and looking like stone. It creates this weird texture, and it's really cool, and it's a fast, easy, fun way to do it. And at this point, how much time do you think you have in the project? You don't want to know. Too much. But, yeah, you can see, like, I'm starting to burn around the cracks and stuff in these photos. And, you know, you just, again, don't be too careful. Just have fun with it and, you know, do as little or as much as you feel. And you'll see all this detail and stuff come out later in the paint. But this is a good way to do it. Again, just home styrofoam. Another Boris Karloff photo. this is me sitting in the TV room downstairs, just snapping pictures of the screen, trying to get basic shapes and doing what I can with it. Oh, nothing. They can do. Okay. So for you people who Googled YouTube or searched YouTube to find a making a mummy, and now you see a naked guy in front of a bunch of Rick and Morty pinball machines. Uh, this is me on a, on a Saturday at the shop when the shop is empty, and I'm just laying my naked, crossed-armed mannequin in the general position that I wanted to make a sarcophagus to go with the mummy and a backdrop. So it wasn't just a static prop sitting in the corner, because, you know, mummy in the corner of your house is cool, but yeah, you're looking down an entire row of Rick and Morty games in production with a naked man laying on a chunk of styrofoam that's that's very exciting so uh you can see here i kind of just roughed out the shape of a sarcophagus trying to round the corners and that's the first piece i cut and then use that as a template basically and david wants to go to the next photo you're going to see these are all the scrap pieces there's the the wall backdrop base for all of this and making a lot of surfboards basically it looks like the coffin lids but it's just the inside shape of the sarcophagus and all the sheets of foam I used you went through about how many sheets of foam for this I was about a dozen total and the sheets run you know 15 to 20 bucks a sheet depending on thickness and type so gives you a ballpark of what I got into it it's not terrible. Basically, what I did was I wanted depth, and I couldn't find a way to kind of heat and bend the sheets in one piece, so what I did was I basically made it about a four-inch thick layer, and then just stacked the layers, and it's two-inch foam, so, you know, obviously, eight inches times two gives you a 16-inch depth, and that's about what I wound up doing, And then the last piece went a little bit thinner than that, which you'll see why later. So, but yeah, that's basically giving you the gist. There's the guy standing in a sarcophagus and those pieces are just leaning up against a bunch of pinball pallets. So what were the workers saying in the office? I did this when they weren't there on the weekend. Very good idea. It created more foam particles than you can possibly imagine. I must have vacuumed the shop out three times in that one weekend just because I didn't want the workers to come in and have to see it and deal with it. Do you know how many of the workers would be getting absolutely nothing done with you making a mummy in the corner? Because we'd all be walking over and staring at it. Yeah, that's a real thing, too. I get that. But what the hell is the weirdo doing now? So, yeah, these are all the pieces just kind of stacked together with one piece cut for the back and all Gorilla glued together. And then you've got to get some weight on this, right? So you've got to crush it and let it sit for 24 hours. So what do you use? Like on a cabinet. Yeah, you use broken pinball cabinet parts and some pallets and some – you've got a hand truck and a shrink wrap roll, whatever we got. I just threw it all on there to weight it down and kind of hold it together and put a bottom on it, too. That is the bottom. Yep, and there you go. That's basically the shape of the sarcophagus. Now, yeah, the bottom could have been a little bit more narrow if his feet were together, but it wasn't the way the mannequin was made. and uh honestly i i kind of wanted him more in a standing position anyway because you only see the mummy wrapped in the film with his feet together for such a short time and then after that he walks out of there and you know for every preceding mummy movie after that or following mummy movie after that uh his legs are always wrapped individually which never made any sense because his legs were tied together as one and then all of a sudden they weren't so but uh yeah there's rough photos we're looking at here right now and again sorry for you people in the audio side go check it out on youtube um that's the the basic gist of it the sarcophagus is there the base is uh there for the backdrop and uh the mannequin is standing there looking all naked and creepy in his mask different angles of creepy yeah and uh what i'm showing on this one here is i actually wanted, I didn't want the sarcophagus standing straight up and down because it would look weird. It needed to be leaning against the wall. So what I wound up doing was taking a hot knife and you'll see that in the next photo, David, taking a hot knife. And I basically just carved that shape out of the bottom face so that when you set the sarcophagus in there, number one, it positions it perfectly. And you'll see that in the video as we go here, picked up the thing and, you know you can set it back in and it automatically leans it back up against the wall and then i just uh this is our our kallaxian crystal purple powder booth area right now and i just went in there with some latex paint and uh sprayed it all down all the pieces just black so it kind of just gives it a nice base to work forward to i like i coat everything in black when i'm doing model kits or anything bug makes fun of me for it but yeah there's your sarcophagus and there's Boris's head probably shouldn't have done that in such a deep black but you know it worked it worked again these are the muckle bone hands this is in our little spray booth in the in the pinball shop not that you can't do this in your garage or outside or anywhere else you got a spot to do it and yeah man it's just base coating everything black and then I kind of start working washes and dry brush and everything out from there this is being just test fitting the piece It had to fit between the wall and the door in my wife's office again. So just, yeah, making sure it did and haven't done any detail work at all to the back wall yet here and just starting to work on the face for Boris Karloff. So, yeah, just various shades of gray over and over again. I did a lot of green kind of moldy washes down into the eyes and the cheeks and the lips and stuff because I figure he going he going to be growing mold if you been sitting in a tomb for 3 years so made sense when you deciding on how to go for the shading for this are you I assume just looking at colorized images of Karloff on the internet because I mean the movie's in black and white and I was thinking about this while you were sending me these pictures was how do you know what colorization to go for because we obviously don't know just from looking at it black and white all the time yeah that's a real gray area see what it did there black and white uh um yeah it's it's kind of artist interpretations like if you look at the basil gogos paintings and stuff from famous monsters they're very colorful and if you look at the like the mike hill statues that he's done of boris and jack pierce together they're very singular kind of gray. I really wanted something a little bit in between. So I kept Boris's face and hands a bit on the gray. I've seen a lot of model kits done that way. And I've always kind of just liked that look. So yeah, I mean, it's really up to you and what you want to do. The fact that it was black and white, and this is going to be in color, you could do it in all black and white and shades of gray. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But I did want to give it a little bit more color. so well you guys can see some green in that one so obviously we're gonna it's there it's very subtle this is all stuff you see in person more than you do like in photos it's really hard to get the coloring on the the bandages and stuff to show up in photos but yeah you can there's purples there's greens there's it's just washes and dry brushing a lot a lot of dry brushing uh i do have airbrush tools but i'm not very proficient with them yet is that is that uh liquid cheese that's yes i think that's actually dog treat butter for dog treats yeah that's what it is that one hand didn't want to stand up by itself i had to use something we're getting closer to the finished product there you can see i've done the hair and stuff and it's i did that kind of in a singular shade of a lighter gray so it would stand out more but it's getting there that's just uh yeah just there now we're really starting to to cook here this is i believe i'm adding uh the mat and it looks glossy because it's wet but it's just a matte finish uh acrylic clear to uh seal in all the paint that's a terrible photo i'm sorry that's very blurry i think now you're just getting old could be yeah see i'm starting to detail the the backdrop and just doing various brushes and washes and again a lot of dry brushing uh it's all latex acrylic paint just it's interior home paint is all it is because you use a lot of it so you know i'm not going to use your little craft jars of paint you got to go out and get a good quarter half gallon or whatever you can find and uh just test fitting and again here we are now we're drywall mudding the daylights uh this is a product or a process called monster mud you just mix acrylic paint latex paint in with drywall mud and to color it and i kind of wanted it to have a bit of like an egyptian red Joshua Clay i don't know if that's even accurate but it's what i went with uh won't lie with the first batch i mixed up it kind of looked like pink frosting so i had to take a little of the red out and put a little more black in it but it's literally just coating layer after layer of drywall mud kind of hiding the seams a little bit uh you know the the probably could have been better if i'd have done two or three different probably you know coats over and over and over and i or two or three more i should say i i did i don't know how many coats of mud it was a lot there's a cat the cat is an interesting story He's just an added little kind of Egyptian gold statue prop that came from our buddy. I have a friend that owns a coin-op business, and he buys a lot of unusual stuff. And this was all parts that was on, I believe it was a coin-pushing game. But it was some kind of a weird prototype one that was bigger, and it had three cats and all these King Tut heads and the little sarcophagus. And the, I have, you know, just all this stuff was on there. Anyway, he had saved it all. And I managed to get his dad to donate a few pieces to this, which looked really cool. And I don't know for sure what I'm going to do with it all, but eventually. And this is D-Day here. This is, I put off assembling the full mummy until the last part of it because I was nervous. This is, you know, you've got, I think the head and hands is a good $300. The mannequin with shipping is, you know, pushing a couple hundred bucks. So this is where I really didn't want to screw up. So, you know, if I destroy it at this point and mess up and it looks terrible, then there's no going back. So this is just me setting up in the shop and shake hands with danger. This is the mummy about to be decapitated sitting on our CNC in the pinball shop. That mask always bothers me, dude. Sorry, that mask is just wrong. I'm telling you, it was a little creepier than the actual finished product with the mummy head. But yeah, you just saw there off with this head, so no turning back. It's all fiberglass. I actually cut that with a sawzall with a very fine metal blade and then began to just slowly hollow out the inside of the head, being very, very careful. And that foam chips away super easy and just a little at a time. And again, I'm making this up as I was going along. I had no idea what the heck I was doing, just getting it closer and closer to the shoulders, trying to get it down as tight as possible. and uh yeah i mean you can see at that point i've cut away almost all the foam and it's literally down to just the shell sitting on the shoulders and got it down to the point where i was pretty pretty darn happy with it there's you know that angle it you'll see that the the head and neck kind of stand up a little higher than maybe they should uh so i know i did a little more hacking not too much more and then you'll see here in a bit uh how i kind of blended and even that out now this thing is back in the house and the hands are attached and the head is attached to a mannequin what is holding the head onto place there honestly i just used uh gorilla glue hollow out the foam on the hands and then slide it down over the arm so that the the distance from the elbow to the tip of the fingers looks pretty natural because at first it didn't the hands on the end of the wrists and the mannequin hands are actually removable they just snap in and out so like if you're changing clothes on it in a store it's easy to deal with uh but if i put the hands right at the end of the wrist it didn't look good so i had to hollow that out slide it in and it's just again gorilla glue and water that stuff is amazing you can literally pick this thing up by the head and It will not come off. And this is your mom and a dog toy in the background. Your mom, we cut eight yards of, it's called muslin fabric. It's kind of like an Egyptian unbleached cotton. So it's very similar to what they would have used at the local craft store. And this is what all the fashionable mummies are wearing this year. that is completely untouched and just kind of wrapping it out to see if the head and the neck were going to line up properly which they still didn't and I addressed that so but that fabric is literally you'll you'll see what we do with it it's it's cut into long long three and four inch wide strips and then still working on the casket I actually I think at this stage I had gone back and I used another shade of light tan acrylic latex paint and I put in dry lock sand like what you put between your paving stones and when it gets wet it sets like concrete it crazy strong and it looks really good but i actually mixed that in with the paint and then dry brushed the entire outside of the sarcophagus with it so it would look like it had been out in you know in an egyptian tomb or in the desert and at this point your mom was really anxious to get that out of her kitchen uh this is all the fabric cut into eight yard long strips three four inches wide and then being boiled in coffee and tea to stain it up and distress it and it kind of makes the ends come apart and stains the daylights out of it and uh it it actually worked really really well so these are smell good it actually it does yeah these are little strips of what the original fabric look like they're all nice neat and clean uh but obviously wasn't the case once uh you boil them in coffee and tea and this is again just kind of test fitting it this is the first time i had had the sarcophagus completely to where i was pretty happy with it and i wanted to set it on the base in your mom's office and just make sure it all fit together and look good and and uh david's got some video of us actually taking this apart the whole thing comes apart into three pieces, four if you count the cat. So it's actually movable and it's not bad. This is what I was talking about. The pink frosting on Boris here is to even out the head, neck, and shoulders. So it kind of looks a little bit more natural. That's actually just spackle. And it claims it doesn't shrink or crack. It did not really shrink, but it definitely cracked. It didn't really matter because it was going under a bunch of bandages and its only job was to even that all out. You can see there in the photo I did the chest, the neck, all around the wrists to make it look more natural. And there's all the strips that have been boiled all over the kitchen floor, and there was coffee grounds in all of it that you couldn't get out, and we're still vacuuming that up, so that's fun. More of the same. And then these are the positionable elbows. You can actually just loosen the nuts and stuff, and you can bend the arms in and out, and you just kind of lock them into as close as you can get them or want them for positioning. And then you throw your naked man up on a coffee table or a card table and start figuring out the wrapping. And it honestly took me hours of studying what Mike Hill had done, the old photos that are in existence of Jack Pierce. This is the worst of the Universal Mummy films. It's called The Mummy's Crotch. That is a gross looking diaper. Yeah, you basically have to kind of wrap him in a diaper. But studying all the photos of the Jack Pierce original wrap, you can tell which way he was wrapping, what got wrapped first. And obviously it was like his groin area and his around the armpits and the neck was wrapped. And it layers itself kind of out that way. And I just put adhesive strips on the mummy to hold the bandages tight. And again, the lighting here, I was using a super, super bright dual LED thing. and it looks washed out like it's not really distressed or anything but it it truly is when you see it in person but just yeah it took me probably four hours to wrap the mummy just one piece at a time and in different sections you can see I've started to do the arms here okay so let's say this mummy gets possessed somehow tonight and it starts moving around your house are the wrapped bandages going to stay on him very long if he starts moving yeah absolutely they will yeah yeah i always wondered how the hell they keep that actually on karloff when he's moving around um i don't know exactly what jack pierce did i'm assuming there was some kind of and i've seen other people that have done like a life-size mummy like this before and i think what they do is they basically do a wash of like white or even yellow uh carpenter's glue with paint or with water and you spray it because it will literally set it in a very clear you don't see it if you use carpenter's glue it might yell a little bit and that's that's fine um to kind of lock it all in and uh i chose i really thought about doing it but i kind of decided to just leave well enough alone and uh and again this is just kind of test fitting some draped bandages and things and and uh just getting pretty close to the final product here and and and again when you see this thing in person the staining and stuff is is uh much more dramatic i think the video captures that a little bit better as well yeah and and bug thank goodness he took a lot of video of this here today but uh yeah that's that's the mummy standing in the kitchen fully assembled at that point and i know the ring is missing the ring is on the way uh i'm gonna have to cut that and fit it over it's actually this finger on his right hand is where the little it looks like a beetle kind of ring uh but it's on the way and uh yeah i'm just you can see the what is david shifting the photos here it's tight in the back probably not perfect but you know obviously even that even though you're never really going to see the back i still wanted it to look like it did in the front and it was you know tight and it's as long as you give him such a harsh wedgie i'm sorry he does yes on purpose i literally had to put adhesive in his butt crack so that it would look you know well as they dry out things are going to stick and pull and it's going to get tight to the skin you're thinking too much about it charlie i know a lot of time thinking about his crotch and butt and everything else trying to make it look as mummy perfect as possible and yeah this is the first time i set everything in together and still going to add some, like if you look to Boris's right hand shoulder there's going to be some hieroglyphics on the inside of the sarcophagus that are scratched out because that's what kept the mummy in the 1932 film from crossing over and yeah, so we got to do a little detail work on the inside of it but I'm pretty happy with it. There's a black and white shot because why not? Gotta be artistic. Yep. this is the original head and hands and we also have a medallion that my friend michael found to go along with it and that's hanging on the cat right now behind me yeah more just reference photos again finding anything i could online to kind of make it look as authentic as possible and that's that's it that's it and then david can show the video here while we talk about it and uh you know i hope it i hope it helps somebody it's probably not the greatest tutorial video if we wanted to actually show somebody how to do this i'd have been smart enough to have bugs standing there with the camera the whole time but i really didn't want a guy with a camera washing me i didn't have 30 hours laying around what i said i didn't have 30 hours laying around to come shoot the whole process yeah it was it was a lot of work charlie needs to learn some more things about pre-production not like hey this is a good idea let's get it out tomorrow okay well our motto is always david can fix it in post right yeah absolutely absolutely may your days and nights be filled with giant creative mummies too and hope you liked our little uh how-to thing we've never really done one of those before so that does it for us here thank you everybody for tuning in and listening hopefully you learned something with uh your mummy projects that i'm sure you all had going on and uh be sure to tune in next time and uh thank you everybody have a happy holidays