Photographer & Makeup Maestro Rick Jones Horrifies You With His Creations

I know you’ve gotten to know horror makeup icon Tom Savini and count Rick Baker among your influences, but how far back does your fascination with horror makeup go?

I was born in 1970, and there was a really legendary double bill horror series on the BBC on a Friday night in the late ’70s. It was always a classic Universal film or a black-and-white B-movie followed by a film in color, which was usually a Hammer film. I was very aware of Jack Pierce’s makeup with «The Wolfman» and «Frankenstein» and all those things, but at that age, I was more interested in the Hammer films, because they had a lot of blood and a lot of red in them. I was very drawn to that.

I’d nick my mom’s makeup kit and nick her lipstick, and draw red lines here [tracing his fingers from the corners of his mouth to his chin] so I could look like Dracula and waste all the ketchup and everything. That’s why she ended up buying me that makeup kit — the Dick Smith [Horror] Makeup kit — because it meant I left her stuff alone. In the ’80s we had the nasty period in the UK when video releases of films were getting censored and banned, and it was really hard to get a hold of things … The banned films were the ones to watch, and [those were] «Evil Dead,» «Texas Chainsaw Massacre,» and «The Exorcist,» and I was fascinated by them and that fascination’s never let go.

What was the ban about?

Home video was just starting up, and the government had this terrible fear that if you could watch a horror film, you could have this perverse power to pause it on a horrible scene and keep replaying this horrible scene. When you’re sitting in a cinema, the movie plays through and you go home. All of a sudden [with video], you could pause it and rewind it, and they feared that children would get hold of this stuff and it would deeply corrupt them. It did, look at me! [laughs] 

As the years have gone on, they couldn’t have been more wrong. Us kids who were horror fans at that time, we’ve all grown up. We still love it. We’re passionate. We’re quite creative people, and I know loads of kids of my age have gone on to become writers, and they’re trying to make films, they sculpt, they paint all from that stuff. It did influence us, but in a really good way.