Body Bag Halloween Costume 2008
I designed and built this costume in the first 2 weeks of June, 2008. The costume made its debut at the 2008 Midwest Haunters Convention Masquerade Party.
The finished Body Bag costume looks like this:
Follow along with my design process:
Photo 1: I used conduit for the frame to hold up the fake body and the rim of the bag. A piece of press board or masonite and a couple of old belts are used to strap the whole thing around my chest and my waist.
Photo 2: A back view of the conduit framework. Not the easiest stuff to bend at all these strange angles. I could have been done right there and called it a torture device.
Photo 3: That’s me posing with the bare frame. I am bending my legs to check how the frame sits on my hips since Mr. Stitches will need to bend his legs in order to carry around the bag full of body parts.
Photo 4: I used high density foam from Joann Fabrics for the body. I already had the overalls from my old leather face costume that I made for the first Haunted Palace Theatre in 2006.
Photo 1: You can see the black fabric that will line the inside of the body bag.
Photos 2 & 3: That’s me checking my progress.
Photo 4: I am wrapping the burlap around the frame along with a couple of body parts to allow for some extra space later on. Burlap is hard to find. I got mine in the gardening department at Home Depot.
Photo 5: Checking my progress and practice my skills as a corpse. I’ve attached the elbow to the burlap bag with a hole in the elbow and the bag so I can pass my arm into the sleeve of the overalls. Most of this costume I had to stitch by hand since I had to add each piece as I went and couldn’t remove the various fabric pieces to sew with my sewing machine. This hand stitching took FOREVER and made for a couple of long days.
Photo 6: Checking my progress and practice my skills as a corpse.
Photo 7: A view inside while I figure out how to close the bottom of the bag.
Photos 8 & 9: I rigged this system to hang it up so I could stand back and check everything out. It’s not easy when you are the designer and the actor/model too.
Photo 1: The spare parts to fill the body bag arrived a day early! Yes, they’re all fake.
Photos 2 & 3: Tonight I focused on the seam where the bottom of the bag meets the hip and the seat of the pants. More hand stitching. Blurg! I will earn the name of Mr. Stitches by the time I finish this costume. The illusion is starting to look really good I think. I am almost convincing myself that some headless guy is carrying a torso around in a bag on his back. I can’t wait for the mask to arrive. This costume is gonna be sweet!
I finished up the seam where the burlap bag meets the seat of the pants. Nothing too exciting to show, but it was a major milestone for me. Once I was done sewing for the night, I played around with placing the body parts in the bag. Word to your cadaver!
Photo 1: REAL BLOOD! I stabbed myself pretty good while stitching the last seam and decided not to waste the pain and blood. So I wiped it on the burlap. Now I can reference it to see what dried blood looks like when I dirty up the bag to look old and used.
Photo 2: I finished hand stitching the last big seam. Yay! This one was along the belt line on the front of the overalls to shorten the length of the pant legs.
Most of the day was spent preparing the body parts. I painted some with a glossy red paint which looks more realistic than the original paint job. I applied makeup to other pieces whose plastic or latex was too pink or too pale.
A few of the pieces that will stick out of the top of the bag had to be cut so they can be partially inside the black layer and partially between the black layer and burlap layer. This will allow the piece to be visible inside the bag where my body is as well as through the holes of the burlap from the outside.
Photos 1-3: I ended up stitching more parts around the pipe at the top of the bag than I had originally planned. It just looks better to have those extra parts sticking out. But my hands and fingers got very sore from stitching through the vinyl and latex body parts. I’m using crochet thread to do the stitching on the body parts. It’s thicker and very strong compared to the thread I had been using on all the fabric seams.
Photo 4: All the parts are hung in the bag. I stitched the top of the bag in place with some hemp thread that we had left over from a jewelry kit. That stuff is strong, and it blends in with the burlap perfectly.
Photo 5: I discovered that the nylon rope was loosely knit enough so that I could easlily thread the heavy jute twine through it. I tied a knot in the jute twine so it wouldn’t pull through which made it pretty easy to do all the loops to hold the nylon rope in place.
Photos 6-9: I tried a couple of different patterns for the rope before settling on this basic path. It looks like it would be functional which is the whole idea. The bones on the front of the overalls pictured below are real. I believe they are the spine from a sheep and several leg bones from a cat. I used to teach 5th grade science… I know you were curious. The spine was already broken, so I decided to make that a part of the design as if Mr. Stitches has been in a few fights. I plan to add a wound there all stitched up, and bloody up the overalls.
Photos 10-16: It wasn’t easy cutting the first hole in my completed bag. It was so perfect, but you just couldn’t see the details of all the body parts inside. It had to be done. And once I made the first cut, the rest were easy. Funny how all the holes expose the best parts of the flesh inside.
Photos 1-3: My mask and spare head arrived today! Sweeeet! They were both a lot more pink than they appeared in their photos, but the detail and craftsmanship are just incredible. Absolutely top notch quality. You really need to get your next mask from www.deathstudios.com. I had to use makeup on the Stitches mask so it would look more like my skin tone. That way I won’t have to do anything to my hands to make them match the mask. I will probably leave the Fresh Head just like it is. My plan is for it to sit on my shoulder as another body part in the bag. I haven’t tried it yet to know if it will stay there and look natural.
Photo 4: The final makeup on Stitches. I added a second layer of light makeup but didn’t fill in all the cracks and creases. I can’t stress enough how good this mask is. The skin has this texture that looks so real. With the two layers of makeup it is just perfect. I added red to the inner lips and around the eye which made the final look just POP!
Photos 5-8: I made the bloody thing even more bloody. I used several colors of acrylic paint to get the various shades of wet and dry blood: bright red, brick red, dark brown, and black. I watered it down and squeezed it onto the bag in several places to get the natural look of dripping blood that soaked into the bag. I also added a few more stress marks by scratching the bag with a stick which made some wider gaps between the threads.
I mounted the head, and I am finished! Alert the media! Mounting the head ended up being fairly easy. I didn’t take any photos of the process so I’ll try to explain. First I stuck one of those styrofoam wig heads inside the mask so the top of the mask could rest on a nice round surface. Then I bent a piece of conduit in an L shape and bolted it onto the arch of conduit that goes up through the green foam body. That gave me a 10″ pipe sticking up from the body where the spine would be. I twisted the styrofoam head back and forth down onto the conduit neck until it sat at the right height. I sacrificed an old undershirt to mask the bottom edge of the mask and tucked it and the mask into the overalls. I didn’t even have to use any glue.
