By Dennis Smith –
Terrorizing people into shrieking paroxysms of fear for fun and profit seems an unlikely endeavor for a mature married couple with grandchildren. Yet that’s exactly what Ed and Marsha Edmunds have done for nearly 40 years.
Not only do they love it, they are also among the best in the world at it. And no, they’re not a pair of sick, twisted weirdos.
In fact, the Edmunds are genuinely warm and caring people. They are soft-spoken entrepreneurs with a strong Christian faith, ridiculously creative minds and an overabundance of imaginative artistic talents who turned their mutual interests in science fiction, fantasy, drama and art into a family-run business that grew to supply clients all over the world with — um, monsters.
Monsters?
Yep, monsters.
Their company, Distortions Unlimited, headquartered in Greeley, designs, creates and builds monsters: life-sized ghouls, zombies and rotted corpses; flesh-eating giants; brain-eating hunchbacks; and snarling gargoyles. They construct severed limbs, bloody body parts and a mind-numbing assortment of horribly gruesome creatures, movie props and immense, electronically-programmed and mechanically-animated displays, the likes of which almost defy human description.
They are not for the squeamish.
A monster head with an exposed brain is a full-size working podium for speakers and announcers at haunted house events.I know; I recently toured the Distortions Unlimited manufacturing facility with the owners, then watched videos of them crafting a new creation for a client from start to finish. The experience was enlightening in a most bizarre yet intriguing sort of way.
The Edmunds and their team of artists, sculptors and engineers were designing and constructing a fully animated, programmable monster’s head hand-feeding itself a kicking and squirming full-size “human being” with much the same enthusiasm a medieval party reveler might have dropping a bunch of grapes into his mouth.
The creature’s head was as big as a Volkswagen, with teeth as long as a man’s forearm. Its cavernous, saliva-drenched jaws could accommodate an entire human body in one gulp — which it did in grand style, accompanied by the victim’s screams and a cacophony of fire, brimstone and hair-raising sounds.
I wasn’t sure if I should be disturbed, bewildered, amazed or impressed. All four would be appropriate.
What kind of person buys this stuff anyway? And why?
As it turns out, hundreds of thousands of people love this stuff. Halloween, apparently, is second only to Christmas in generating holiday revenue, and the “dark entertainment” business is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry with fervent customers ranging all the way from your neighborhood trick-or-treaters to wholesale mask and costume distributors, Hollywood set designers, corporate amusement parks and private collectors — not to mention a frightfully huge and increasingly popular year-round, international haunted house trade.
The man-eating creature they built in the video, for example, was the brainchild of Allan Bennett of Baltimore, Maryland. Allan and his wife are owners and operators of one of the top haunted houses in America.
Renowned for their creatively outsized, original sets, the Bennetts rely heavily on Distortions Unlimited to help them design the unique displays that earned them the distinction of being named the number one haunted house attraction in Maryland.
These two ghouls are just an example of hundreds of different kinds of creatures in the Distortions Unlimited inventory.
Allan envisioned the man-eating ogre from the earth’s core and emailed his idea to Ed and Marsha. That was the beginning, and before long an imaginary creature in one man’s mind transformed into a hideous, bigger-than-life animatronic monster in a world-famous house of horrors.
The process of bringing a new monster to the marketplace is not wholly unlike that of developing any other consumable except, of course, that the finished product is created solely to scare the living tar out of anyone who sees it.
For that reason alone, this process seems much more fascinating.
“There’s a whole lot more going on behind the mask than meets the eye,” Ed told me. “It all begins with an idea — the fruit of someone’s wildly vivid imagination.”
Then Marsha chimed in, “An idea can come from anywhere or anybody — either Ed or I, an employee, one of our artists or sculptor, or a customer — as in the case of the man-eating demon,” she said. “Some of our wildest creations came as requests from our customers.
“First,” Marsha explained, “We sit down with the customer to discuss the basic appearance and application of the new monster. Once the basic idea is agreed upon, artists are called in to draw preliminary sketches.”
A sculptor creates the full-sized finished clay figure, which is then used as the master for a plaster mold from which the body and lifelike latex skin of the creature from.
Simultaneously, Distortions’ mechanical engineer, Mike Glover, begins fabricating the armature or electromechanical infrastructure that activates the monster with sound and motion.
It is a complex, exacting and, considering the monstrous (sorry) size of some of the monsters, extremely demanding process.
The Sleeping Giant is a huge mechanical creature activated by a pressure or motion switch. He awakens from a sleeping, sitting position and rises to become an 11-foot monster that threatens to gobble you up.Brothers Mando and Mon Olivares, who run the molding shop, told me that while a finished foam and latex monster might easily weigh several hundred pounds, the original clay sculpture and plaster castings used to create such a beast can weigh up to several thousand pounds.
Casting the monsters is labor intensive, the plaster molds are fragile and extreme skill is required throughout the entire casting and assembly process.
Once the creature’s physical outward configuration is complete, the high-tech electronic and mechanical devices that regulate the motions of the creature are installed and any prerecorded sounds the monster might make are likewise timed to its movements. (It wouldn’t do, for example, to have a monster shrieking a barrage of atrocious noises while its mouth was obviously slammed shut.)
In the finishing stages, artists begin the intricate work of airbrushing the final color schemes and applying head and facial hair and other unique details that transform the creature’s features from monochromatic latex to a gloriously colored work of astonishing and horrifying believability.
After final testing, the monster is boxed and shipped to the customer.
It is interesting to note that because many of the creations are unique, each shipping container must also be custom built to accommodate it.
A Distortions crew will usually install or oversee the on-site installation, making certain the unit functions properly in its new environment and the customer is happy before heading back home to start the next ghoulish project.
Depending on the size and complexity of the project, the process from initial design to final installation can vary from a few weeks to several months.
OK, fine. That’s how you build a monster. But how do you build a company from a 16-year-old kid’s bedroom hobby into one of the most sought-after monster-making manufacturing operations in the world?
It is all too easy to state the obvious: unrelenting dedication, persistence and hard work, and, of course, that’s the essential core of it.
And then there are the seemingly innocuous little twists of fate that triggered one revolutionary spurt of innovation and success after another, after another.
There was the time Ed walked into gym class with his hand gushing blood from the mangled stump of a supposedly severed finger he concocted of foam and latex, just for giggles.
His teachers rushed him to the nurse’s office before they realized it was just a prank. The teachers were relieved, but it was an epiphany for young Ed.
He suddenly realized he could terrify people momentarily with his creations, and make them laugh at the joke when it was over. He loved the drama.
Scaring people was fun — and harmless. Hmmm. An idea took shape.
He continued to hone his artistic skills sculpting monster heads of clay and applying stage makeup for touring theatrical groups, all the while nurturing the little home-based, mask-making operation he dubbed Distortions Unlimited.
After high school, he studied art at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, during which time the owner of a local costume shop marveled at an alien mask Ed was crafting and asked him to recreate it for resale in his shop.The White Rat is part of the Sleeping Giant display. He narrates a ghastly tale while the giant talks about how he’s going to eat your bones.
Another lightbulb went on: A guy could make money doing this, and Distortions Unlimited evolved from a hobby to a business, though an infant business at first.
Within a year, though, Ed was advertising his original masks in a trade magazine.
Morris Costumes, a national distributor and a giant in the industry, picked up the Distortions Unlimited product line and projected Ed’s little company into the national marketplace.
With growth came diversification, and Ed began crafting props — severed fingers, latex blood-crusted hands and the first sculpted, severed arm in the industry.
During this period, he hired Marsha Taub, a young biology student he met at church, to help at Distortions where she quickly became an integral part of the entire operation.
They painted masks, made molds, poured latex and cooked up crazy monster ideas together. Before long, they married and the company blossomed.
Focus shifted from just masks to props, aliens, zombies, full-scale monsters and dark attraction displays. But as each new project idea became more complicated, so did the skills and specialized knowledge to make them.
Ed had to learn how to weld and work with pneumatic and electronic equipment. With each new core knowledge he learned came more ideas and opportunities.
Distortions moved into a 22,000-square-foot manufacturing facility with automated production equipment.
In the years that followed, Distortions began mass production of the alien queen from the movie “Alien.” It also started its first haunted house and created the first, now-famous, realistic electric chair with sound, smoke and lights that many experts in the dark entertainment business credit with revolutionizing the haunted house industry.
All this success was picked up on by a television producer in 2011, who developed a reality series, “Monster Makers.” It ran for three wildly successful seasons on the Travel Channel.
Today, housed in a 24,000-square-foot facility in Greeley, Distortions Unlimited remains one of the preeminent designers of animatronic monsters and displays for the haunted house and dark entertainment industry.
Ed, Marsha and their crew have a wonderfully spooky future as they continue calmly cranking out all manners of corpses, zombies and brain-eating monsters.
Dennis Smith is a freelance outdoor writer/columnist whose work has appeared in numerous state and national publications. He’s been CCL’s outdoor columnist for more than 20 years, and though he wrote other features stories, Dennis says Making Monsters was by far the most bizarre assignment he ever had. After touring the monster factory at Distortions Unlimited and seeing how funny zombies really are, the only thing he’s still afraid of are spiders and snakes.