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Behind the Mask with David & Laura Lady

This Behind the Mask Interview is with a couple I’ve personally admired nce I read about their Horror Hotel in an issue of Haunted Attraction Magazine I picked up about 8 years ago. Bedes hosting one of America’s top haunted attractions, David & Laura Lady are also very talented mask makers. To take things even further, David has literally written the book on collecting monster masks (when he sneezes he forgets more about masks than most of us will ever know). On top of everything else, the Ladys are amongst the nicest people you’ll ever meet. I could go on and on but you didn’t click on this link to hear me rambling so I’ll just get to the interview.Tell us a little bit about yourselves and how you developed your interests in monsters and mask-making.

Well, we're both freaks.

Oh, you wanted more than that, huh?

It's hard to remember back that far, but in my case a lifetime of monsters and scares was probably inevitable.

As far back as I can remember (which is about a week ago Wednesday), I was obsessed with all things scary and weird and surreal.

My mother and I both have Halloween birthdays, and we were both 'only children' (as in, no blings), so when I was little it was probably just a fun time of year, and I probably began at a very young age to associate fun things like parties, presents and cake and such with all the spooky things that would be in stores and on TV around Halloween.

I had a great-aunt who would make me a "spooky" birthday cake every year, always with either a skull or a witch or a bat or something on it, and I always got monster toys as presents. Just like me, my mom loves the fact that she was born on Halloween.

As most of our friends know, Mom is our ticket-taker (in her witch outfit) at Horror Hotel, and has been for all 14 seasons we've done thus far.

She regularly sends us cards on Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Easter, etc., which she gns as mply "Love, The Old Witch".

Much later I learned that my Dad was born on a Friday the 13th, so I already had two horror movie titles in my background right there!

Not only that, but my mom's house is literally on Elm Street.

She lived there nce long before the first Freddy movie, but today she has an "Elm Street" street gn in her living room with Freddy on it, so you know she has a sense of humor about all this horror stuff.

Laura's brother Richard was my best friend in high school, and I met Laura through him.

The first time Laura and I met was at a Haunted House I was putting on (I think I was in the 10th grade at the time).

Richard had degned the haunt with me, and one night this ster of his came to see it, so the first time Laura ever laid eyes on me I was wearing a Darth Vader outfit in the haunt's sci-fi room.

We didn't meet again until one year later, at the next year's Haunted House, again organized by me and Richard.

Laura was the first female I ever met who knew about all the old monster movies and was into them in such a big way.When they were little kids, Laura and her ster Carol (now Carol Hicks, the mask sculptor) even had a "monster club" in a treehouse just like in that movie 'The Monster Squad'.

So they both knew all the monsters and horror stars and such.

Laura says that when they would "play monsters" she liked to be Barbara Steele from 'Black Sunday'.

I think most little girls were playing they were a fairy princess or a cowgirl or a mommy, but Laura the little weird kid wanted to be a scary vampire or witch type. As for masks specifically, I loved masks and had been getting them as birthday and Christmas presents from my parents, my great-aunt and great-uncle, and my grandpa, so I had a bedroom full of cool old masks by Don Post, Be Something and some from cheap import companies, while I was still a kid.

Man, I wish I still had all of those oldie-moldies today!

Of course when you're a child with a bunch of great monster masks, you use them to scare people, let your goofy friends wear them and everything else, so they take a beating.

I don't know when it first hit me that I needed to take good care of these beasts because most of them weren't replaceable!How has the mask-collecting hobby changed nce you first became involved?

Back in the days when I was still alive, I didn't really think about whether anybody else collected masks or not.

I just knew they were cool and I enjoyed having them.

The first person to work toward bringing mask collectors together was the late Terry Prince. Terry put out a mple but very clever little xeroxed newsletter called "MCC", Mask Collectors' Club.

Of course the photos weren't anything great, but it was a fun little fanzine type of thing from the golden age of fanzines.

Terry would announce all the new masks that were coming out, do little interviews with mask makers or collectors, and feature mask-related cartoons and art (the guy was an incredibly ted illustrator).

That was in the '80s.

Back then, whatever collectors there were didn't have much chance to know each other.

There'd just be an odd kid here and there-- usually a very odd kid, come to think of it-- with shelves of latex masks in his room.

It would still be a while before collectors started, as the humans call it now, "networking". In your opinion, how has the internet affected the hobby and have these changes been for the better?

Overall I have a dim view of the internet because its primary functions now are spreading minformation, manipulating the general population's opinions and priorities, and selling car insurance and porn.

I don't think the people who first created the 'net intended it for those purposes, but like TV and practically everything else that could have been used to make the planet a better place, it quickly fell into the hands of greedy irresponble bunessmen and corrupt plutocrats, so that's the way it goes.

Same as it ever was, I suppose.

In terms of mask collecting, I think the internet has had a tremendous impact which overall has been just great.

HorrorBid, Ebay and other auction tes are incredible resources for people who collect masks... or who collect anything, really!

Stuff that would have ended up sold at somebody's grandma's garage sale before can now be offered to literally millions of potential buyers online.

And of course it's made it eaer for mask artists and dealers to show the world their masks and meet the people who will appreciate them.

So I think the mask world is a much better place for having the internet, even though I'm not sure that's the case in the socio-policical arena.

I'm not an internet geek by a long shot, but I've bought and sold so many masks online in the last 5 years, it's amazing. A lot of those pieces were nearly imposble to find before.

It's made collectible masks eaer to find, eaer to buy and eaer to sell, and that can only be a good thing!Tell us a bit about your book and how it came to be?

More importantly, are there any future editions planned?

I didn't deliberately set out to become an authority on mask trivia, although I did save all the pictures of masks anybody would send me, and I saved all my old mask catalogs just because they conatined all those cool pictures of monsters.

Things got to the point where people, many of them total strangers, were calling or writing me to ask about certain masks.

Which company made this one, who sculpted that one, where could I buy or sell that certain special one, that sort of thing.

It was happening more and more, with people from all over the planet.

Most of these folks didn't want to buy anything from me, they were just curious about who sculpted a particular Don Post Frankenstein or whatever.

Eventually it dawned on me that, out of all the people in the entire world, I was probably the one people were coming to the most about monster masks.

Plus they were sending me photos of their collections, stuff from movies they'd been involved with, their homemade creations and all.

I started to think, Gee, if I accidentally electrocute myself or get run over by a steamroller or eaten by a giant robotic crab, it's like a lot of that info will die with me.

Today, there are a lot of other mask experts who know all the trivia, but this was over 10 years ago, and at that time I don't think people would have had anybody else to go to if I hadn't been there.

So I figured I needed to put together a book that could serve as a handy reference for people in the hobby.

I worked on it alone, did the whole thing ngle-handedly (well, that's not entirely true: I used both hands).

I called a few artists and collectors to confirm certain facts, but I wrote, laid out, typed and assembled the book on my own.

So when it came out, it was a surprise to collectors, including my closest friends.

I remember Dan Roebuck practically had what is commonly called a conniption fit.

He was like, "David, I was at your house like two weeks ago, and you were working on something this big, and you forgot to tell me???!!"

He thought I was nuts.

And he was probably right.

But I just kind of wanted it to be a big surprise to the mask collecting community.

I have a library filled with photo albums stuffed with thousands of mask photos.

It seemed like the best way to narrow it down was to limit it to just the movie- and TV-related stuff, as opposed to all the original degns.

That's always what the majority of collectors are into, the familiar images from movies they've seen. Imagine how incredibly cool it would be to have a reference source that included all those years' worth of generic zombies and aliens and stuff. That would just be wonderful.

But if it was done on paper it would probably fill a set of encyclopedias.

At the moment I'm working with a friend to start work on a posble mask collector DVD that will preserve some of these many rare photos.

So many nice people have been sending me so many awesome photos for so many years now, it would just be awful if my house burned down and all this stuff was lost.

I'm talking about records of beautiful work by a lot of fantastically talented people, and it sure isn't doing anyone any good locked away in my house where nobody can see it.

For me it's so much fun just to look through these photos, I feel like I'm being selfish unless I figure a way to share them with other people who'd enjoy them too.

So stay tuned.One honor you’ve both received is that you’ve been immortalized in latex by Henry Alvarez. How did that come about?That was all Henry's idea.

Good thing it was, too, because I'm sure we couldn't have afforded to commison someone of Henry's incredible talent and experience to create something like that!

He knew us from back when we all lived in CA, and at the time I was doing the painting and Laura was doing the hair on almost all of Henry's latex collector pieces.

Henry saw Laura playing her vampire-self on some videos and in pictures and he just thought it would make a cool vampire bust.

We sent him Laura's lifecast along with a stack of photos of her with various facial expresons, and Henry came up with the wide-open eyes and mouth look as his personal choice for the expreson.

He opened the eyes and mouth of the lifecast, added the two vampire fangs, and did this absolutely amazing job of refining it all and making it look very realistic and lifelike.

The Laura Vampire head was a success right away.

We've sold a lot of those to museums, haunted attractions, and collectors.

I understand there are two full-body mannequins of her at Wayne Toth's HalloweenTown store.

And of course, lots of people have seen "Laura" in all those haunted houses and horror exhibits.

She loves it 'cause she gets to scare people by proxy.

Of course most people don't know who she is; they just see a neat female vampire character..

A couple of guys have assumed that head was supposed to be this red-headed vampire woman from the Spanish movie, "The Night Of The Sorcerers".

One year we used a copy of Laura's head (with a different wig) as the infamous Countess Bathory for a scene in Horror Hotel.

For a few clients, we've done special finishing work the way they specified, like with mottled or veiny undead blue skin, or red/yellow demonic eyes, black hair, or whatever.

The Laura head also makes an ideal haunted house or museum prop as a generic victim.

The way the expreson is, you can paint it to look terrified, like it's screaming, snip the points off the fangs, add whatever kind of wig you want, and have a great frightened woman head for use in scary scenes.

We also did a few of them as this cool She-Wolf werewolf variant, with medium reddish-brown hair all over the face.

But the majority of them have been painted and haired to look like Laura looks at Horror Hotel and in our video productions, with light caucaan skin, hazel eyes, dark red lipstick and a red, puffed-up Tina Turner style wig with a white streak in front.

As for the one of me, Henry watched a HauntWorld video with a segment I was in, and he especially liked this one particular crazy expreson I had while doing some sort of mad doctor bit.

There too, Henry just thought it would make a cool collector mask/bust, and, armed with a lifecast of me, he went to work.

Henry is so talented, it's just mind-boggling.

The quality of his work is so constently high, so off-the-chart dramatic, he never ceases to amaze.

nce he had given Laura fangs, he wanted to "monsterize" me in some subtle way too.... yeah, like I don't look enough like a monster to start with.... so he gave me pointed ears.

The Dr Lady head has never been as big a seller as the Laura one, posbly because there are already so many male prop heads available and so few female ones.

That, or maybe she's just prettier than I.

We've done some fun things with the Alvarez David Lady... it turns out I make an excellent old-school style red devil if you add little horns and a goatee (I call that veron "the Dave-L"), and I've dome some zombie verons of myself that turned out nicely too, like the one where I'm a blank-eyed drowning victim and one with a severely bruised neck from where I'd been hanged.

I call the dead verons of myself "Ca-Dave-r".There are some other things I hope to try, like a Jack The Ripper, a generic Dracula and an evil clown, ung the Alvarez veron of "me".

Still.

It's a bit sad that I make a better corpse or devil or vampre than a human being, don't you think?

More recently, Henry had the idea to make a full-body gargoyle prop of Laura. It would be a life-ze, crouching female gargoyle statue with claws, batwings, and Laura's face.

It was a terrific idea, and it certainly would have been a very different prop from anything else on the market. I wish he'd had the time to do that, but right around when it was in the planning stages he started to get these huge orders for wax figures from several big museums overseas, so the Laura Gargoyle had to be put on hold and never did come to pass.

Laura and I got so extraordinarily lucky, not only to get to have a wonderful working relationship with one of the greatest wax museum sculptors in the world, but to even have him decide to do likenesses of us too!

Working with Henry has always been a pleasure, but the whole buness of having him want to create collector edition heads of us... well, who wouldn't love an honor like that?

Back when I was a kid collecting masks, I certainly never dreamed I would get to be one someday. Tell us about how you both came to develop the Horror Hotel.

Strange as it sounds, we didn't buy this place with anything like that in mind.

We were just looking for a large, old, dark house to live in, and somebody mentioned that there was an old hotel in Chatfield, and the rest was history.

Or maybe geography.

Neither one was my best subject.

I had been running my own haunted houses (the traditional "jump-out-and-go-Boo" kind) ever nce I was a kid.

My poor beleaguered parents would have to park on the street in the fall so my friends and I could turn the garage into a haunted house for Halloween.

I'd get refrigerator boxes, cut them up and use them to build a maze, that sort of thing.

Then when I was older, I was still doing haunted attractions, eventually with Laura on board.

Years later, sometime during the year after we were settled in here, it dawned on us that was were reding in what bacally looks like most people's idea of a haunted manon anyway.

Here we were living in a big, old, dark, drafty house that was originally a small railroad hotel, and it was crammed with masks and props and gothic decor and monster stuff.

Once we gave it some thought, we realized we could turn most of the rooms into scenes, put in colored lights, hide tape players all over the place, and construct full-body mannequin style figures of all kinds of monsters, and we'd have a unique and offbeat attraction.

nce the place really was a hotel some 100 years ago, our story was that today it's still a hotel... only now it's only open to all the ghosts and monsters who come creeping out of the darkness to invade the world of the living every Halloween season.

So that's been our bac theme every year, that we're a hotel for monsters.

Which is nice because it makes it open to pretty much all kinds of monsters and creepy characters.

At a typical haunted house you wouldn't dare put, say, Michael Myers next to Dracula because they'd look lly together, but at Horror Hotel that would make sense because they would both be hotel guests, checked in for their annual Halloween trip to the world of humans.Like most of our projects, it got way out of hand quickly, and became something much more complicated than how we first envioned it.

Every year the tour is all new in terms of the scenes and stories, so every year we need to construct some new props and set decor and so forth.As of right now, we've had Horror Hotel open fourteen years!

My God, we are so old.But anyway... I wonder how many more times I can come up with fresh jokes involving monsters at a hotel, you know?

We've done things with room service, cleaning ladies, ice buckets, soda machines, and just about everything else that one would associate with a hotel.

There are a lot of unavoidable milarities from year to year, but I really don't want to fall into ung the same tuations or jokes over and over again.

So, realistically, there probably isn't much more Horror Hotel left in us!

I only want to keep it going as long as I think it's genuinely good, and full of interesting new material every year.

I will say that we've garnered an amazing audience over the years.

We have so many super-nice people who come every year, lots of film buffs, art students, and families with little kids who'd be too scared at a typical "scary" haunt.

We've really been very fortunate to have attracted the wonderful crowd we get every year, and we've been lucky to be able to put together such an elaborate project this many times.

I don't think the average person has any idea how much work it takes to turn the place into Horror Hotel each year. Those of us who have seen pictures of your collection realize you have many pieces that the rest of us would gladly sell our souls for. Can you each pick out a ngle piece that you can call your favourite?Really?

Wow... you guys really shouldn't sell your souls for a mask.

Souls are worth more than masks. You could always hire a maskmaker to sculpt a new veron for you a lot eaer than you could find someone to provide you with a new soul.

Unless of course you happen to have a mask they want bad enough to trade you their soul for it.

But then you'd have somebody else's soul, so I'm not sure how that would work.

Would you have their soul in your collection?

And if you did, would it be a Collective Soul?

I think souls are usually non-transferable, like raffle tickets.

You wouldn't want to end up souled out.

You might feel like a soulless heel, or worse, a total ass ... soul.

Wait, what was the question?.. Oh yeah, I remember now.

Favorite mask, huh?I couldn't posbly pick a ngle favorite. Or even a married favorite. There are so many wonderful masks.

It's like asking someone to choose their favorite potato chip out of a bag of Ruffles.

Nobody can pick just one.

But I can tell you that a few of my all-time faves are the Shuna Sas that Laura commisoned Harry Inman to sculpt for me, Distortions' Pickman's Model, the Halloween Society Metropolis Maria, Harry's Unnameable bust, Don Post's Universal "veron B" Mummy and "veron A" Creature, plus their Glenn Strange Frankenstein, Cagney Hunchback, and "veron A" Wolfman.

But then I also love the Hideous Sun Demon, Henry Alvarez's Freddy Krueger, Christopher Lee Dracula, Linda Blair Regan and Frederic March Hyde, Carol Hicks's Boris Karloff, Monster-On-The-Campus and Edward Scissorhands, and Laura's It The Terror, I-Married-A-Monster and Teenage Werewolf masks, plus Tom Savini's Dead Nate, and...umm... I should shut up now, huh?

Laura says her favorites include the Halloween Society Maria, the Cathy Tharp "Beast", and most any good veron of the Black Lagoon Creature. And of course we are both somewhat partial to those masks of us that Henry created!Your cable televion show “The Late DR Lady Show” has some clips on your Myspace page that are quite hilarious. Tell us a bit about the show.

We started doing the show in October 2003..

It's really thanks to Wolfie. He was the one who approached the TV station to propose the idea to them.

I write almost all of the material we do, but if it wasn't for Wolfie there'd be no show at all.

We had done other TV and video stuff over the years, but THE LATE DR LADY SHOW is my favorite.

It's bacally just four of us, me, Laura, Wolfie and Kellie, playing only slightly exaggerated verons of ourselves.

I always say none of us are really acting, because that's pretty much how our real lives look and sound.

It's set at Horror Hotel, which is of course is a hotel for monsters, so there are always all kinds of creepy characters making cameo appearances in our skits.

Thus the show ties in with our annual Halloween tour, having the same main theme and having Laura and me looking the same in the show as we do at Halloween, plus it's shot right here where we really live, so that works out nicely.

Our home is so full of horror and monster stuff that it looks like a horror host set without any extra decorating!

The challenge is to keep it entertaining and funny, and not just do the same things over and over.

So far, each episode has been slightly different in terms of pacing and editing format and such, which is how I like it.

I wouldn't ever want it to fall into something where I just stand there in front of a black curtain and say, "and now back to the movie", you know?

It has been suggested a couple of times that we build one all-purpose set and mply talk to the viewers from that same spot every break.

I know if I would've agreed to that, we would have a lot more episodes by now, but I don't think they'd be as much fun.

I like the show to be a little chaotic, a bit weird and unpredictable, instead of getting too relaxed in any certain pattern.

So the skits cut quickly from one thing to the next.

I'm sort of a hyperactive nervous-energy-spazz myself, so maybe that's why I like things to be edited that way.

I'm always wanting to cut our segments by a few seconds here and there, to make them play out quicker, because I think they're funnier that way.Maybe in the long run I'm wrong, and I would've been smarter to let the show flow a little more casually, and ease up on writing time-consuming skits that require special sound effects, visual effects, precise edits and such, and thereby have a bigger run of complete episodes..

But to me the important thing is that it's funny, and I think things get less amung in a TV series when they become too cozy and familiar.

One thing I do include in every show is a part where I discuss the movie we're showing and give the viewers some trivia about it.

A few people have said that's their favorite part of the show.

Apparently a lot of TV horror hosts don't know all that much about the films they show, but nce I'm a walking encyclopedia of useless horror trivia anyway, I figure I may as well use that to enhance people's understanding and appreciation for the movie they're watching.

It's especially nice when we have a film that I happen to own a collector mask from, because I can have that mask there on camera while we talk about the film.

It's a lot of fun, but it's very difficult to get it all together sometimes.

We just don't have much help and don't have many people involved in the making of the show, so it's very much a labor of love.The most important thing your readers need to know is that THE LATE DR LADY SHOW is available on DVD!!!!

We have a sort of "best of" DVD out that contains 90 minutes' worth of our skits and bits, with a very lly menu and all, a very profesonal, very well-produced DVD.

Then for those who like their horror hosts to be "complete with movie", we have some of the full episodes out on disc.

For $18.00 plus $5.00 Priority Shipping, lucky human beings can buy THE LATE DR LADY SHOW VOLUME ONE: THE PRE-SEQUEL.

The straight-up episodes of the show are available in a no-frills presntation for $15. each.

At the moment we have 8 different two-hour episodes available in that format, and we plan to release more.

Response so far has been so completely potive, it's just been great.

Please tell all your readers to do their part to help the U.S. economy by giving me some of their money! Your current mask line-up includes a lot of great stuff (I can say this with absolute certainty as I own quite a few of them). Are there plans for any new pieces to be coming soon from the Horror Hotel?

This is the lamest posble answer, but the truth is that I have no idea.

We have gone years in between introducing new pieces, and then we'll come out with several during a short timespan.

It depends on many things.

When I have a lot of paint work to do, I can't find time to sculpt anything because I don't want to keep people waiting forever on their paid-for paint jobs.

It really is a wonderful compliment every time someone elects to spend their hard-earned kaputnicks on something you're creating for them, and as artists, I think it's absolutely crucial for mask makers to keep in mind that treating that buness responbly is their job..... to always do their best work, to satisfy their clients, treat them with respect and friendship, and treat their orders as the serious buness transactions they are.

There's nothing more important than earning good solid relationships with people.

But you do have to earn them.

And I don't want there to be anyone, anywhere, at any time, who can say that DR LADY cheated them, ripped them off or treated them unfairly in any sort of transaction. nce Horror Hotel keeps me and Laura and our whole house tied up for like four months out of the year, that really limits what we can do the rest of the time.

But right now we are long overdue for some new editions, so I'd love to get some new pieces going in '09.

It just depends on what I can fit in along with the stuff I have to do for mask clients, the stuff I have to do as Mayor here, and how much time we can find to tape segments for the show!

We have kind of a full plate in front of us, as you humans would say.One last question…what advice would you have for new collectors who are just getting into collecting?

Relax and have fun with the hobby.

Don't just collect what the other collectors say is cool.

Collect what you think is cool.

And don't feel competitive about it.

There are no prizes awarded to the one who dies with the most valuable masks.Other than that, I suppose it would be an awful cliche' to end an interview by telling collectors to buy something from me, wouldn't it?

You know, saying something like, "Everyone needs a DR LADY mask in his or her collection!

Everyone should order a mask from me today!

And everyone should buy a LATE DR LADY SHOW DVD and a HORROR HOTEL soundtrack CD from me, too!

Trust me, you'll enjoy them!"

....Yes, that would be crass.

Shameless self-promotion, you know.. Downright embarrasng. So I won't say anything like that.Wow...what a great read! Thanks again to David & Laura for taking the time to do these interview questions. Here are a few pictures of David & Laura at work in their studio. I'll be adding some pictures of their masks in a separate post.













lblambert Wednesday 2/25/2009 at 11:52 PM | 37609
great read!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Johnny Bisco Thursday 2/26/2009 at 12:20 AM | 37614
WOW!

What an interview!!! Tons of information in this one. Thanks Lee for putting it on, and my thanks to the Ladys for providing all of us with such a great read! I truely enjoyed that.
Myers31TKD Thursday 2/26/2009 at 12:29 AM | 37617
Awesome interview Lee!!

Really great info in there, really nice to learn more about them.

DarkArtist81 Thursday 2/26/2009 at 12:40 AM | 37623
Very cool guys. I'm smiling!
TxSteveTodd Thursday 2/26/2009 at 01:08 AM | 37627
what a just incredible read! It is a true honor to have both David and Laura take the time to do this. You guys are a true inspiration to us all! Incredible work and story on how you guys got to where you're at. Great read! Nice work Lee!!!!!

Horror Domain - Cursed Evil Overlord Thursday 2/26/2009 at 05:14 AM | 37682
Awesome and funny read!

I hope to make it out to the Horror Hotel someday
chubacabra Thursday 2/26/2009 at 09:00 PM | 37782
David & Laura's new webte is up and running. Take a peek and be sure to check out their mask line-up in the shop section!

http://thelatedrladyshow.com/thelatedrladyshow
lblambert Wednesday 3/11/2009 at 04:03 AM | 39296