Zombies and vampires have gone from creepy to cool and are running amok in pop culture. From the Twilight series to True Blood on HBO and The Walking Dead on AMC, creatures are filling TV and movie screens. That trend is scaring up business for Rob Fitz, a makeup and special effects artist, and indie film director in Derry.
I've actually turned down work because I don't have enough time," says Fitz, who explains October is particularly busy. During the run-up to Halloween, Fitz makes custom fangs at the Magic Parlour in Salem, Mass., and also provides monster makeup and face painting for tourists. His fangs, which are customized from thermal plastic formed to people's teeth, cost $25, and he says he usually makes more than 400 fangs per season. One Halloween I did 165 sets in one day, Fitz says.
He also does makeup for zombie road races and walks, and he has provided makeup for events from Hampton Beach to Atlanta, Georgia, where he makes $200 to $400 per day. I did a zombie pub crawl in Harvard Square. The drunker people got, the more zombie makeup they wanted and the more they acted as zombies, he says.
His passion, though, is working on horror movies. When I was a kid, I saw Dawn of the Dead and I thought, This is the best thing ever. I want to make people into zombies', Fitz says. Mostly self-taught, he attended film school at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
At first, he mainly worked on low-budget movies, but since joining the union for makeup artists in New York in 2008, he has landed jobs on several major Hollywood productions, including The Perfect Storm, Fever Pitch, and The Fighter. Asked about his favorite brush with fame, Fitz talks about meeting and doing makeup for Robert Englund-the original Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise-on the set of a movie called Incubus.
Fitz is now focused on being a director and growing his fledgling film company-Conquest Pictures. He has one movie under his belt-a low-budget indie, God of Vampires, released in 2010. He made the film for $26,000 and it grossed $56,000 in limited release. It is now available on DVD and on Netflix. I've been hired to direct another film this fall-Blessed-a dramatic film about a pregnant woman who is depressed and suicidal and meets her next door neighbor who is over 2,000 years old and still sees the joy in life, Fitz says.
He is also releasing a zombie calendar that will be sold at Newbury Comics, Bull Moose, costume shops, comic book shops and through his website, www.godofvampires.com. He teaches basic makeup effect classes out of his studio. I like the idea of doing [more classes] and building a group of people who are good at special effects and have an advanced special effects company that can do several films at once, Fitz says.
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