Wilder Mann Mask Build
Years ago I was somewhat obsessed with the Wilder Mann concept because of Charles Fréger’s amazing book. Still a bit obsessed today.
Wilder Mann book plates, Charles Fréger (pub. 2012)
I was struck by the inventiveness of the designs, as well as by the utterly alien and oddball nature of many of the shapes and proportions I saw: wookie beasts with monolith-heads; ferocious, horned men with carved & painted wood faces and giant bells on their belts; stacked-up, indecipherable, snarling, multi-horned totem faces; bare-legged, toothy, Pac Man moose giants in smocks.
I often keep an eye toward realism and verisimilitude in my own design, and I feel like that can lead to a level of criticality that sometimes holds one back (“One”? OK, me then!) when simply trying to express oneself and have some damn fun. The craziness of these guys’ shapes and the ambitiously scrappy nature of their construction was a refreshing antidote to this, and it lit a fire under my butt to construct a more ambitious Halloween costume than usual that year: a Wilder Mann of my own.
Also sticking in my mind was a comic from the book Tiny Footprints by the surrealist/absurdist comic artist Bernard Kliban (B. Kliban on all of his books).
From Tiny Footprints, B. Kliban (pub. 1978)
A woman and two men are having a conversation; probably at a cocktail party, judging from the year of publication, the characters’ style of dress, and the cigarette she’s casually holding in the first panel. The men’s faces each go through outlandishly grotesque transformations in turn as she suspiciously looks back and forth: She never quite manages to catch what’s happening, and the conversation continues.
Say what you will about how this 40-plus year old comic—probably originally published in Playboy magazine—holds up in the present (creepy f’d-up sexist garbage? Effective commentary about Men? About people in general? 70’s society?), but I like the idea of people changing in startling ways when your head is turned, their heads erupting into comical yet disturbing configurations just outside your peripheral vision, then snapping back to accepted societal norms when you think you’re about to catch them. Look at the guy in panel #3: he’s nuts!
People are weird. I definitely wanted to try and hit this more psychological side of the character, and mash it in there along with its original pagan underpinnings.
Before displaying the completed mask, I’ll put up a rough process sheet I cribbed together from a handful of photos taken for my own reference during the build (shored up later with some quick supplemental illos). I made this cribsheet not long after the mask itself, and then pretty much forgot about the thing until I recently found it on the desktop of one of my old computers.
The two most useful sculpting tools for this build besides hands: a Leatherman Skeletool blade and a Dremel with a bullet grinding stone
Where the hell did the horns come from? Good old Etsy! Black Crane Creations, to be specific. This isn’t any sort of paid promotion—I don’t even know how to set up an affiliate link—I’m just a very satisfied customer.
Molded from real goat and ram horns, they’re extremely lightweight and durable because they’re slip-cast with a thin layer of some sort of plastic or resin, then filled with highly structural expanding foam. The horns showed up with a natural-looking paint job with some good variance and a nice, realistic dark wash down in the crevices. All I had to do is glossy clearcoat them, mainly to keep the surface pores protected and unstained when I started sloshing paint all over the place.
Normally I’d do a bunch of color overlays in Photoshop to completely nail down a satisfactory color scheme before starting with physical media (Measure seven times, cut once—Russian Proverb: though Maelcom boiled it down to twice in Neuromancer). For some reason, though, none of the overlay work was ringing true, so I gave up on digital and went straight into wrestling with different colors of paint until I was happy.
An arresting image of a jade, shark-toothed Maya mask kept showing up in my Pinterest feed at the time, and I think I couldn’t keep it out of my head. I’m pretty certain it may have been influential in pushing me toward a bright & cool, non-fleshy color scheme. It seems obvious in retrospect: yellowy teeth, orangey eyes with red-purple rims, bone/ivory-ish horns? Blue-ish skin, then.
Max Shrek in Nosferatu—Eine Symphonie des Grauens, dir. F. W. Murnau (1922). Incidentally, Eine Symphonie des Grauens is also a great song by The Monochrome Set.
Maya mask, Rio Azul, Peten, Guatemala
It’s only occurring to me now that maybe the Nosferatu-like front teeth configuration is more than coincidence as well. But it also may have just been the only way I could quickly figure out to fit Wilder Mann’s choppers together.
Here’s how he turned out:
Left: Wilder Mann mask on Halloween, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
In an attempt to go full-body with the getup, I bought some wolfman hands at Abracadabra NYC, and ordered and painted (to the best of my ability with the time left at hand) a ghillie suit. The ghillie suit was insanely hot to wear, so I ended up with head/hands/odd jacket & trousers for what I hoped was sort of a Lady Boyle’s Last Party look.
Yeesh, Lord Brisby. If you’ve played Dishonored, you know.
With more time and resources, I’d have sanded the face surfaces down and filled them to be smooth and more planar, scribed in some fake grain, and given the mask a more multilayered & multitonal paint job to mimic lacquered wood. I’m a pretty slender man (maybe another Halloween) so the ghillie suit looked kind of droopy and silly on me: ideally I’d have found an old set of football pads to wear under it, in addition to really slathering it with a much more opaque black paint/dye treatment than I’d been able to find. I suppose with all that, some sort of big monster feet would be in order, too—though a lot of the guys in the book are just wearing workboots, a wonderfully gritty aesthetic of necessity!
Ultimately there wasn’t enough time for all of that, and I guess white-whaling those things would’ve sorta flown in the face of what I was saying about “refreshing antidotes” way back in paragraphs 2-3. Dropping that stuff also let me focus on what really matters; a good goat-eye paint-job. It was nice to get a concept across with a few well-placed strokes, let go, and head out the door to Lady Boyle’s.
