Face Off is a Syfy series that pits prosthetic makeup artists against each other in our society’s favourite form of gladiatorial combat: reality television. Here in Canada, Face Off runs on the Space channel, a channel I don’t have because it doesn’t air any of TV’s three reasons for existing (Breaking Bad, Community, hockey). But after several people on Twitter told me that Tuesday the 26th’s Face Off would be about werewolves, I made a note to dig around after the episode aired to see if I missed anything good.
On this episode, called “Howl at the Moon”, the teams (contestants? combatants? victims?) were told to create full-body werewolf suits. That task alone would be hard enough without any difficulty modifiers, given the time constraints in place, but this being reality TV, of course there was a twist: the werewolves couldn’t be from Earth, but instead had to be from any other planet in our solar system that has a moon. (The space nerd in me is delighted at the fact that four of those planets don’t even have solid surfaces on which werewolves could stand.) Here’s the promo video:
And here, after what looks like the requisite out-of-context hissy fits and fabricated melodrama, are the results:
None of them are what I would call “classic werewolves”, but then, that wasn’t the point, was it? To me, all four are identifiable as werewolves and aliens, and I think they look terrific, especially considering the conditions under which they were designed and built.
Here’s the episode recap on Syfy’s “Face Off” site (complete with a streaming version of the episode for those of you in the United States), and here, courtesy of Cinema Makeup School‘s Twitter and Instagram feeds, are some photos of the winning design by @waynesworldfx and @krisfxkobzina. Good work, guys!
This looked like an interesting episode, but I don’t think I’ll be paying the extra $10 / month it’ll cost to get Space added to my cable package. Nevertheless, it’s great to see werewolves and prosthetics makeup artists getting this kind of exposure.
Did you see the episode? What did you think?