ABOUT ME

Today, I am a huge fan of all things ‘horror’ but it was not always this way. In the early days, I was completely oblivious to this amazing genre. I remember looking in a computer games magazine back in ’97 or ’98 and saw some pictures from an upcoming game called Resident Evil 2. One such image stuck out, it was a concept art image of a Zombified cop, an undead crow perched next to him, picking at a severed arm, a worm-like section of gristle hanging from its beak. I was interested, enamoured by the gore, amazed by the absolute blankness of expression in these dead yet, somehow still moving, antagonists. The meat hooks were in.

However, it was not until I read Max Brooks’ excellent Zombie Survival Guide did I think these undead lords of terror could be real. From there, the world of horror was open to me and I, like a ravenous ghoul, had to consume every morsel. I had been infected by some insidious black Mold, starting at the brain, the cosmic ichor eventually seeping down through my veins and blackening my heart. Horror movies, big-budget affairs such as World War Z right down to indie gems like Horror in the High Desert. Computer Games, Books, Action-figures, Collectible statues, Masks – nothing was safe from my desire to bathe in metaphorical blood. I even created by very own website, www.thedeadtimes.co.uk, dedicated to my favourite aspect of horror at the time; the Living Dead. I was also lucky enough to join a team of volunteer Scare Actors in Dundee called Castle Horror. They ran a multitude of events all year round, not all of them horror focused but if the event involved scaring members of the paying public while dressed as a ghoul, goblin or other heinous villain – my name was on the cards.

From there I got into Horror Conventions (not helping, just attending to further my love of the morbid), starting in Manchester, moving through Dundee, the city where I live, and ending up in Glasgow. I do not actually know why I chose to go in cosplay, it was never an option in my mind, just something that was a simple ‘if you’re going, you need to go as somebody’. I went to my first con dressed as Bub from George Romero’s Day of the Dead and the amount of people that wanted a photo with me convinced me that I was onto a good thing. The joy of people appreciating your work enough to ask if they can take a photograph with you is just overwhelming. Anyway, it was through these cons that I met Drew from Nightmare Fuel, and a new stage of my life began.

I was introduced to Drew at the Dundee Horror Con where I, for the first time, was cosplaying a creature entirely of my own design. Bagman, as I affectionately called myself, was awarded first prize in the cosplay competition which was insanely awesome. I also got photos taken which, when I saw the final products were stunning, even Jason Voorhees himself would have been proud at how menacing I looked against the wooded background, shrouded in eerie green lighting. I followed that up by asking Drew to take photos of me in my costume of Beta from The Walking Dead. He obliged and the photos were, again, phenomenal (Drew did have a disturbing insistence to bury me alive which was slightly alarming). From there, my cosplay has only increased, with Drew helping to capture the unholy magic; Tarman and Emo Mike were my next victims. The beast grew further still; sucking in mortals from my past and new fiendish friends to act as models for my massacre like some twisted death-machine, endlessly churning, craving more, always more; more photos, more cosplays, more… blood, the infernal engine never ceasing, it’s draw inescapable.