‘We have eyeballs and severed fingers on our kitchen table’

“I start by looking at the concept and then researching how we are going to make the actor look like their jaw has been dislocated, or their mouth is sewn up, for example,” says Julie, who makes all of the latex prosthetics, masks and designs from her home in Newhall.

“I also need to think about health and safety as well. If I need to make it look like the actor’s mouth is sewn up how do I make sure they can still breathe, that they can wear it for a long time.

“When we first launched the Demonica scare attraction, the characters had their eyes gauged out. If I am going to cover an actor’s eyes on a dark set you need to know they can see what they are doing.”

In the UK, scare attractions themselves are relatively new so through her work at Screamfest Julie has been at the forefront of crafting new and interesting looks that bring horror make-up to life.

Julie says: “When we started eight years ago there weren’t people doing scare attractions. It was a relatively new concept so I didn’t have many points of reference we had to work it all out.

“I have basically learned along the way through trial and error and taken a lot of influence from American artists who are very much established in the industry.”

In the early days this meant that Julie’s testing was even more crucial as she discovered red blood did not work well with red lighting because