Skeletons in his closet: That's Daniel Lorentz's idea of a dream job

You know that guy at the Halloween party, the one who always has the scariest costume? The guy who stands out among the unimaginative cheerleaders and the last-minute ghosts as truly chilling? The one who spent the last year in his basement, paging through "scarezines" and fright catalogs?

That's Daniel Lorentz. He makes corpses, and he's really good at it. Skeletons, mummified bodies, gravestones and decomposing flesh are both his art and his income, and today is the highlight of his year.

Lorentz, 23, works out of his parents' home in Everett doing custom design and decoration for Halloween parties. He plans and builds all year, creating the grotesque characters of his imagination from scratch, laboring in a garage full of hanging skeletons and latex fumes.

His elaborate designs have drawn interest from police and concern from teachers. They appeared at KNDD-FM "The End's" "Scaregrounds" last Halloween and graced the back yards of those with a little bejesus to spare and a wish to have it scared out of them. He can make good money from our worst fears.

When Halloween approaches, Lorentz uses his father's pickup to transport his collection of corpses and other haunted-house props to a party site, making sure to hang all the arms and legs outside the truck bed and drive slowly through town. His friend Zane Gardner, also 23, helps him set up. Their chores range from spreading dead leaves around the property, to hanging bodies from the trees, to dying the water in the garden fountain blood-red.

"He's actually really demented," said Lorentz. "I just do the fake stuff."

'Scooby-Doo' cartoons

Lorentz said it all started when he was a little kid, watching "Scooby-Doo" cartoons, monster movies and Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. Anything creepy, supernatural or sinister seemed to catch his attention and spark his imagination. He remembers asking his mother again and again to drive by an antique shop in Everett that had a skeleton in its window display.

He keeps a photograph of himself at age 8, dressed for Halloween, wearing a white shirt spattered with fake blood. His face was a pulpy mess, a fake eyeball boing-boinging out of his eye socket. He had done the makeup himself.

"Halloween was always my opportunity to show off," Lorentz said. "It's a time to be something other than what you really are."

Lorentz doesn't seem like someone who expends most of his energy replicating the faces of death. He is clean-cut and highly normal. His ambition is to work his way into a Hollywood special-effects/prop studio, so that constructing ribcages and mummified skulls might be his 9 to 5. He's been hesitant to approach any local prop companies until he has a full portfolio.

"But all these special-effects artists, they're all really nice people, the same as me," said Lorentz.

"Well, maybe they're a little bit cooler," said Gardner.

For now, Lorentz spends his days working in an optical lab, grinding and edging lenses.

The police investigate

His dark talent has gotten him into a few strange situations. One day he was transporting two corpses, and had them sitting upright in the back seat of his car, secured with seatbelts. He parked his car in the lot outside a bar and went inside. After a while, the bartender came over to him and said the police were outside. A woman had seen the corpses and freaked out.

"The police were really cool," Lorentz said.

"They loved it," he said. "They took Polaroids and hung them up in the precinct."

In his studies, Lorentz figures he has probably taken every art class offered at Everett Community College, from illustration to sculpture, even creating an independent study for mold making, foam and latex work. He often starts with a cast of a medical skeleton, then uses such materials as clay, plaster, wet paper towels, cheesecloth and glue to sculpt rotted or mummified flesh.

Lorentz has several corpses in his portfolio now, a sort of variety pack. But most of them are "pretty well rotted," he said, with "a tight, mummified look."

"They've all got so much character," he said.

He keeps several fans blowing in his workshop because of the toxic chemicals he works with: xylene, naptha, methylethylketone and other solvents that in the long term could be scarier than the corpses themselves.

"You whip it up with an eggbeater, and hope it doesn't explode in your face," said Gardner. "That stuff is burly. You come out of there, and you've got no nose hairs left."

The haunted-house industry is booming right now, said Lorentz as he rifled through the ScareFactory catalog, which offers a full line of corpses and coffins, for all your terror needs. There are the hanging twitching corpses, which thrash around when activated, the "Splatter Series" featuring a corpse with collapsed ribcage, appropriately named "Jumper."

A squeamish side

Lorentz said his parents weren't worried about his interest in the macabre.

"I think they knew it was a positive direction, and not some weird satanic thing," he said.

Lorentz admits he's on the squeamish side when it comes to real-life death.

"If I'm in charge of making it, sculpting it, then I'm OK," he said. "But real dead things — I don't want to see them."

Lorentz's and Gardner's obsession with all things dead and undead did get the attention of a teacher at Everett High School, however.

"She used to tell us we were sick because of the stories we turned in," Gardener said happily, before pointing out a big maple tree in a neighboring yard that would be an excellent place for hanging a fake body.

The two drove up to "Castle Novacula," a waterfront home Lorentz was decorating for a Halloween masquerade party of 150 to 200 guests. For parties of this size, Lorentz charges a fee of about $2,000.

Just then, the homeowner zoomed into the driveway in his DeLorean sports car, lifted up the door, got out and proclaimed to Lorentz and Gardner, "Count Chocula is here!"

Everyone laughed; Lorentz's enthusiasm for Halloween is infectious.

Lorentz pointed out the precision-cut lawn that would soon become an overgrown cemetery, complete with headstones, fog machines and lights. The garage would be a mausoleum and the fountain would spout red water.

If Lorentz had his way, the beautiful house overlooking the water would become the graveyard of his imaginings, and every day would be Halloween.

Caitlin Cleary: 206-464-8214 or ccleary@seattletimes.com.