Distortions Unlimited 

Hidden in an industrial complex on the sleepy prairie near Greeley, Colorado, Ed and Marsha Edmunds make monsters for a living. As the owners of Distortions Unlimited Corporation, their quality props, masks, and creations have been the mainstay of the dark amusement industry for the last 22 years. Long creative hours are spent in gray walled offices with brain-eating hunchbacks, wall-scaling zombies and docile, 3-foot tall aliens, the working environment looks more like Batman’s lair than a place of business.

It all began in Long Grove, Illinois in the early 1960’s. It was the days of The Outer Limits, The Time Machine and the original Star Trek. The characters in these television shows fascinated the fertile young mind of Distortions founder, Ed Edmunds. "Those shows created more than just an interest in entertainment," he explains, "It created a love of monsters." To Ed, monsters were more interesting than classmates, and more powerful, too. By creating and becoming a monster, Ed soon realized that he could leave the restrictions of his guarded personality behind and become a performer. In his mind Ed wanted to be a monster, and he would don an alien mask or convert his face into something out of this world with layers of 3 dimensional makeup. Ed would tell his cousins that he was a Martian or offer his sister tours of his back-yard spaceship, knowing she would be too scared to accept the invitation. By sliding on a costume Ed was able to slide off his coy demeanor.

Realizing that he could not actually become a monster, Ed became content with creating them. "If I could not be one, I wanted to bring them to life and be a part of the Frankenstein-type process," Ed recalls, "I never saw monsters as ugly." Instead, Ed saw the monsters or at least their makeup as ‘pieces of art.’ "Those monsters were beautiful to me. I associated with these creatures much more than the human stars of the show." Looking back Ed says, "I do not believe in the correlation between ugly and evil, beautiful and good. Outwardly Mother Teresa may not have been considered beautiful, but she was good, and beautiful inwardly." continues Ed, " Without naming names, we could all think of an outwardly beautiful woman who is evil. According to Scripture, Satan was one of God’s most physically beautiful creatures." In the interests of conveying good and bad so that they are easier to spot, Hollywood and storytellers have used this good is beautiful, evil is ugly relationship and inadvertently created a skewed reality. "There is beauty in all of creation from spiders to bunny rabbits." explains Ed, "This skewed reality and people’s negative reactions from the real life elephant man to Frankenstein makes me more empathetic and bonded to monsters."

Ed continued to experiment with makeup and soon realized that there was more to this hobby than just art. There was a dramatic side as well. After plenty of practice, Ed brought his hobby to school. Stumbling into gym class, Ed gripped a makeup-caked hand, which gushed blood from the remains of a severed finger. The gym teacher cringed, grabbed Ed and hurried him to the nurse’s office for first aid. Both looked on in horror until Ed revealed his farce. With this realization the emotions of the adults immediately changed. They were relieved and amused. Ed was thrilled and enamored with the dramatic shift of emotion. Ed had decided "Scaring people is fun."

Through years as a ‘practical jokester,’ Ed has learned that sometimes you can go too far. People enjoy pretend fear; it is an emotional rush, but the minute they think, ‘this horror is real,’ the enjoyment is gone. Ed found that fear is not a concrete thing. It changes with the audience. Maintaining a balance is difficult for some entrepreneurs in the haunted attraction industry, because what is designed to scare teen-age girls will not scare a forty-year-old. Generating just the right amount of fear is a tedious process, a delicate positioning of fear and fantasy, pitted perfectly one against the other.

Fear would take time to master, but fantasy...that was easy. Masks were pure fantasy, and Ed was proving himself to be a talented mask maker at a young age. Without instructions, molds or even advice, Ed meticulously sculpted a Frankenstein head out of oil-based clay at the young age of 14 and perched his first full head creation among a growing spread of collected masks. By the time his family packed their belongings in 1972 for a move to Pueblo, Colorado, Ed’s artistic proficiency had been established.

Once settled in, Ed started a one-man company dubbed Modern Stage Craft. Working with the local theatrical productions that would pop up from time to time, Ed applied stage makeup and crafted props. The returns were limited but productive, and Ed would spend his spare time incubating his smaller, subsidiary company, a mask-making operation that he temporarily branded with the name Distortions Unlimited. It was more of a hobby than an occupation. "I never thought I could make money with masks," Ed recalls, even when the art department head at the University of Southern Colorado offered Ed a full scholarship to bring his talent for monster making to academia, Ed turned it down, still stern in his belief that there was no money in masks.

Soon after his high school graduation in 1974, Ed packed his things again, and headed to college, in pursuit of an art education degree at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado. Distortions took on more vigor in Greeley, where Ed churned out masks from his one-bedroom apartment. He would start with cheap, lack-luster masks, and would paint more intriguing faces and details on them to sell at Party Palace, a local retailer.

Still playing the role of monster, Ed crowned himself with an impressive Don Post wolf man mask in1978, and strolled confidently into a Halloween costume party. Convinced that he had the first place prize, a stereo, ‘in the bag,’ he was shocked when the judges chose instead a friend who had come clad in one of Ed’s own Frankenstein creations. Frustrated but encouraged, the bittersweet defeat inspired him, and Ed set out on a year long quest to create a costume that could not lose; a beast that no judge could overlook. For the next year Ed labored on a massive green alien that would shock any slate of judges. Jim Faust, a local costume shop owner, happened to see the alien in process and told Ed that his talent might be marketable. When Jim asked Ed to re-create the alien mask to sell in his shop, an idea surfaced that Ed had never thought of before, "I might be able to do this for a living." After all, if those cheap masks could turn a profit, why not good ones? So in 1978, the mask making company carrying the Distortions Unlimited name became more than just a hobby.

In its infancy Distortions was a diamond in the rough, making its first home in one bedroom of a two-bedroom apartment. Pumping out strictly masks, Ed worked to bridge the gap between the cheap masks he had previously painted and their high-priced American counterparts. He guessed that there would be some market for higher-quality masks at reasonable prices, and he was right. In 1979, Ed started advertising his growing array of Distortions masks in Fangoria magazine. Jim Lawrence of Morris Costumes saw the ad and contacted Ed about carrying his line of masks. When Morris picked up the line, the exposure took Distortions from an amateur project to a professional success, and Distortions Unlimited had arrived.

Exposure meant growth for Distortions, and the company pushed beyond the walls of Ed’s apartment, filling a garage and basement in nearby Evans, Colorado. Movement also meant diversification, and Ed began experimenting with small props. He sculpted a severed finger, molded bloody hands and eventually became one of the first in the industry to sculpt cut off arms. Business flooded Ed’s garage and pushed him to change locations again in 1981, planting his maturing business in Kersey, Colorado in 8,000 square feet of a three level building.

Ed was just settling into his new digs when he met .Marsha Taub, a biology student also from University of Northern Colorado. After an introduction at church, Marsha came to work at Distortions where she quickly became part of every step of the operation. Ed quickly discovered that he and Marsha shared more than a workplace and a dedication to a faith in Christ; they shared an artistic passion, and a creative yearning. "It was the old two heads are better than one thing," recalls Marsha. The two would paint together, pour masks together and from the paint buckets and vats of latex; they started a relationship that lead to taking marriage vows in 1992.

The marriage of Ed and Marsha seemed to pump fuel into Distortions. Marsha took on more responsibility in the company. "We balanced each other out," Ed explains. Together, these ‘two heads’ not only thought better, they thought bigger. With growing foreign competition in the mask industry, Distortions changed its focus and soon found itself buried under a heap of new prop ideas; Full-scale monsters, Aliens, and Zombies. With the introduction of large props, the creative process became more complicated. "In order to make the large displays we had to start welding," explains Ed, "In order to make animated products we had to work with pneumatics and electronics." It seemed that whenever Ed learned these new mediums it opened the door, creatively speaking, to do more similar products and more complicated products, which required additional knowledge, which opened more doors, etc. Each creation would enhance and boost creativity. It was not long before you could not even open the doors at the studio and Distortions was forced to move again in 1989. This time to a 22,000 square foot facility with automated production equipment. Then, in the early 1990’s, Distortions brought the homicidal queen alien, of the movie Alien, to life. "I thought: This is it," says Ed, "We went from a cut off finger to a queen alien and I figured we could not do anything more." He was wrong.

In 1995, the Edmunds started their first Haunted House, called The Dark Museum. The one-room exhibit in Greeley was a moderate success, but "cheesy" by modern standards. Distortions’ foray with Haunted House production was not complete, however, and fueled progress far beyond the walls of the exhibit. The first haunt was a learning experience, an experience that gave birth to the now-famous idea of a realistic animated electric chair with smoke, sound and lights. In finished form, the Electric Chair was even more impressive than the Edmunds’ had imagined. While the prop used a motor and not sophisticated pneumatics, it was a milestone nonetheless, and over 200 chairs were sold the first year at $3800.00 each.

The entire industry took notice. Haunted Houses from coast to coast made room for the chair, highlighting the morbid machine as their centerpiece. In the Electric Chair, entrepreneurs found the marketing muscle they h ad been looking for. For the first time, the industry had hard dark animation, and with that came publicity. When the smoke cleared, Distortions had become a fixture in the fast-evolving world of modern haunted houses. Moving once again to their current location also in Greeley, in an industrial zoned 24,000 square ft. facility, Ed and Marsha still wanted a chance to try their own seasoned hands at a large-scale, multi-media haunt.

Knowing that times were changing fast, the Distortions team looked to the future for help - to the teen-agers who they saw standing in line at Haunted Attractions around the country. In doing so, they set the groundwork for a revolutionary, rock n’ roll-style Haunted House called Brutal Planet. The event was a critically acclaimed success, being voted "worst place to take your mother" by the Denver Rocky Mountain News. Brutal Planet went off without a glitch, opening to the lauding of patrons and industry insiders alike. The bizarre marriage of gothic club life, traditional Halloween haunts and mind bending sensory stunts paid off. As a capstone to the wild circus, the Edmunds brought in Alice Cooper to promote the event, saying the legendary rock n’ roll wild man was, "the perfect persona for the job."

Brutal Planet was a tremendous hands-on learning experience for the Edmunds. It opened their eyes to the dark attraction industry and the needs of entrepreneurs of dark attractions. Unfortunately, the busiest time of year for Distortions coincided exactly with the busiest time of year for Brutal Planet. "Brutal Planet kept us up until 2 a.m. and Distortions got us up early," recalls Marsha, "The combination was a killer.' After several years of no sleep during October, the Edmunds decided that their efforts were best incorporated into the creation and production of products rather than actually running a dark attraction. They still do provide creative advising on attractions, and plan to have many unique dark attraction concepts ready to unveil in the future. "We had originally planned to license the Brutal Planet concept, but Six Flags beat us to the punch," recalls Ed, "We realized that they could do immediately what would have taken many years for us to accomplish." In 1999, the Six Flags chain of theme parks asked Distortions to duplicate its Brutal Planet attraction in 16 cities across the country.

Distortions maintains a large year-round staff of designers, artists, carpenters, sculptors, painters, pourers, patchers, seamers, welders, woodworkers, mold makers, sprayers (foam, plastic, latex), shippers, seamstresses, cutters, electricians, assemblers, managers and office personnel. Not to mention numerous out of shop consultants and advisors. As with any successful company, there are many people who make the magic happen, and many of the Distortion employees have been with the company for years. Peter Galindo III has been with Distortions for 11 years, and is the supervisor for the paint department. Michael Glover supervises the fabrication of animations, Irene Gonzales oversees the shipping department and Ella Mae Margheim, the accounts analyst, has been with the company for 13 years. Ten-year employee Theresa Rodriguez supervises the prep area, and Janene Johnson is in charge of customer service. "We have a tremendous team of specially talented people, who t ogether can make anything we dream up." boasts Ed.

Ed and Marsha have four equally creative, artistic sons who participate in the business when they can. Adam is a 25-year old CMT (massage therapist), freelance artist and works part-time at Distortions in the sculpting and mold making departments. He was also the ‘Clown’ at Denver’s Brutal Planet for 3 years. Ryan is a 22-year old Fine Arts major at the University of Colorado at Boulder and will graduate this Spring. He also works part-time at Distortions in the sculpting department, and was the ‘Freakin’ Huge Zombie’ at Denver’s Brutal Planet for 3 years. At 17, Blake is a junior at Greeley Central High School; plays hockey and has an interest in art and vet medicine. Blake works part-time as a hockey referee and works summers at Distortions in the painting department. Weston is a freshman at Greeley Central High School, enjoys art and church youth activities. At the age of 15, he also works part-time at the Distortions shop.

Over the years, Distortions has evolved into a movie-like production studio. Their latest venture was the creation of the stage sets for the new Alice Cooper Brutal Planet Tour, including reworking Alice's original guillotine, a gutted car, numerous corpses, skeletons, two headed babies, and the ‘ReCooperator,’ (‘Pieces of Alice’ were put into it, then hewn back together in a haze of smoke, strobes and electricity). Age sometimes has a way of snuffing out creativity. As the years slowly tick by, youthful imagination is blanketed with a quilt of realism. Not so for Ed and Marsha, whose child-like enthusiasm and imagination still reign supreme. With a new focus on cutting edge animations, developing technology and materials for props and molds, the worries of creative stagnation are gone. Plans at Distortions are in fact "Unlimited." For the future, "higher impact" and "more intense" animations are the key phrases. The Edmunds are enjoying this new incarnation of Distortions. "We used to have trouble dreaming up what would be next, now we have trouble crossing off the things we just do not have time to produce prior to the next show," jokes Marsha. Ed and Marsha now spend their days in a warehouse akin to a cannibal’s buffet. Hands and feet top a line of metal spikes, a row of glassy-eyed zombies peer from behind a rail of severed heads. They are still making monsters... but now they make them by the thousands.

For the first time in years, Distortions will be showing at the 17th National Halloween, Costume and Party Show in Chicago this March, with booths both in and outside of the ‘Dark Zone.’

Eric Olson is a freelance writer from Ft. Collins, Colorado. He can be contacted at 970-980-7059

Brutal Planet

More like a Marilyn Manson concert than a Haunted House, the queue line is high-tech, with lights and sound taking center stage of the 28,000 square foot warehouse space, shrouded beneath 200 gallons of black paint. Zigzagging around a cross-shaped stage and past a large video screen, a train of patrons snakes through the sound-saturated entrance corridor of Denver’s Brutal Planet. An 11-year-old from Aurora, Colo. tugs at his father’s shirtsleeve. His eyes fixed on a spotlighted bald man who rakes his chest with the jagged edges of a broken bottle. Behind the boy a pair of high school students from Littleton, Colo., dressed completely in black and smeared with white face make-up, gaze stunned at the scene. They come from all walks of life, and every age group. Some scream. Some shield their eyes. Some even laugh. But while waiting for the pneumatic octagonal doors of the Distortions Unlimited Brutal Planet Haunted House to open, they are united in a haunted pep-rally.

The idea behind the queue line is a "series of Boos," says Distortions founder Ed Edmunds. "It is a chain of shake-ups, designed to excite patrons - patrons already thrown off by concert-volume industrial music, chaotic lighting and stage shows as they wind their way slowly toward the Haunted House’s entrance. Our concept was to take (the patrons) into a high-volume environment and show them bizarre scenes so their subconscious is saying ‘this is weird and not usual," explains Edmunds. "Once the subconscious is on board, their body is telling them that there might be danger and they should be apprehensive." After up to 45 minutes of "boos" set up by live talent roaming in the queue line, the patron creeps through the portal and into the Haunted House with his or her senses pumping at the volume of the show. Experiences that the patron had in the queue line, including the screaming Electric Chair and the video of the strange 7-year-old girl who killed her brother, still linger. Consequently, the adventure that follows takes on new intensity.

It is only the opening act for Brutal Planet’s main event, but from the first boo it becomes obvious that this Haunted House is different from any other, uniting the gothic underworld, "freak show" performers and a little multimedia pizzazz. Edmunds explains: "We created the raucous rock n’ roll Haunted Attraction to match what customers want." Referring to the patrons, he continues, "Look what the people in line are into. They are into rock n’ roll and blockbuster movies; we put those two together and came up with something really wild."

Once the patrons step through the door into the Attraction, the wild theatrics and deafening sound give way, setting up the potential for a sensory let down. It is at the entrance gate, however, that the horror intensifies. Here the patron is transported to a new place, a real place. An evil place. Once inside the patrons are informed of the horrors awaiting them on Brutal Planet. They are then separated into small groups and transported in groups to their demise. Where traditional Haunts pull patrons through a string of rooms and hallways, the action of Brutal Planet transpires on a street scene and behind storefronts of a post-apocalyptic city.

This "streetscape" concept was designed and implemented by industry legend John Burton to give the patron a sense of place, a sense of reality and cohesion. The first view of the town that the patrons get is a view down a street littered with barricades, derelict cars and debris; the aftermath of a savage war. From this raised vantage point, the patron sees vast numbers of people wandering in the streets before them. These inhabitants, seemingly part of a large acting core, are actually patrons moving from storefront to storefront across the street scene, further into the attraction. Burton ingenuously uses the patrons themselves as "extras" in his horror movie. As patrons emerge from a storefront, they are guided across the street to the next scene by obstructions on the street. Inside the facades, a brief intense scare returns them back onto the street to cross to the other side.

Behind one facade, a technologically enhanced 1/2 human warns patrons of their most certain doom. The room is infested with working and non-working TV sets, corrugated tubing, and keyboards. The Controller himself is perched in a tall chair, creating the illusion that he is cut in half. Another building is the insane asylum, where inmates are spun, electrocuted, and slammed. The restaurant on the block is the Road-Kill Café. The Café is, of course, littered with all sorts of disgusting food items. A customer vomits into a barrel, and the chef yells at you from across the room. Suddenly his body rushes toward you as his detached head, still against the wall, screams at you. In the hotel bathroom a man sits on the toilet, his pants down around his ankles, and screams something about privacy as a bloody body flies out of the shower toward you. An alien with a smoking jetpack flies down six feet and lands in front of you as alien spores attack from overhead. A human victim perforated with countless tubes and wires is convulsing wildly as a seven-foot tall alien firing a loud air chisel gun chases you out of the room. Completely different from the standard haunt, Brutal Planet is not just hallway, scene, hallway, and then another scene. "With storefronts and signs, we could do anything we wanted." says Edmunds. "And they (the patron) could still make sense of it." This realism added to the patrons’ suspension of disbelief, maximizing the disturbing experience of the Distortions Unlimited Brutal Planet Haunted House.