Fake Injuries for Halloween or Dead Serious Training

I'm admiring the carnage and gore at a two-car collision*. The driver of the small car is crushed between the steering wheel and the seat. His passenger is unconscious in her seat, blood dripping from a huge gash on her forehead, her face pale and sweat-beaded. An indignant infant wails somewhere in the SUV. Shrieks of "My baby, is my baby OK?" come from the bleeding, hysterical woman in the front passenger seat. The SUV's driver is conscious and calm, dripping blood onto the pavement from his dangling arm.

Yes! This is our best one yet! Bring out the trainees and watch them turn pale, puke, and pass out!

As well as the serious business of training first responders, moulage is used for special theatrical effects or for Halloween costuming. The movie makers can afford the expensive stuff. The rest of us make do with improvised ingredients and cheap costume props. Our 2-car, 5-victim accident cost under $10 to produce, including the cost of the baby.

Tips for more Convincing Moulage

* Collect the materials, make the gore and fake skin, and practice your moulage before you need it. Take notes and pictures at each step so you can recreate it quickly on the night of the Zombie Apocalypse.

* Shave the hairs off the wound area before you glue the prosthesis on. It makes removing it less painful. If you are making scalp wounds, use a "bald cap" and a cheap wig.

* A cheap Halloween rubber wound can look better gorier if you touch it up and add detail. Reinforce the prosthesis by brushing a few layers of casting latex from an art store inside the shell. Latex glue, such as Elmer's white glue, can be used instead of casting latex. Use acrylic paints to enhance the wound detail and add the finishing touches after you apply the wound to your skin. Wounds are shiny, so dab a bit of oil into it.

* Use commercial makeup - foundation and powder - to blend, blend, blend! If the edges are well-blended, you can have a half-inch thickness or more of fake wound build up to stick bones or glass into.

* For open fractures, reinforce a medium to large wound prosthesis, then cut a hole in the wound area large enough to insert a piece of shattered bone with one end sticking out of the wound. Raw bones look more convincing than the leftovers from your fried chicken dinners. Turkey drumstick bones are the right size for fractured forearms or lower legs. Wing bones make good hand fractures. If you want to make open femur fractures, ask a butcher for the bone from a leg of lamb.

* The blackened, crispy look of your mad scientist's post-explosion burned skin can be imitated with "nori", the sheets of seaweed used in Japanese cooking. After you use make up to create the raw, skinless burn area, glue a few irregular pieces of nori around the edges for charred skin, then dust with gray powdered eyeshadow or charcoal for scorch marks.

Web Sites for Moulage and Gore

These are some of my favorite moulage sites with ingredients, instructions, recipes, inexpensive supplies or good links to other moulage sites:

CERT-LA (Civilian Emergency Response Team) has recipes for fake blood and skin, instructions and a downloadable slide presentation.

Gorify.com sells supplies for making zombies, sculpting wounds, and has a set of great how-to slide shows.

"Casualty Simulation" from the 40th Fife Scout Troop's website has a good technique for making burns, and a recipe for making artificial flesh substitute for wound wax.

Another Boy Scout site has some good blood recipes and how to make a fake spurting artery.

Gore Girl has a long list of makeup suppliers and moulage sites.

Several YouTube videos show step by step moulage. Zombies make-Up, wounds and stitches effects, chemical burns:

* No humans or vehicles were damaged in the production of this training scenario. The trainees were supposed to quickly decide the first driver should not be treated at the scene, recognize that his passenger had life-threatening injuries that were not treatable until an ambulance arrived, and stop the other driver from bleeding to death from the severed blood vessels under his sleeve because all it takes is a pressure bandage. The "baby" (a doll with a recording of a shrieking child) was unhurt in a car seat, and the mom had no serious injuries but was totally hysterical and had to be dealt with.