Monster Maker: A Journey from Haunted Houses to Frankenstein
Petsalis has been creating and performing in haunted houses since her junior year of high school. “It’s just a lot of fun. You can visually see how people react to certain aspects of horror,” she says with macabre glee. She’s performed as a variety of ghouls, hags and other horror staples, even in sites widely considered to be haunted, like the Lake County jail in Crown Point, Indiana from which John Dillinger famously broke out. This Halloween season, she was a rag doll who created a makeshift puppet using a large, filthy, stuffed panda and a dirty rope, positioned to watch cartoons. "People questioned if I was real or not."
With over half-a-decade under her belt crafting practical special effects, this Studio Arts and Technology student has turned her attention to Purdue Theatre’s animatronics offerings. For Frankenstein, an immersive, experiential theatre experience “like a big haunted house,” she says, will take viewers through a guided tour of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratories featuring a fully animated array of zombified organs.
Animatronics, she says while interlocking her fingers, bridges the gap between artists and engineers. “For animatronics, you need your sculptors, your artists, your engineers, animators, chemists, performers, carpenters, writers and other storytellers, everybody coming together to create something with purposeful movement. What place has all of that? We’re in it: Purdue,” she whispers. “Purdue has everything.”
Petsalis’ task primarily is in crafting a pair of lungs that will “breathe” on their own during the performance. For this show, she has had to learn new skills, like how to work with different, more pliable materials—resin and silicone molds like epoxy—and gained some new sculpting skills along the way. With animatronics she says, holding up her finger in what appears to be a half-bent position, you sculpt in an object’s most natural state, “no extreme positions. Neutral finger positions, eyelids half closed, that way the object wrinkles correctly when in an extreme position.”
Of the lungs themselves she says, “They have this squishy, scaly texture. You take a kidney scraper tool with teeth and scrape it in all different directions.” She mimes holding a scraping tool and feverishly tears into an imaginary artificial lung. “[You are] basically mutilating the sculpture you just made. Then you have all these little boogers left on top that you smooth into the scratches left behind.” She continues, describing a series of scrapings and smoothings that eventually lead to a product that mimics the surface of a real lung.
Though previously familiar with creating static sculptures, crafting “innards” has been all new to Petsalis. Her parents, who raised her on horror films, lent her their anatomy textbooks to help. “The books have cadavers whose body parts have been peeled back layer-by-layer with diagrams. These have been super helpful in getting the details right.” For example, each lung contains a different number of chambers, and the left maintains a recess for the heart to rest within.
“It’s been a whole hoot-and-a-half,” Petsalis said of the production and working with STEM students to bring the show to life. “It’s also been a lot of trial and error. Which is basically anything art-wise. The next piece you make is the redemption round, and the next piece and the next piece until you die.”
Though the future remains unclear for Petsalis, her work with animatronics and Purdue’s investment in entertainment technology has her interested in seeing where this path leads, either with the university or elsewhere. “I know that I want to be in the industry. I want to work in the shop.”
With the enthusiasm of the show’s titular character, Petsalis said she has never before been able to see her creations come to life like this. “You design it, sculpt it, cast it, paint it, but the animatronics brings it to life. You made a creature or something. Is it just a paperweight? It looks really cool, but it can’t do anything. With animatronics, well, it’s alive.”
Purdue Theatre’s production of Mary Shelley Presents: Frankenstein is an experiential event that invites the viewer to hear, see, and interact with performers in a walk-through exploration of the environments of the novel throughout Yue-Kong Pao Hall of Visual & Performing Arts and its Nancy T. Hansen Theatre. Guided by Mary Shelley herself, watch significant moments of the story played out before you; interact with characters from the novel and immerse yourself in the sights and sounds of an imagined 18th century world in which the power of electricity can be harnessed to create new life! Opening on November 8 at 7 p.m. and running until November 17, get your tickets at https://events.purdue.edu/event/mary-Shelley-Frankenstein.
Tune into the College of Liberal Arts’ Instagram account @purdueliberalarts on Halloween, October 31, for a special behind-the-scenes takeover from Phoebe herself!