Since the beginning of movie makeup, it has changed a lot. Lets start from the beginning. Of course, Universal Classic Movie Monsters. Those actors and makeup artists would sit and work for hours on end just to produce a AMAZING finished masterpiece. It was later discovered that many of these makeup products were even toxic to the actors. They put their own health at risks just to proudly wear these character costumes. Roles like The Mummy, Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Wolf man all took exquisite details to produce such a fantastic on screen look.
In The Mummy, they applied layer after layer of bandages, and this paste almost like paper mache. The actor was covered from head to toe, with numerous layers. In order to produce this.
In The Hunchback of Notre Dame the actor actually worse a body suit that contorted his body to give him the hunch over look. There was also a ridiculous amount of makeup applied to this actor before every single shooting. This created this spectacular character.
The Wolf man may have been the most time consuming of them all. A full size body suit was created for the actor. Every single hair that was on the suit was plucked in by hand. There are an uncountable number of hairs, yet they took the time to pull every one through, just to achieve this fascinating look.
For this time period, these are all unbeatable makeup skills. Perhaps the most skilled makeup artists of this time even worked for Universal. No matter what new techniques are created, this will always reign as superior to me. Even though these creators had few examples to look up to for reference, they managed to create numerous, unique, and memorable characters based off of these makeup techniques.
To see even more examples of amazing characters check out some of these movies here.
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