Photo Essay: Curiosity Crawl at Dapper Cadaver

A horror props house that's open year-round just seemed to me like the most obvious place to take people for Obscura Day.



Because, aliens.



And a room full of dinosaurs.



But in this Jurassic world, the prehistoric beasts are frozen in their positions of attack – a lingering threat without consummation.



These are the horrors of fantasy, the types of things that make me giggle because I know they're fake.



Dapper Cadaver, however, also specializes in the realistic and in the real.



Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a prop and a specimen.



Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead.

This props house has become the go-to place for horror movie productions and crime TV shows that need realistic-looking corpses...



...which Dapper Cadaver creates through the very expensive process of lifecasting.



An entire body form can cost upwards of $10,000, so Dapper Cadaver tries to make the most out of the ones they already have (which are body forms of some of their friends and local actors).



But if you had enough money to spend on a vanity project or a really terrible practical joke...



...Dapper Cadaver could probably help you make a dead version of yourself.



It's an unnerving place to visit...



...with all those glassy-eyed stares...



...coming from those shelves of decapitation.



You don't ever want to see a face like that when you, say, wake up, or look out the window.



But sometimes horror is reality.



Real vintage surgical instruments and other medical equipment of days of yore remind us of a time when the human body was nothing more than that of a guinea pig, and its parts were poked, prodded, pried open, extracted, amputated, put in a jar and preserved.

Pretty much everything at Dapper Cadaver is available to buy or rent, which makes it an invaluable resource for prop masters of American Horror Story, Saw and the like, but anyone looking for a fake goat or a stone archangel for their home haunt or year-round decor can also partake of these treasures.

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