Every year when we start out our October planning, we have a long list of things we want to do and achieve, sometimes everything falls into place and we get a majority of it done (2014) , other times circumstances dictate otherwise (2015) .

This year was kind of a mixed bag, as we absolutely wanted to get more photo shoots done, but with a busy weekend schedule and traveling, it left us with little time to accomplish them. Luckily the final shoot of October is full of enough Halloween spirit to close out the season in style.

It's finally October, and that means we are getting back to doing what we love most, celebrating Halloween all month long. Our favorite way to do that? Some TrueHorror.net photoshoots! Last year we had a few planned that we were unfortunately unable to get done due to all sorts of circumstances. This year is a different story and we are excited to share the first of many upcoming photo sets. 

It has been my experience that no matter how much prep you put in before a photo shoot, more often than not, there will be some point where you need to improvise. If you are lucky it will be something rather simple to switch up, such as a lighting set up. Other times though it can unfortunately alter all your plans when something is simply not working as you envisioned and you hope you can salvage the shoot and everyone's time and patience. 

Excited (as always) to share this latest photoshoot with you all. Nicole here and I had been talking about working together on a shoot for a while now. So when we finally set a date to get together and work on it, I quickly started to prepare. The concept we landed on was loosely inspired by the Succubus who is a demon that takes the form of a woman in order to seduce it's prey. I really liked the concept of a woman who had just picked the bones clean of an unsuspecting victim whom she had lured into her clutches. Nicole was into this idea and I thought she would be able to pull it off and as you will no doubt see, she absolutely did. Now generally Succubi (thats the plural I guess?) have wings and tails, which of course is really awesome, but here we opted for a more simple approach for a few reasons, of course one of those being budget, but I knew if we got the imagery of her victims eaten corpse, that it would all fall into place and result in some creepy and equally sexy images. I think we pulled that off here and think the photos speak for themselves. Nicole came into this ready to go and was not shy when it came to getting messy for this shoot. She really was a trooper through this one and have to thank her so much for that. Also as many of you know, we at TrueHorror.net love creating our faux movie posters and this project afforded us the opportunity to create one of our most striking yet, in the form of the "Maneater" one sheet you will see at the end of this post. I am especially proud with how that turned out and very pleased to add Nicole and these images to our site as she did a great job and is a welcome addition to the TrueHorror.net family. Be sure to follow Nicole on instagram @findnicolehere to see some of her other shoots and cosplay work. These shots hold true to our Blood, Babes, and Boogeymen slogan. Hope you all enjoy! 

Saved the best piece for last

Maneater one-sheet

As you may have noticed from checking out this site one of my favorite people to collaborate with is my good friend Holly. She has always been willing to jump into any projects I come up with for her and is always a blast to work with. She is a huge reason for the success of this site and helped me launch it in grand style with our  "Wanna Play?"  photo set, which to this day is a big fan favorite and still our most viewed set on the site. We followed that up with our popular "Movie Night" shoot. It was ultimately a no brainer to entrust Holly with TrueHorror.net's flagship character, our original female slasher bearing her name in our faux film project  "Carved"   (of which there will be a sequel later this year!)  So with all that being said, It seemed like a good time to go back to our first photoshoot together. The Billy the Puppet inspired Saw themed shoot we just about did 3 years ago. prior to the relaunch of this version of the site. It was this photoset that really cemented the fact I wanted to focus much more on photography and creating these images. It was a fun experience to first work with Holly, she was very patient and kept up a good sense of humor throughout which I find is always important during a shoot. I will say these to this day might possibly be my favorite shots I have done and also have to thank Natalie for doing a amazing job on Holly's makeup. Everything came together to create striking images that I never tired of looking at. 

My favorite photo from this set is the one seen above. It was the first photo I did that turned out exactly as I had envisioned it in my head. It was such a thrill seeing it realized and it received so many compliments upon initially sharing it that it made me really begin to trust in my ability to create these images. So I definitely see this set as a springboard for the everything that has followed. I cannot thank Holly enough for putting her trust in me with this one and glad that I could deliver.

The obvious thought here was to do a sexy version of Billy the Puppet's outfit from the Saw movies matched with a grungy setting that is so pervasive in those films. Having Holly sit on the tricycle for such a long time was not the easiest thing for her to do, but she never complained once and in retrospect,  I don't think there is any other model who could have fit on it and make it work. The green layer of texture just helped to add to the look seen in the films. 

I hope you guys enjoy revisiting these images again, as I am happy to give them some new life and some much deserved attention. After all they never had a dedicated post on the site till now. I am excited about the new projects Holly and I have been planning and can't wait to share them with you all, still till the time is right, hopefully all the previous images we have created will tide you over till then.

One more cool thing was that I got to actually share these a while back with Saw creator James Wan who was kind enough to approve. 

Below is a bonus outtake I always loved, I just really dig her expression. along with a random behind the scenes shot.

As anyone who visits the site often enoguh or follows us on instagram know, we love our movie posters and we especially love creating them for movies that don't exist. So when thinking about what would be the next one, I knew I wanted to do something to capitalize on the vinyl craze that has been so prevalent in recent years. So while thinking about haunted or evil records, of course Rob Zombies "Lords of Salem" comes to mind, but I wanted to do something different than that. More of a possession by music that causes you to kill type thing. After kicking around the idea some more and going through various iterations of it, "Warped" was born.

The above "teaser" image came about by me just wanting to get the creative juices flowing and since I can't always just up and shoot something new with a model, sometimes I have to create some images in other ways. Since I knew I was going to do something based on Vinyl, discussing it with my good buddy and collaborator Matt Durston who greatly helped me conceptualize alot of this project , this idea above came to life. Now to clarify, I am not into Satanic anything, but as a horror fan it's obviously a familiar subject matter, still it is one I never thought about touching until now that I figured out a more unique way of going about it. I then talked to Erika, who had a great time shooting our 8-Bit Jason inspired set from our Blood, Babes and Boogeymen series. She had mentioned to me previously how she wanted to do some type of "possession" shoot and this would give her an opportunity to do so in a way that was not the usual exorcist motif. Erika is always a great deal of fun to shoot with and is always happy to do whatever is necessary for us to get the shots we need. Thankfully she trusts me to be able to bring them to life once she is done doing her part. I also have to give much credit to the aforementioned Matt Durston, as he was integral in helping me break the bit of a creativity block I had when working on this,  I was sick during the week and couldn't crack this one to make it pop till he chipped in his ideas, so this is definitely a co production with him and he will be contributing to many future projects as well as I definitely consider him part of the TH team. In the end all the parts came together to create what I think is a vivid and striking image that sells the idea of possession and evil while appealing to the vinyl crowd. As well as seeming like the next progression to the teaser image. We hope you dig it. There will be additional related images coming soon so stay tuned for those as well.

Blood, Babes, & Boogeymen was one of our main projects for during this past October. The concept was to take a minimalist approach and have our models portray feminine versions of some of horror's most iconic characters. We received a great response to all the individual shoots when we revealed them one by one throughout October. Now that we have had a chance to catch our breath here after the hectic Halloween season, we wanted to revisit this project and shine some new light on it, as some may have gotten overlooked during everything that was going on last month. So here we are revealing a previously unseen photo from each set followed by a link to it's previous post so you can check out any you may have missed. So without further ado...

MARILYN SAYS "YOU'RE NEXT"

The first set we unveiled features Marilyn donning an outfit inspired by the Fox masked killer from director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett's film "You're Next". These were a big hit and even prompted Simon Barrett himself to post the photos and a link to our site on his Facebook page, which for us was the highest compliment. 

To see the rest from this set click here.

DEB REVS UP HER TEXAS CHAINSAW

Next up we have our homage to everyone's favorite skin mask wearing slasher, Leatherface. Deb was great to shoot with and excited to represent Bubba Sawyer in our series. It takes alot to make Leatherface sexy and Deb did it with ease. We love how they turned out and hope you will as well. 

To see the rest from this set click here.

8-BIT ERIKA

Moving on to Crystal Lake we have Erika portraying the ultra popular NES 8-BIT version of Jason Voorhees. Wanting to keep these sets colorful when possible, it was an obvious choice to go with and proved to be very popular. Erika being an avid gamer and already having that amazing hair color also made her the perfect choice to shoot this one with. 

To see the rest of this set click here.

KRYSTAL WILL MAKE SURE YOU NEVER SLEEP AGAIN

Of course, you can't do a Jason photoset without a Freddy Krueger one to compliment it. This whole project concept started from hanging out with Krystal one day and shooting something very similar to these, just for fun and to keep productive, so when it came down to doing them all for real, it was only right to redo the ones we originally took to include in this series. She is always great to work with and this time was no different.

To see the rest of this set click here.

SHEYLA IS READY FOR HALLOWEEN

We couldn't do a series of photos entitled Blood, Babes, and Boogeymen without honoring THE boogeyman. So it was really important to get the perfect model to portray Michael Myers and one look at these photos and we think you will agree, Sheyla was just that. 

To see the rest of this set click here.

As an added bonus here are the full bold colored versions of the images used in the header image for this feature.