Cursed by a Necromancer, Rotting by the Minute, and Built Entirely by Hand

On April 24, Karl Huber took a photo of a single eyeball.

It’s sitting on a workbench, wired into a breadboard, surrounded by a nest of jumper cables that look like they’re holding each other hostage. He captioned it, with visible exhaustion, “Trying to figure out animatronics.”

The next photo in the sequence is dated May 28. It’s a human skull — jaw articulated, eyes seated properly in their sockets, skin gone mottled purple and split open across the cheekbone, a spine of servos and wiring running out the back like the thing has been field-dressed. The caption is two words: “Figured out!”

Five weeks. One twitching eyeball to a working animatronic corpse.

That head belongs to Chris Gallo, the doomed lead of Dead Man Walking, the horror comedy short Huber is currently trying to finish. And the reason it exists at all is that Huber painted himself into a corner on purpose.

The campaign is live on Indiegogo now, with a $1,500 goal and 25 days remaining. → Back Dead Man Walking here

The problem with rotting a man on camera

The premise: Chris Gallo is a con man who wakes up one morning with the dawning realization that he is dead. Not metaphorically. He can still walk, still talk, still think — he just also happens to be decomposing on schedule, the way a body should. He works out that a Necromancer has cursed him, and the rest of the film is a race to find her and talk her into undoing it before there’s nothing left of him to save.

It’s a comedy. It’s also, structurally, a nightmare for a special effects artist, because the joke only works if the decay is real and relentless. Chris has to get visibly, progressively worse. The audience needs to be able to clock how far gone he is in any given scene, without being told.

Makeup can carry that for a while. It cannot carry it to the end. You can age a living actor’s face convincingly through the early stages — pallor, mottling, the sunken look around the eyes. But you cannot collapse a real eye socket. You cannot sink a real jaw. You cannot peel back a real cheek to expose real bone, and no amount of foam latex is going to convince anyone that the man wearing it has a skull where his face used to be.

Huber knew this going in.

“When I started developing the story for DMW, I knew animatronics was the only practical way to pull off the extreme stages of decomposition that the character goes through.”

Which was a confident thing to decide, given what came next.

“Animatronics was not something I knew how to do at the time. But after tons of online research, spending a lot of money on parts I mostly didn’t need, and several failed attempts later, I finally got an eyeball to move. Then I was able to complete the entire head, a little over a month later.”

Huber committed to an effects approach he had no idea how to execute, on a film he was already writing, and then taught himself the discipline in public — badly at first, and expensively. A lot of money on parts I mostly didn’t need is the most honest sentence on that campaign page, and anyone who has tried to learn a hardware skill from YouTube knows exactly what it means. A drawer full of servos with the wrong torque. Controllers that won’t talk to each other. A slow, humiliating education in what you should have bought instead.

Several failed attempts. Then one eyeball moved.

Five weeks after that, the whole head worked — jaw, eyes, the entire grim apparatus. The finished piece isn’t a mask or a static bust. It’s a puppet built to perform, which means Chris Gallo’s worst stages can be played by an object that doesn’t need to breathe, blink, or resemble a living person underneath.

There’s a version of this story where a first-time animatronics builder gives up around week two and rewrites the script to keep the character in a hoodie. Huber went the other way.

Why practical still wins this particular fight

There’s a reason decomposition remains one of the last real holdouts against digital effects, and it isn’t nostalgia.

Rot is a material problem. Decaying flesh is translucent in a way that’s brutally hard to fake — light penetrates the surface, scatters underneath it, and comes back wrong. It’s also wet, and it sags, and it has weight. The eye is unforgiving about all three. It’s why the practical work in The Thing still holds up more than forty years on while digital gore from ten years ago already looks like a cutscene. It’s why Return of the Living Dead‘s Tarman is still genuinely upsetting: there was a person inside a suit that was actually dripping.

An animatronic head sidesteps the uncanny valley by simply being there. The light is real light. The wetness is real wetness. When the jaw moves, something physically moved, and a camera pointed at it records what happened rather than what was rendered.

Where it stands — and what you get

The perks are stranger and more generous than the price tiers suggest. $20 gets a credit and an IMDb thank-you. $25 adds the digital script. $30 gets you a “location tooth,” which is exactly as odd and as appealing as it sounds. $35 is a digital download of the finished film, $45 a Blu-ray. $100 gets a replica of the film’s “Witch Bitch” box prop. At $250 you’re an associate producer, at $500 an executive producer, and at $1,000 you take home the Necromancer skull itself.

The one worth singling out is the $50 Necromancer Files — a digital case file for a 1976 murder investigation, with footage recovered from a South Florida home. The victim was brutally murdered. The coroner put time of death at nearly a week before the body was found. Multiple eyewitnesses insisted they had seen him alive during that week.

It’s fiction, written for the film’s mythology rather than pulled from a real archive. It’s also a genuinely clever thing to hand a backer, and it says something about how much thought has gone into a short whose entire funding goal is smaller than a single day’s catering on a studio picture.

If you want to see a con man rot on camera the hard way — with servos, silicone, and a guy who learned it all in five weeks — this is the one to put money behind.

→ Back Dead Man Walking on Indiegogo $1,500 goal · 25 days left · perks from $20