The corpse builders to the stars

BJ Winslow: I feel like every place has a spooky factor, but I do find it is unique here in Wisconsin.

Eileen Winslow: There’s definitely a weird factor. It’s something that we enjoy tapping into. Hi, I’m Eileen Winslow.

BJ Winslow: And I’m BJ Winslow.

Eileen Winslow: And we run Dapper Cadaver.

[spooky music, prop shrieks]

BJ Winslow: Who wants to play a funny little trick tonight? [laughs]

Eileen Winslow: We make and provide death-related props and decor for a number of industries, including productions, attractions, and educational facilities worldwide.

BJ Winslow: We also have the shop. We’re located here in Madison, Wisconsin. We do stuff that is like Halloween characters that you’re gonna see in a haunted house or an amusement park. And then we also do realistic dummies for film and television.

Eileen Winslow: We’ve provided things for American Horror Story, Law and Order, 911, Shogun.

BJ Winslow: We start with a liquid material: urethane, polyurethane, polyfoam, silicone. We’ve got a fab team that are gonna be filling the molds. A lot of our molds are realistic heads, are realistic bodies and body parts. Those are life cast off of actual people.

BJ Winslow: Once it’s all set up, the liquid material becomes an expanding foam. So a small piece can be set in like an hour and a larger piece over four. And then once it’s all set up, you can crack open the mold, pull it out, brush the skin layers, and you’ve got yourself a realistic body.

Eileen Winslow: I’m originally from Milwaukee, south side.

BJ Winslow: I’m originally from California. I grew up in northern California. I’ve been making things for as long as I can remember.

Eileen Winslow: I had graduated from the University of Southern California. We met through friends in LA. It was actually right after BJ had moved down from northern California. And I started doing props after I got out of college, working at another guy’s shop. And I wanted to branch out on my own, and we were able to.

[spray paint hissing]

Eileen Winslow: BJ was making props in our garage, and then I had helped him set up a website, because actually at that point, I worked in internet marketing.

BJ Winslow: And that was huge. Nobody else was doing prop shop websites at the time.

Eileen Winslow: It started to grow to the point where then it wasn’t sustainable to keep doing it from the house. We started the business, we got married, went on a honeymoon, came back, and then

BJ Winslow: And opened.

Eileen Winslow: And opened, yeah.

Eileen Winslow: We moved back here in fall of 2020. We really like the business environment in Wisconsin. There you go.

Customer: Thank you.

Eileen Winslow: Thank you.

Eileen Winslow: It’s really great for the bulk of what we do, which is manufacturing. When we were moving, there was no guarantee that people would continue calling us. And we’re just extremely happy and grateful that they did. It’s been a leap of faith in terms of continuing to grow the business in new ways as well.

BJ Winslow: We’ve done a number of dummies for UW-Platteville forensic training. These are people that are going to school to become forensic investigators. And we recently did a brand-new type of dummy where it has lividity that’s like bruising. It will actually bleach when you touch it and then go back to pink, so we developed a type of paint that does that as well.

BJ Winslow: It’s nice to go into work and have like both sides of things where it’s like, “Today, I’m gonna do something really stupid and I’m gonna love it,” or “Today, I’m gonna do something that could save lives.”

Eileen Winslow: In the fall, we like to do the night market. There we go, cool. We like to put out one of our great characters, and people love to take their pictures with them. And that’s always fun. We do September and October here because that’s our season.

Eileen Winslow: One of the things I loved with working with BJ well over a decade now is just seeing him grow as an artist and as a person.

BJ Winslow: Yeah, I can’t imagine doing this on my own.

Eileen Winslow: I love working with creative people and I love working with people that are helping other people. If you can do that for a living, what else can you ask for in life?

BJ Winslow: Yeah, and it’s fun. [chuckles]

[groovy music, prop shrieks]