♪♪ There's no such thing as real zombies.

All of the things that you might see in this are fake blood, fake gore, prosthetic makeups or just makeup, none of it is actually real.

♪♪ I have to emphasize that I don't know how to make anyone look pretty at all.

♪♪ I can make you look horrible or I can age you or I can make you look scary, but I can't put lipstick on you, I don't know how to do that.

♪♪ Corey Ruby: I grew up drawing, since I can remember I would draw cartoons, I would draw things at a young age.

And I've been told throughout the years that I was exposed to horror movies at probably an unhealthy age.

Rumor has it I went to see Cujo when I was six months old, then Nightmare on Elm Street when I was three.

People frowned on seeing a child draw these horrific things with crayon or colored pencil.

But I loved cartoons, I loved comic books and that is where everything started for me is I wanted to draw.

Fast forward, a friend of mine he's like, hey, do you want to help me do this makeup on myself for Halloween?

And I was like, well, I have no idea what I'm doing, like I've never done anything like that before.

And he goes, well, I've been doing all this research online and I just need your help putting it on if that's okay.

And I was like, sure.

♪♪ Corey Ruby: And I ended up having so much fun, I started researching it more and realizing it was something that I could pursue actively and make a career from it.

♪♪ Corey Ruby: My research told me start in haunted houses.

And I did that for a long time.

♪♪ Corey Ruby: And I had a lot of fun doing that.

I got to create some amazing makeups.

Eyes closed for me.

Corey Ruby: But ultimately, I always wanted to do prosthetic makeup.

♪♪ Corey Ruby: I have worked in music videos and commercials, movies, obviously haunted attractions, Dreamland has Margot Robbie in it.

All the bullet holes in that movie are my designs.

One, two, three -- (screaming) Corey Ruby: But my first major putting me on the map kind of thing is called the Zombie Pride Parade.

The guy who was creating it, he took this younger photo of himself and he gave that version of himself a persona and gave him a false name and created him as a missing person.

He had stacks of missing persons flyers like this and we would go all over.

That scared the whole Quad Cities and the Quad Cities believed it was a legitimate thing to be afraid of.

It noticeably got made into a big deal because so many people ended up getting involved.

And the police were involved and it was like this whole endeavor.

Once he said zombie the first time everyone was like, oh, ha-ha, we get it now, you had us fooled.

They needed a makeup artist to come in and help bring these creations to life.

So many people ended up getting involved.

I think it was like 150 people done up as zombies into the Halloween parade unannounced.

That was kind of where the career kicked off bigtime, that was the moment.

I'm going to get really close up.

We're going to do some shading.

Keep your eyes closed for me.

Kim Anderson: He is very good at what he does.

Tilt your head up for me.

Kim Anderson: Of course, he has his movies and everything, but on our side, people love having Corey do body paint or prosthetics.

And then a lot of times it gets published.

Corey Ruby: So, Photography by Focal Points is Kim and Whitney.

Stop about there.

Yeah!

Corey Ruby: We had talked about collaborating for a while.

We could do different themes and stuff and offer it as different packages.

They built their own sets in a lot of cases, like all of that.

Kim Anderson: We do tiki, obviously, we do space, we do western, Halloween is our huge one.

We have a set that we built in the Garden of Good and Evil, which is based off of the cemeteries in Savannah.

We build all these by hand so no one else has this, so this is ours.

Whitney Pope: I mean, there's only so much you can do in Photoshop.

A lot of that, what he does, just can't be replicated in post.

And the detail, it really comes through in the photos.

♪♪ Whitney Pope: Photography goes pretty quick.

It's usually the prep that takes a lot of time.

Mouth open.

Corey Ruby: With Conner, when we did his zombie makeup, it was like three and a half hours that I worked on Conner.

♪♪ Corey Ruby: I'm a cinephile, I love movies, I grew up on the Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock and I had like an effects career bucket list and one of those was I want to work on a slasher movie, I want to be able to say I got to work on a slasher movie.

And that's Haunt Season.

It was a blast.

Like everybody on that crew was great.

It was a challenging project for me.

I wanted it to be something that I felt like could potentially become a cult classic.

I really truly believe that's going to be the one.

(horror music) Corey Ruby: Every single time I go to do a new makeup there's always the anxiety of starting to work with someone that I've never worked with before.

But there's usually a point about two-thirds of the way through the makeup where now they don't look like themselves anymore.

That's what I do it for is just that constant challenge of being better than my former self, you know, pushing those elements.

♪♪