As Halloween season approaches its apex, Orlando’s streets and stages are awash with uncanny creatures, and all those frightening fiends need somewhere to find their fangs and fur. For the past 28 years, AEO Studios (aeostudios.com) has been supplying pointy teeth, beastly brows and other prosthetic makeup effects for Central Florida’s theatrical and film productions. But after spending nearly three decades bringing the undead to life from Church Street to China, owner Alan Ostrander is now facing down a monster even more terrifying than Art the Clown: the economy.
When I arrived at AEO’s workshop and warehouse off Forsyth Road on a recent weekday afternoon, I was greeted outside by a trio of skeletons standing guard and found a customer seated inside receiving the final fitting for his new pair of custom canines. (They felt so secure “I might eat a sandwich with them,” he declared approvingly.) Vampiric dental appliances are apparently in high demand this time of year — both for personal costumes and for plays like Dracula at DeLand’s Athens Theatre; Ostrander furnished fangs for that production, whose run was sadly cut short by Hurricane Milton.
However, though bloodsuckers are Ostrander’s bread and butter, this Orlando native wasn’t drawn into the makeup business by an obsession with horror or gore, but rather his love of illusions.
“I started performing when I was 10, doing magic and clowning, and grew up on the old Civic [now Orlando Family] stages,” says Ostrander, who also became fascinated with “female impersonators” and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “When I was 17 [I] was very lucky to have an effects artist, Rick Gonzales — [who is] still in town and doing things — he let me sweep his floors for a couple years, and I started learning about all the makeup and what I could do with that.”
Shortly after the legendary Terror on Church Street haunted walkthrough opened in downtown Orlando, Ostrander was hired as a performer; after director David Clevinger came aboard, Ostrander was upgraded to head makeup and character designer, where he remained for the full eight-year run on Orange Avenue. (He doesn’t like to rehash Terror’s brief and ignominious afterlife inside Church Street Exchange.)
Although originally founded to support Terror, AEO Studios has now long outlasted that attraction, and has taken Ostrander as far afield as Southeast Asia, where he’s known as “Hong Kong’s father of Halloween” for founding the region’s first haunted theme park event at Ocean Park in 2001.
“I thought it’d be a great gig for two weeks. It turned into 13 years,” says Ostrander, who was hired through a trade show only two weeks before the holiday, and eventually went from makeup designer to director of the entire event. “When I left in 2013, we had a cast of 520 [performers], 13 full stage shows, eight haunted attractions — all in Cantonese, which I don’t speak.
“We had to figure out how to meld the Eastern and Western together, and the biggest thing I found was it had to be relatable,” Ostrander says, citing a Freddy Krueger character as inciting confusion rather than fear among Asian audiences. Instead, he says, “We created characters that they knew from their mythologies” — such as a ghostly bridal couple that prompted superstitious businessmen to bruise them with thrown rocks and a paper-themed haunt that park management insisting on burning to appease the spirits.
Closer to home, over the decades Ostrander has created everything from an eight-foot-tall articulated dancing penis (for The Oops Guys) to a dead cat (for the Garden Theatre’s Lieutenant of Inishmore) to orthodontic headgear for Dogfight at Theater West End, as well as outfitted scores of schools with ogre heads and hands for Shrek: The Musical.
“Anything we do, we always work backwards. We start with how things are going to be used, because that’s going to dictate how we make them,” Ostrander explains. “Our company slogan is ‘everything from demons to divas’ and I never know what’s coming next. … That’s what I love about the effects side of what we do — it’s a lot of puzzles and problem-solving.”
As we toured his memorabilia-stuffed workshop, Ostrander’s phone was constantly ringing with customers seeking the kind of special effects supplies that Spirit Halloween doesn’t stock. They might have to shop elsewhere next October, because while Ostrander is grateful his studio survived the pandemic and enjoyed a healthy spooky season, this Halloween may very well be the last for Orlando’s oldest operating theatrical makeup source.
“Business has not bounced back [because] we’re losing a lot of theaters, which are a lot of our customer base, [and] Florida is not the mecca of film production,” says Ostrander, who is currently offering a bonus plus-20 percent value on purchases of AEO Studios gift vouchers in a “Hail Mary” effort to keep his doors open. “I’ve been very fortunate to be able to stay in the industry as long as I have … and I love paying it forward, helping to keep the craft alive.”
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This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2024.