GREELEY — The most surprising thing wasn’t the dismembered latex limbs — veins protruding, fingernails gnarled — suspended by clotheslines on the rows upon rows of drying racks adorning the walls.
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It was Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta’s “You’re the One That I Want” serenading employees as they crafted spooks and specters destined for haunted houses, amusement parks, corn mazes and the front yards of dedicated Halloween decorators across the globe.
Surprises lurk around every corner of Distortions Unlimited, an unassuming lair in Greeley that has produced some of the world’s most acclaimed Halloween props and animatronics since 1978.
“We’re just a bunch of goofs,” said owner Ed Edmunds, the evil genius behind Distortions Unlimited, while seated in front of a life-size goblin in his workshop. “We’re just trying to survive and make monsters.”
Edmunds is the Frankenstein of the operation, dreaming up monsters and bringing them to life.
As a kid, he was enamored by the science fiction television show “The Outer Limits,” which featured creatures du jour.
“I was like, ‘I want to be a monster,’” Edmunds said. “Monsters were powerful and in control of their emotions, and I wanted to be that as a kid. I’m sure that’s what was going on in my stupid little brain.”
Edmunds became obsessed with making masks and cosplaying as different beasts. His dentist neighbor even made a cast of Edmunds’ childhood face out of dental alginate teeth mold. In high school, Edmunds launched a mask-making business that blossomed into stage makeup and prop work. By college, he honed his craft into monster-making-at-large.
Edmunds met his wife, Marsha Taub-Edmunds, while she was studying biology at the University of Northern Colorado, and the rest is grisly bliss. The couple and their crew spend their days concocting ideas for newer, bigger, better, grosser monsters to unnerve and delight the masses.
“It’s very hard to dream up something that’s never been done, but we try,” Edmunds said. “We are limited only by our imagination.”
Among their most popular products: A $619 fire-breathing dragon, a nearly $9,000 11-foot-tall animatronic ape head, a range of gremlin babies that go for around $100, a 7-foot-tall “demon legend” and a $6,570 electric chair animatronic that pays homage to the company’s original, first introduced in 1995.
“That changed the whole haunted house industry,” Edmunds said in a YouTube explanation of the history of the electric chair prop, which he said garnered massive media attention and put haunted houses on the map — or, as Bobby (Boris) Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers would put it, the ghouls all came from their humble abodes to get a jolt from Edmunds’ electrodes.
On a mid-October day in Greeley, a reporter circled a building with a no-frills industrial exterior, wondering whether they were in the right spot. Cracking open a side door to inquire within, the reporter gained entry to a dark room the size of a coat closet with black-painted walls and a life-sized, grimacing zombie prop holding a bowl full of Tootsie Rolls.
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This must have been the place.
Distortion Unlimited’s busiest days of the year had just passed, but the work never stops. On this day, employees painted rows and rows of baby gremlins and poured latex into molds of sculpted dragon heads.
Creatures in various states of undress — unpainted Frankenstein’s monsters, lines of drying corpses writhing in agony, alien parasites wrapped in plastic — awaited finishing touches.
A large shipment was headed to Dick Van Dyke’s house in Malibu, California, which the Edmunds deck out for an annual Halloween celebration they attend. Van Dyke, 100, could not be reached for comment.
“We just have the best customers,” Taub-Edmunds said.
The Edmunds have built quite the reputation and clientele over the past few decades of monster manufacturing.
Their creations startle onlookers the world over, from local joints like Centennial’s Monster Mini Golf and Denver’s 13th Floor Haunted House to an alien installation at the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico, to a massive sleeping giant that lives at Six Flags Canada’s Wonderland.
Their unorthodox workplace antics were even the subject of a Travel Channel reality show called “Making Monsters.”
This summer, the Edmunds laid to rest their decade-long Greeley celebration “Monster Days,” which honored monsters every August with costume contests, food and family fun. The beloved local tradition landed during the company’s busiest time of year, Taub-Edmunds said.
“It was killing us,” Edmunds said.
Now, Distortions Unlimited has more bandwidth to dream bigger. The future looks dark and ghoulish, just like they like it.
Edmunds has his twisted heart set on experimenting with invisible ultraviolet paint to see what haunted house illusions they can create for next year. In the coming weeks, the Distortions crew will gather for a pitch meeting at which they all throw out their most horrifying ideas for new product designs.
“We try to increase creativity, make animatronics that move better and just improve every year,” Taub-Edmunds said. “It’s a team effort.”
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