Freaked

It started as a low-budget vehicle for the Butthole Surfers, under the title Hideous Mutant Freekz, and somehow ended up a 20th Century Fox release: Alex Winter and Tom Stern’s Freaked, starring Winter as Ricky Coogan, a spoiled celebrity kidnapped by a roadside attraction and dosed with a chemical that turns him into a sideshow freak. The film needed a lot of freaks fast, so the makeup effects were split across three shops: Tony Gardner’s Alterian built most of the sideshow ensemble — the Dog Boy, the Bearded Lady, the animatronic Sockhead — Steve Johnson’s XFX handled the conjoined twins, and George designed and sculpted Ricky’s own mutation, the film’s central and most extreme transformation. ¹

What George built

Ricky’s freak form is George’s house style running loose in a studio comedy: bulging, vein-threaded eyes, skin breaking out in oozing pustules, flesh gone rubbery and slack enough to fold on itself. He was brought onto the project during pre-production, before it was even a Fox picture, to sketch the freak designs — his background was the NYC punk and underground-comics scene, and Winter and Stern wanted that specific ugliness rather than a conventional monster. Those early concept drawings carried through to the finished makeup largely intact.

George is credited as one of the film’s three lead Special Makeup Effects Designers, alongside Gardner and Johnson; the makeup work as a whole was nominated for a Saturn Award and a Fangoria Chainsaw Award.

Release and rediscovery

Fox barely released it. Freaked found its audience on video instead. Its large cast was built almost entirely with practical makeup at a time when CGI was beginning to take over that work. After George’s death in February 2026, Alex Winter wrote that Freaked, along with many other works, could not have existed without him.