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 and the animatronic Sockhead among them; Steve Johnson’s XFX handled the conjoined twins; and George designed and sculpted Ricky’s own mutation. ¹

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. George said he met Winter at a gallery opening full of low-brow and pop-surrealist art, where Winter told him about the film he was developing and asked him to design all the characters. Other companies came in on the creatures later, which George said he was unsure about at first, since he had been designing from the beginning.

George is credited as one of the film’s three lead special makeup effects designers, alongside Gardner and Johnson. He and Johnson were nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Make-up for Freaked at the 20th Saturn Awards, which covered 1993 films.

Fox barely released it, and Freaked found its audience on video instead. After George’s death in February 2026, Alex Winter posted a tribute on Facebook calling him his “dear friend, and master artist.”