Tattooing oneself from head to toe to look like a rotting corpse is not the traditional route to stardom, but it has somehow worked out for Rick Genest, a.k.a. Zombie Boy.
“My first tattoo was an outline of a skull and cross- bones right here on my shoulder when I was 16,” Gen- est says, pulling up the sleeve of his black T-shirt. A decade later, he held two titles in the Guinness Book of World Records, one for the most insect tattoos at 176, and one for the most human bone tattoos at 139. Both numbers were quickly out of date. But why so much work—is he hiding something with his ink? “Before the tattoos I had some cuts and cigarette burns and stuff like that. I never wanted to get a full-body cigarette burn. It’s just stuff that you do when you’re a kid.”
Enter darkness... The richly tattooed Rick Genest – ‘Zombie Boy’ and Lady Gaga muse – and his Lucifer’s Blasphemous Torture Carnival are serious about DIY and their self-formulated brand of street family values.
It’s 11pm. A line of Halloween-like revelers is forming outside Le Belmont bar in the hip Plateau area of Montreal. Inside, the cast of Lucifer’s Blasphemous Mad Macabre Torture Carnival Freak Show are drinking beer in the basement and practicing their acts.
Rick Genest, the freak show’s mastermind, is shoving live worms up his nose using fake blood as a lubricant, while behind him one of his closest friends, Miguel, dances with a machete.
{vimeo}29731313{/vimeo}
Filmed during a photo shoot by Matthew Lyn for Schön! Magazine.
