15 years later, the make-up artist behind Insidious looks back: 'It's black within blackness'

For more than a decade, Joseph Bishara worked as a film composer focused on indie horror films like The Convent and The Gravedancers. Then, in 2011, he suddenly became the actor behind one of the 21st century’s great scary movie icons.

Bishara met prolific horror director James Wan while working on another project as a composer, but Wan saw something else in the musician: a monster. As Wan recalled in a 2019 interview with Fangoria, he was “looking for someone who’s lean, thin and bald. So I asked, ‘Joe, if [writer Leigh Whannell] and I make this movie, would you be interested in playing a demonic creature?’”

Bishara agreed and would soon become the unnamed Insidious villain fans would come to call “The Red-Faced Demon” and “The Man with Fire on His Face.” However, Wan’s original behind-the-scenes name for the character was “The Lipstick-Face Demon.”

According to Insidious’ head makeup effects artist Justin Raleigh, it’s an appropriate nickname.

“The concept behind the character was that this demon is basically devoid of color. It's black within blackness,” Raleigh tells Polygon. “The only way it can create a look for itself and find some way to scare the kids it's going after is to paint its face. The name Lipstick-Face Demon comes directly from the fact that he's putting lipstick on his face.”

That was the concept, and it worked. Insidious launched a franchise that’s still going today. But for the 15th anniversary of the original indie horror movie, Polygon caught up with Raleigh to uncover how Bishara transformed into an instantly classic horror villain.

Bringing The Lipstick-Face Demon to life

Insidious was one of Blumhouse’s first movies, and it was originally intended to be made for under $1 million. Ultimately, the budget became $1.5 million, but that was still incredibly low. This prevented any elaborate creature suit for the demon. Instead, Raleigh says they used “a minimalistic approach, which ultimately became putting body paint all over Joseph Bishara.”

Though when he gets into the details, he reveals that there was a good deal more to it, which began with taking casts of Bishara’s body, then covering much of his loer half in prosthetics.

"In the film, Joseph basically wears custom, almost like, fetish shoes that have ankle bracers in them to give him that lift and angle his toes down to get more of that hoof-type shape," says Raleigh. "There's a hoof that's built into those shoes and a big fur wrap that goes around them. That bridges up onto the body paint, which is just a few colors. It was mostly black with some spatters of grays and blues and yellows, just so there's a little bit of texture in it. Then there's hand-laid hair that goes all the way up his legs, way up into his groin area. Then he basically wears, for lack of a better term, almost like a G-string with a fur merkin on it that covers his genitalia. Then there's additional hair that's laid up onto his belly."

Raleigh also custom-made jewelry-like finger extensions, which the demon is seen sharpening in the film.

For the face, Raleigh created a nose prosthetic for Bishara to wear, but beyond that, they kept the actor’s features. And while the demon is all black with red lipstick on his face, simply putting red over the black would desaturate the red.

“James wanted something that was not subtle,” says Raleigh. “He wanted a red that really popped.”

To achieve that vibrancy, a stencil was used to lightly airbrush where the red would be, then they’d paint Bishara black, and then bright red was applied in the stenciled area.

It wasn’t actual lipstick though, even if they did try that early on.

“We tried a bunch of different actual lipsticks,” says Raleigh. “The issue with the lipstick is it just didn't have very good staying power in the heat. It would melt. Instead, we used a really thick cream-based makeup that gave it some chunkiness."

Finally, Bishara wore a wig that just wrapped the sides of his head, plus yellow contacts and veneers that “look like stacked, clustered little, tiny, pointed teeth,” Raleigh says. “Plus we stained his mouth to look blackish purple,” which was done with a cake dye.

All told, the process took about two and a half hours and it was completed by Raleigh himself along with his assistant, Kelly Golden.

An on-set complication

The results were terrifying, so much so that it caused an unexpected problem on set.

“One of the biggest challenges beyond the makeup was dealing with our Dalton character, Ty Simpkins, the young child that starred in this film,” Raleigh says. He was just scared to death of Joe Bishara. It was really tough because there were days when James would say, ‘Hey, let's have him sit and watch the entire process so he gets comfortable with Joe and sees the whole thing and hopefully gets over his fear of him and just realizes that it's a makeup process and not a real demon trying to kill him.’ That kind of worked, but then there was a jump scare, and it just completely reversed all of those efforts and the poor kid's just crying away.”

"Joe Bishara was doing everything he could to be as sweet and as friendly as possible,” continues Raleigh. “We would take his contacts out, we'd take his teeth out, we'd take his fingers off, whatever we could to try and calm him down a little bit. There was even a day when we were doing touch-ups and I invited Ty in, and I was like, ‘Hey, do you want to help me do this touch-up?’ I gave him a brush, and I was showing him how to do the touch-up. It seemed like he had calmed down, then literally the next shot is Joe jumping out of nowhere and just scaring the living bejesus out of this child. Again, all of our efforts to calm him completely went out the window. He was just pouring tears. That was one of the most difficult things in the whole shoot.”

The Lipstick-Face Demon, 15 years later

Despite that setback — or, perhaps because of it — Simpkins delivered a fantastic performance and Insidious went on to make over $100 million, an astonishing haul for a movie with such a low budget. And while viewers were rightfully terrified by the demon, it did generate some comparisons to a certain red and black-faced Star Wars character.

“Yeah, I’ve heard the Darth Maul comment a few times, and it's like, ‘No, it's not a pattern. It's not a tattoo. It's lipstick,’” says Raleigh. “I think if it would've stayed as The Lipstick-Face Demon, if there was a little more backstory to what that meant — obviously, I get it. You've got a black and red thing, and it's a bald head and it's kind of demonic. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I get it.”

Fortunately, the comparisons didn’t stand in the way of success. Four Insidious sequels have arrived since 2011 and in each of these films, the Lipstick-Face Demon has reappeared, sometimes just for a cameo, like in Insidious Chapter 2 and sometimes as the central villain, like in Insidious: The Red Door. He’ll also most likely reappear in Insidious: The Bleeding World, coming this August. So far, Bishara is only listed as the film’s composer, though it’d hardly be an Insidious film if he didn’t also reappear in his now-famous face paint.