2026 FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards: Best Makeup FX

The instantly recognizable Bride of Frankenstein is such a quintessential visual of horror history, and wisely, the FX team on Maggie Gyllenhaal’s punk rock retelling The Bride! decided to give Jessie Buckley’s titular heroine a brand new steampunk look with black ink splatter on the mouth and eyebrows bleached to high heaven.

For Christian Bale’s Frank, the team used heavy prosthetics inspired by World War 1-era skin grafts for a fleshy patchwork look, once again reinventing the classic monster for a brand new cinematic age.

And speaking of new twists on a classic monster, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein birthed an instantly iconic new look for the Creature that evolves over the course of the film alongside Jacob Elordi's also Chainsaw Award-nominated performance.

Inspired by organic materials like clay and 1800s anatomy texts, Hill's Frankenstein is all at once grotesque and beautiful, terrifying and heartbreaking, and perfectly captures del Toro's fantastical visual style. Hill has already deservedly taken home an Academy Award for his work on Frankenstein – will a Chainsaw Award be next?

For the titular goopy superhero (gooperhero?) of Macon Blair's The Toxic Avenger, UK based studio Millennium FX decked out star Luisa Guerreiro, who provided the physical performance for Toxie, in a full body creature suit featuring silicone gloves and prosthetic appliances, and partial facial animatronics.

Combining all the glorious slime and scum of the original Troma Toxie with the cartoonish quirkiness of the 90s animated spin-off, Millennium FX's Toxic Avenger gave the mop-wielding hero a new coat of radioactive paint for modern audiences. Will they clean up the competition at this year's Chainsaw Awards?

Almost 30 years after Danny Boyle's game-changing apocalypse horror 28 Days Later, the 28 Years Later trilogy centered on the evolution of not only the survivors left behind, but also the Infected. For The Bone Temple, John Nolan and his team put particular focus on the physical evolution of Samson the Alpha, played by Chi Lewis-Parry, as he begins to seemingly recover from the rage virus and return to some semblance of humanity.

On the far more grisly side of things, Nolan's team also delivered bloody prosthetics galore for the now infamous Farm Scene, in which the maniacal Jimmy gang perform ‘charity' on a group of innocent survivors. Remind yourself of what exactly they got up to here, if you've got a strong stomach.

Academy Award-nominated creature and prosthetics designer Arjen Tuiten lent his skilled hand to Lee Cronin's The Mummy, putting a far gorier spin on the classic monster than any previous iterations. Inspired by Jack Pierce’s classic makeup for the original Mummy, Tuiten took inspiration from real mummified bodies to show the gradual decay of Katie (Natalie Grace) from perfectly preserved to rotten, falling apart at the seams quite literally.

Tuiten and team were responsible for Lee Cronin's The Mummy‘s most wince-worthy scenes, including the one that had us throwing our nail clippers in the trash and committing to just growing our toenails out from now on. Shudder.