Steve Fiorilla
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Steve Fiorilla (born January 12, 1961) is an American artist born in Paterson, New Jersey, who lives and works in Buffalo, New York. Throughout his career, Fiorilla has emphasized the grotesque and surreal in illustrations, sculpture and fine art. As a sculptor, he has produced a variety of bizarre, malformed creatures, and one of his 1985 sculptures was featured 12 years later on a cover for the magazine Bloodsongs (1997).
Fiorilla has illustrated for books and magazines (Heavy Metal, Video Games and Computer Entertainment, High Times), T-shirts, small press journals (Eegah!, Magick Theatre, Moody Street Irregulars), catalog covers (Gregg Press), fanzines (Horror from the Crypt of Fear) and mini-comics (City Scenes). He created numerous drawings and product designs for Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, including a belt buckle, T-shirts, caps, ads and catalog illustrations. Fiorilla sometimes works in tandem with illustrator Jim McDermott, such as their collaboration for Stephen J. Spignesi's The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia (1991).
Fiorilla's work for films includes sculptural designs for Boston's Olive Jar Animation. The short film Things Never Seen (1989), with creatures designed by Fiorilla, received multiple showings on MTV during the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to special effects makeup for videos (Tennie Komar and the Silencers) and films (Winterbeast, 1991), he has designed masks for Death Studios and horror films, including Saturday the 14th (1981) and Till Death Do We Scare (1982). The MTV animated logo "Guillotine" featured a sculpted horror by Fiorilla, and he also created the customized skeleton guitar writhing in a popular 1987 Dokken video seen on MTV.
EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines owned one of Fiorilla's latex masks depicting EC's Old Witch (The Haunt of Fear). In the second season of HBO's Tales from the Crypt anthology television series, a photo of this Old Witch mask was a prop in the June 26, 1990 "Korman's Kalamity" episode, adapted from the EC story "Kamen's Kalamity." Illustrated by Jack Kamen, the original self-satirical story is set in EC's offices where the EC editors have a meeting with Kamen about his artwork.
Buffalo's Low Down Dirty Low Brow Art Show was a 2002 group exhibition "inspired by the artwork of Steve Fiorilla," although he did not participate in the show. Fiorilla's articles and reviews appear regularly in the online magazine, Flickhead, and he also does film reviews under the pseudonym Jacques Corédor (a pun on Samuel Fuller's film Shock Corridor).
