PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Heather Galipo is proof that big dreams can come true.
Currently, she is living out not one, but two of her longtime passions: makeup and music. Based in Los Angeles, Galipo is making waves in the experimental post punk scene as CrowJane, with a full album, EP and numerous singles under her belt, all while bringing intricate makeup creations to life on screen in high-profile projects, such as American Horror Stories, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (our review), Star Trek: Picard and more.
PopHorror recently spoke with Galipo about both of her fascinating career paths, including how she got started, standout projects, inspirations and more.
PopHorror: You’re involved in two very cool industries, makeup and music. I’d love to start with the makeup. Can you discuss how you got started?
Heather Galipo: I was a painter and always kind of an artist, and then I really took up painting in high school. Maybe it was the end of junior high school when I really got into it. I really loved street art, I would go graffiti places, I’d paint on canvas. I was trying to think of a way, you know when you’re in high school and it’s like, “What am I gonna do when I get out?,” and I knew I wanted to do something in the arts. But I then had a feeling that going to a four-year art college might not be the best route. Becoming a painter seemed archaic and unrealistic.
I was always into film and TV, and my dad liked Predator a lot, he liked Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. And my parents would watch CSI a lot, and I’d watch CSI with them. I remember while watching those films, I had this idea while seeing the creature and dead bodies, like, “Oh, I could probably do that.” So then I got the spark of, maybe I’ll do makeup effects. I was doing my sister’s beauty makeup for prom and stuff, and exploring my own makeup, and it just clicked. I would paint my own creatures anyway and draw anatomy, so it just kind of made sense to transfer from one to another. I went to a trade school, Cinema Makeup School in LA, and just started working from there.
PopHorror: You’ve done a lot of horror movies, sci-fi movies. What’s it like to work in that genre?
Heather Galipo: Since I wanted to do makeup effects, I feel like B-movie horror is sort of where a lot of us land. I think there’s a lot of indie filmmakers making horror movies, and it’s really fun. So I did a lot of practical blood effects, and just wounds and prosthetics and stuff like that, and I was doing that right out of the gate of film school with USC or AFI, the big film school universities out here. And it’s fun. It never fails, especially on those sets when you’re doing something super gross or something with blood splatter, and you just hear everyone on the film crew like, “Ughh!” I used to call myself the Queen of Gross because I felt like I could make something look really, really disgusting in a cool way, kind of ’80s-style.
And practical effects, there’s such a cool art to that. I feel like for a little bit, it was going mostly digital, but even with AI, there’s a lot of directors doing this digital-effects-plus-practical-effects, and that’s the perfect marriage, you know? Even the new Star Wars do this perfect marriage of the two. And if you’ve seen The Substance, the marriage between digital and practical effects is chef’s kiss. It’s my favorite style.
And then I’ve done so much alien stuff. For a while, especially when The Walking Dead came out as a TV show, there was a bunch of zombies. I was just doing zombies all the time. And then sci-fi really got big before the strike. For the past few years, I was doing a bunch of aliens. I went from Star Trek to Guardians. It’s amazing being on those sets. Even helping out with Star Wars, a lot of the not main cast are pullover masks now. I have one on my coffee table, I’m making one for a musician, but it’s a pullover silicone mask of an old man, so it’s like him as an old man. A lot of the alien masks are like that too on Star Wars, so you’re just pulling over these magical, top-grade-looking silicone masks on these people. But they look great walking around.
And you see where they have, it’s not just a green screen. It’s an actual screen showing a video of the background, it’s like an LED screen with a replaying video of a scenic whatever planet that they’re on. And just being on the stages, you’re like, “Wow, this is amazing.” Just the time, the money, the artistry, everything that goes into building these stages is wild, and I love that part of it so much.
PopHorror: I have to ask, is your home filled with random pullover masks?
Heather Galipo: [laughs] I mean, kind of. I feel like I went for sort of a gothic storybook theme in here. But I have my garage, which is also my art studio, where I build stuff from home, which has a lot of faces in it, yeah.
PopHorror: What’s the process once you’re hired for a film or TV show? Do they tell you what they’re looking for? Do you provide your own vision?
Heather Galipo: If I’m hired as the department head, then I’ll usually, unless there’s a makeup designer, have a pretty heavy hand in creating the character looks. If I’m not making the pieces or prosthetics or whatever it is myself, I will hire the effect shop to make whatever I need, at least for the makeup effects side of things. But even character and beauty makeup, we have tons of meetings and mood boards about what’s gonna tell the story the best and how we want this character to look, and whatever happens to them in the story. Read the scripts, break them down. But if I’m just hired on as, what we call in the union side of the industry, a day player, then all of the bosses do all of that work, and they’ll just show us what the mood board is, and then we’ll create whatever their vision is.
PopHorror: Do you have a favorite thing that you’ve worked on so far?
Heather Galipo: Yeah, I have multiple favorites, and for different reasons. I’ve gotta a few dream jobs. I helped with the most recent Joker that came out, and I love the Joker franchise, so that was a dream job. I haven’t seen it yet in theaters and I’ve heard not-so-great stuff, so that’s really upsetting. But I wanna go see it for myself anyway. And Guardians of the Galaxy was one of my top favorites for sure, not just for the cool alien makeups that we got to create everyday, but the crew was amazing. I was in Georgia, on the stages in Georgia, and I was with a bunch of my friends. So just the way that the job went was one of my favorites, we were doing something cool. We surpassed the Planet of the Apes for having the most prosthetics, which was really cool, on set.
One of the planets was a human animal planet, and there’s just these beautiful prosthetics made. It’s the most amazing animal ears and pieces of animal face that we were applying onto the people, and blending them to look like a human animal. And then you have to remove it, and you just have to throw it away. This super expensive, amazing piece of art that looks super real and cool, you’re just throwing it in the trash.
PopHorror: Do you typically watch the movies and shows that your work is in? If so, what does that feel like to see it?
Heather Galipo: Yeah, I usually do, and there’s usually screenings and stuff, even before it comes out. It’s hard for me to not be a critic and be like, “Is the continuity OK with the makeup? Does he look OK in that?” Even movies that I don’t work on, I’ll often critique the makeups in it and stuff. I just know so much about it now, about filmmaking, that I’ll be like, “Oh, that lighting could’ve been better,” or whatever. But you never know the backstory, so I try to keep that in mind when I’m watching stuff. There might’ve been a day where they had five minutes to do whatever, the actor was late. You just never know. So I try to not be a super harsh critic when I’m watching something that I worked on, but I definitely do watch them.
PopHorror: Is there a dream film, franchise or show that you would love to work on someday that you haven’t yet?
Heather Galipo: Well, most things that I love are shot in freaking Europe or Canada. I would love to work in the Game of Thrones franchise, give me House of the Dragon, give me any of them. I love all those stories. And I would also love, all the Tim Burton stuff that’s been shooting has been in Romania, so it would’ve been cool to work on that too, Wednesday or the new Beetlejuice. But my favorite genre is really artsy horror, surreal artsy horror, kind of like Midsommar, kind of witchy, artsy horror that has this hint of surrealism to it. And The Substance is kind of that way too, where it’s just this super bizarro surreal story. And so I would love to work on something like that too, and that also shoots in Europe mostly.
PopHorror: Hopefully someday! In addition to this, you have CrowJane and your music. Over the years, have you been doing both simultaneously, or has the music been more of a recent thing?
Heather Galipo: I’ve always wanted to be a singer also, so I was singing on rocks and pretending to be in bands since I was, like, 5 or something. But then I started playing guitar in high school. And then around 2010, I started doing a punk band. I played in that band for over a decade, it’s kind of like a post punk band. When that ended during COVID year, I had this solo album out that I was doing with Kitten Robot. Paul Roessler is the sound engineer at Kitten Robot, he’s a friend of mine, so we started making songs together outside of my bands, just my own thing, and it was kind of this therapy music writing process. But we made songs just because we wanted to.
And then when Kitten Robot was becoming a label, Paul wanted me to put out the album as a, “I’m going solo and putting out this album!” So I did, and the release went really well. We pressed hundreds of records of the album. And then I needed to do a release show and it was like, “Now I guess I’m becoming a band because I’ve got to sell hundreds of these records.” So then I made a lineup to do this release show, and the band has transformed and stuck to certain people ever since. Because I work in film and I love music, I’ve been trying to make stuff with a post punk edge that is just fun for me to do, and fun to do live. And then also at the same time, trying to write cinematic, moody songs that I could see in film or TV, and try to have them pitched.
PopHorror: At this point you have a full album, an EP and numerous singles. Has your artistry evolved over the past four years since the album?
Heather Galipo: Yeah, definitely. The full LP was done so DIY in this way because it was just me, there wasn’t a drummer or bass player. It was just me playing around with things in the studio. A lot of that percussion stuff was very experimental objects that we made to make percussive sounds. For the release show of that album, I wanted to have a choir sing with me, so we had basically just a bunch of goth-y punk girls that are in the local music scene to sing in this choir. I kept a few of them to play with the band live. So now when I’m writing, I have ideas for backup singers and choir-y sounding stuff. I mess around with a lot of string plug-ins and stuff, so a lot of it has grown from where it started.
I did a bunch of singles because I’m trying to just basically play the algorithm game. It’s just the way it is right now. In order to grow as a music project or as a band, if I wanna play bigger tours or stuff like that, you probably need a booking agent, but a booking agent only wants to book you if you have a certain amount of numbers. And one of those numbers is Spotify listeners and followers, and the only way to get Spotify listeners and followers is to put out singles, promote them, get them on playlists, and all this stuff that I’ve learned that I didn’t care about before. If I’m playing in a punk band or post punk band, I actually want to do whatever the opposite is for the corporate algorithm world. But to gain success in the way that I wish to gain success with this musical project, I’m trying to pay more attention to that, so that’s why the singles.
And I’ve just been getting inspired by different things that I’ve been doing in my life. “Gallows,” I was on an indie movie, a psychological thriller in France, and that was the inspiration for writing “Gallows.”
PopHorror: Who are some of your favorite artists? Have they influenced your sound at all?
Heather Galipo: Definitely. Sometimes, if there’s not a specific thing that I’m pulling from, like the France inspiration, if I’m just writing a song, I might be inspired by something different, like an actual song. For instance, I was cleaning the house and listening to music, and I love the Virgin Prunes. They came on the station that I was listening to, and I got inspired to do a dual vocal song that had a consistent driving beat in it. That’s how I wrote the song “Savage,” it stemmed from that.
I’ve gotten inspiration from Siouxsie and the Banshees, I’ve gotten inspiration from Fever Ray, Björk, Tom Waits, Skeletal Family. I fucking love music, and there’s so many bands in different music genres that I really love and I wanna pull from. It’s kind of become this hodgepodge, where it’s like, CrowJane isn’t one specific genre. It’s a bunch of different genres, and all of my bands that I’ve been in have been that same way. It’s not really pigeonholed, and it always has this experimental edge to it. So I’ll probably always be like that.
PopHorror: What’s it like to perform your music to a live audience?
Heather Galipo: It’s one of my favorite things, that’s why I still do it. I’m definitely not in it for the money or anything, especially there’s seven people in the band currently. So if you divide it seven ways, you don’t really end up with much. There’s something to performing live, it’s like the energy release and the energy received back from the crowd, there’s a magic to it that’s hard to explain, but it really does exist. A lot of people that I talk to that don’t perform are like, “I don’t know how you do that, I would be so nervous.” But I’m actually more nervous to be off stage walking around in the crowd, or having one-on-one conversations than I am performing on a stage at this point in my life. It’s just a super cool spiritual connection and release, and it’s just one of my favorite things.
PopHorror: What inspired the name CrowJane?
Heather Galipo: I got it from a blues song by a blues artist named Skip James. A lot of the punk people that I love have these music synonyms, or they go by other names for whatever reason. Like Alice Bag because she was in a band called the Bags, or Stiv Bators or, usually back in the day, there was something sexual about them, Rat Scabies because they’re gross or whatever. But I wanted my own name like that, and I got CrowJane because I love the blues.
And the song “Crow Jane” was also something that I’m inspired by and the meaning of it, which is a title for prostitutes in a way at the time. Guys would have their wife, and they would have this other woman on the side that they would mess around with that they saw as beneath them, that they would call Crow Jane. It’s kind of like a filthy girl title that I like to take and mix around in my own feminist way. But yeah, and I thought that it was just a cool name. A lot of people think that it’s from Nick Cave because I didn’t realize Nick Cave has a song out called “Crow Jane” also, but it’s not.
PopHorror: Would you say that your two worlds help one another? Does the makeup influence the music at all, or vice versa?
Heather Galipo: There’s a lot of musicians in the film industry, actually. Some makeup artist friends that I have are also musicians. I do think that some of the adventures that I have in filmmaking inspire some of my songs, or situations that I have in the film industry, negative ones, also inspire some of my songs. It doesn’t really go the other way that much, where my music inspires a makeup design. The industry has always ebbed and flowed, and we were on strike for a year, so when I’m not being kept busy by the film industry, I have something else to do, which I think is a good thing to have so I’m not super worried about work. It’s all kind of connected, and hopefully being in the industry will maybe make it easier to place songs within film and TV in the future, who knows.
PopHorror: For anyone who’s looking to get into either of these careers, do you have any advice?
Heather Galipo: I think if you want to be a makeup artist, going to a trade school is good to learn some of the trade, and also you could then have connections to your peers or teachers, and they could take you onto stuff. And/or just start doing it and working in effects shops. I feel like the film industry is one of the few industries where, I guess with makeup and stuff, you don’t have to have some sort of certificate that says you could do it. You could just start looking for jobs on the internet, and start doing stuff for free or low pay, and start learning what it’s like to be on set. There’s plenty of YouTube videos and tutorials nowadays, there’s so many different avenues to do it. You could be a TikTok or Instagram makeup artist, or you just do makeup on your own face. I feel like the way that I went about it is a pretty good way to at least get in the film industry, and to become union-ed.
For music, it’s also just kind of like, start doing it. I was a pretty amateur musician when I started playing instruments. I’m not classically trained. I took some guitar classes, but they were just kind of whatever. I learned a lot by ear, and I just started like the classic punk story, amateur musician punk story, and just grew from there and started playing in bands. I think with both those fields, it’s just network, network, network, meeting the people doing the thing, and giving it a bunch of passion and time and energy. Just devote yourself to it, and over time, things develop from it.
PopHorror: Is there anything upcoming for you that people can look forward to?
Heather Galipo: I play a CrowJane show Nov. 23 at Bar Sinister that I think is gonna be a cool show. And I am trying to put out another LP next year and do an east coast tour, and then hopefully the year after that, do Europe. I’m talking to a booking agent, so hopefully it’s just all good things.
Thanks for speaking with us, Heather! Keep up with her at on Instagram @_crowjane_ and @hgalipomakeup_fx.
