It’s a week until Halloween, and I’m throwing FFZ into full on Horror mode to compliment the Thirty-One Days of Horror Review Reposts that I’ve been running on Twitter. In addition to this week’s usual three articles, I’ll be doing a couple extra for next weekend and of course one more on Halloween Day. And to kick things off, today I’m having a look at The Four Horsemen’s latest offering in their Figura Obscura subline. These one-off releases have been horror themed and I’ve skipped them all until this one, mainly because I’m a fan of Edgar Allan Poe and to a lesser extent a fan of the Vincent Price film based pretty loosely on Poe’s story, The Masque of the Red Death!

You get some damn fine premium packaging here. The figure comes in a window box with a heavy tri-fold cover that attaches to the sides with magnets. There’s some gorgeous character art on the front and the back has a parchment recounting a synopsis of the story the figure is based on. You also get a little booklet that reprints the entire short story, which is a great bonus and definitely worth a read this Halloween if you haven’t experienced it.

Remove the tri-fold and you get a standard window box with a window cut out on top to let some light in. The back of the tri-fold also has some excellent artwork to serve as a backdrop while displaying the figure, and I’ll include a shot of that at the end. The figure is positioned on the tray in rather tight quarters thanks to the Grandfather Clock taking up a good bit of the real estate in there. There’s a second tray nested underneath, which has a few more accessories. Everything is collector friendly and with a box this good, I plan on keeping it. Of course, the figure is scaled with TFH’s 6-inch Mythic Legions line and uses modular parts compatible with those figures, as well as Cosmic Legions if you fancy cobbling together a figure of SPACE DEATH!!!

Here is Death out of the box and ready to scare the willies out of you with a lesson on inescapable human fate and mortality. Softgoods is the name of the game here, which is definitely unusual for The Four Horsemen, who are generally regarded as some of the best sculptors in toyland. Although they seem to be embracing softgoods more and more in the upcoming releases of their other lines. Death is wrapped in layered robes with a hood that has two long flaps which hang down all the way to his feet. Besides the face the only exposed plastic is his arms and feet. I won’t be taking the robes off, and they aren’t meant to be removed, because what you get underneath is a pretty basic body.

The robes do look very nice, albeit a bit chunky in a few areas. It feels like there’s some underwire present, but it doesn’t really do a lot to hold the robes in any specific position. The two-tone red coloring looks very great and the tattered edges are a nice touch. The fully exposed right arm is textured and comes off as a mix of dead flesh and bone, while the feet are just nasty rotting skeletal feet. You get four sets of hands, which include fists, graspy hands, relaxed hands, and accessory holding hands. The robes are pretty forgiving when it comes to posing.

The head sculpt is pretty damn fantastic and suitably creepy. The mask itself is a mix of skeleton with some interesting arcane patterns sculpted into the forehead. The wax-like melting effect coming off of it is excellent. There are two different shades of red paint here, with the base of the mask being a darker speckled paint and the upper teeth and some of the sculpted accents in a much brighter gloss crimson. The lower jaw is left as a purplish-gray color to suggest it’s part of the actual head and not covered by the mask. It’s a nice touch as the masks usually worn to these parties typically only covered part of the face.

The mask is indeed removable, as it pegs in to the head on either side near the temples. If you’ve read the story, you know that removing it reveals nothingness. Just a lower jaw and a hollowed out crater where the rest of the face would be. There is some creepy sculpted detail lining the back. It’s a very cool and unsettling effect.

Death comes with a medieval-style dagger, which I believe is a new sculpt. I don’t recognize it from any of my Mythic Legions figures, although it will fit right in if you choose to give it to one of them. Technically, I think this would count as an accessory for Prince Prospero, but you get hands so that Death can hold it. Either way, I’m a sucker for a good medieval dagger, and this is a really beautifully sculpted piece.

The other rather large accessory is the Grandfather Clock and it is a real work of art. It stands taller than Death himself and is beautifully sculpted with some ornate carvings, particularly a raven motif up top and a gargoyle head down at the base. The clock requires some assembly out of the package, which is basically just attaching the top and the base. The front piece does come off, but nothing inside is articulated so there’s not much reason to remove it. It’s also held on by some extremely thin and delicate pegs, one of which was already broken in the package, although it still stays in place fine, I may wind up gluing the front piece on permanently. For a one-off piece, TFH really poured the love into this clock.

Finally, you get a rather large effect piece of pooled blood leaking out of the clock. This has some pegs that attach to the feet of the clock to hold it in place and it looks suitably creepy.

I really love how this figure turned out and it’s clear that TFH put a lot of thought and love into the design. Of all the Figura Obscura releases (Krampus and Headless Horsemen) this one feels the most like a personal passion project. Granted, it did not come cheap, as with shipping he clocked it at over $80. Don’t get me wrong, it’s easy to see where the money went, but I suspect a lot of it went into the one-time clock accessory which may be lost on some people looking at picking this up mainly for the figure and not for the story related trappings. All in all, this is definitely what I would consider an art piece, as opposed to a fun action figure. That certainly makes it rather unique and there’s nothing wrong with that!