Scare Tactics

''In the story,'' Yagher says, ''Crypt-Keeper's parents are sideshow freaks. His father has two faces — there's a mutated, underdeveloped face on the side of his main face like a twin brother who never quite got out of the body. The mother is an Egyptian mummy with a curse on her. So they get together and they fornicate and — voila! — we have the Crypt-Keeper.''

A tour of Yagher's own studio in Glendale, Calif., provides an even more vivid picture of what goes into his work. At first glance, the spacious 4,300-square-foot warehouse seems cheery and well-lighted. But on the walls hang grotesque faces, bodies of beasts, ghouls, and, of course, Freddy Krueger, who seems in particularly ill humor up there.

Then there are the cabinets: Oh, no: ''knife wounds,'' ''bullet wounds,'' ''tongues.'' In another room are the latex arms made for ''Cutting Cards.'' Their realism is chilling: The skin is perfectly tanned; the fingernails have a dull sheen; the hairs have been punched in one at a time. Beside one arm is a severed forefinger (it is not twitching).

Preparing for Yagher's Tale about the Crypt-Keeper's origins, one of his employees, Mike Trcic, is molding a baby C.K. It has terminal chapped lips, deathly blue eyes, and a protuding lower tooth. As Trcic sculpts the face in clay, amid several large tongues lying about his desk, he says, ''This guy is kind of cute.''

Clearly Yagher likes to hire people in his own image. As one of the rising stars in the special-effects field, he often works on movies, and not just horror movies — many of the violent death scenes in Glory were his. He can employ as many as 25 at a time. Yagher says he needs a larger studio. On top of that, the location of his studio has gone public. ''I had a Freddy Krueger break-in,'' he says. ''A bunch of Freddy fans broke in and stole Freddy stuff. Or maybe Freddy broke in and stole himself.''

Yagher, a self-taught makeup artist, got his big break when he was asked to redesign Freddy for Nightmare 2. ''Freddy from the first movie was slightly vague because of the lighting,'' he says. ''I decided to give him a more prominent bone structure and a more evil look.''

Yagher's occupation leads people to ask him a lot of questions: 1) ''How does one get into this line of work?'' 2) ''Are you a strange person?'' 3) ''Did you have a weird upbringing?'' Yagher smiles and answers: 1) ''You bribe a lot of people.'' 2) ''No.'' 3) ''I had mutants for parents.''

Later, he admits that he and his brother Jeff (an actor who will appear in Yagher's Tale) constantly watched horror movies and made each other up with Play-Doh, oatmeal, or whatever was around.

Kevin soon graduated to more demanding — and rewarding — stunts. ''I dressed up as an old man in high school. A student introduced me as his grandfather, and the teacher bought it. I said, 'I've got to do this for a living. It's a kick.'''