Let me tell you about the night I stopped being myself and became something better.

We chased this thing across Los Angeles for weeks. Underground parking lots that smell like motor oil and bad decisions. Industrial guts of the city where the light comes down in slabs and everything echoes. I'm proud of this shoot in a way that scares me a little. So buckle up — this is the whole bloody confession.

The Hunt for the Right Kind of Ugly

Pretty is easy. Pretty is boring. We didn't want pretty.

We wanted rust. We wanted cracked concrete and flickering fluorescents and the kind of silence that hums. So we went hunting — level after level of underground lots, descending into the belly of LA like we were looking for something we lost down there.

Here's what we learned crawling through the city's basements:

The deeper you go, the better the shadows. Sub-level three is where the magic lives.
Echoes change everything. You stand in that emptiness and you feel small, theatrical, doomed. Perfect.
Pipes are art. Those ugly horizontal pipes running across the ceiling? They frame a shot like nothing else.

Every space told us no before it said yes. We got moved along by attendants, stared at by security, soaked by a sprinkler that had no business going off. We kept going. You don't build a monster in comfortable places.

Thrift Stores, Far and Wide

Now the props. Oh, the props.

We tore through thrift stores across the whole sprawl of this city. Glendale to Long Beach. Dusty corners of the Valley - I had dust in my lungs and a fever for the find.

You can't buy this look new. New has no ghosts. Thrift has history baked into every seam, and that history bleeds into the camera. We dug for it like raccoons in a dumpster of dreams.

What made the cut:

A black top hat — found half-crushed under a pile of scarves, resurrected with steam and stubbornness.
A dark, heavy coat — high-collared, textured, the kind of black that drinks light.
Random treasures that didn't make the frame but fed the mood anyway.

Each piece had to earn its place. If it didn't make my skin crawl in the best way, it went back on the rack.

The Reveal: The Man in the Mask Is Me

Here's the part where I drop the curtain.

That figure. The featureless mask, the purple hair tumbling down like spilled paint, the top hat sitting low and dangerous. People keep asking who he is, what he is, where we found this haunting creature.

It's me. It was always me.

I stood in front of that lens and disappeared into him. And I have never felt more honest in my life. Funny how a mask with no face shows the truest version of you.

Building the Character, Layer by Layer

So how do you become a ghost in a top hat? You build him. Piece by piece, lie by beautiful lie.

The Mask

Matte black. Featureless. No eye holes you can see into, no mouth, no nostrils — just smooth contours where a face should be. It's unsettling on purpose. You look at it and your brain keeps searching for a person and keeps coming up empty. That void is the whole point.

The Hair

Long, messy, gorgeous chaos. Purple and lavender and dusty pink streaked through with gray, like the wig had lived three lifetimes before it found me. It spills out from under the hat and frames that blank mask in color. The contrast is everything — cold black nothing against a riot of bruised petals.

The Makeup and the Final Touches

Under and around it all, we worked the edges. Shading where the mask met skin, blending so the seams vanished, making the whole thing read as one creature instead of a costume. Makeup isn't about looking good here — it's about making the impossible look like it breathes.

Then the coat. Then the hat tilted just so. And suddenly he was standing in the room with us, and we all went quiet.

What the Concrete Taught Me

Here's the truth this shoot beat into me, level by underground level.

The best art lives in the ugly places. It's stitched together from thrifted garbage and stubborn nights and a face you build because the real one isn't strange enough to carry the feeling. We bled for this thing and I'd do it again tomorrow.

So that's the story. The lots, the dust, the mask, the man underneath. If you take one thing from this confession, take this: go to the deepest, ugliest place you can find — and build the version of yourself that finally feels true.

The top hat's waiting.
So is the dark.

-Mitchell Royel

CONCRETE, THRIFT DUST, AND A MASK WITH NO FACE: HOW WE BUILT THE TOP HAT