Episode Recap: Scared Silly

In the middle of the night, while you're slumbering deeply, a cackling voice beckons from nowhere, "Wake up! Time to go!" You stumble through the dark, unseeing, barely feeling, and arrive in a pitch-black makeup lab. Out of the inky darkness appears the face of McKenzie Westmore, telling you that she knows your deepest fears and is about to bring them right to you. This… is Face Off.

The contestants must combine their scariest childhood fears with one of the creepiest icons in horror movie history: clowns. But how do you take things like tornadoes and worms and turn them into clown makeup? Cig's fear was dark water, and so he creates one of the skeletal figures from his childhood nightmares that would drag him into the deep in dreamland. He carves out a bony, sharp face that he'll paint to have the effect of clown makeup streaking as if wet. He can't actually use water since, to spice things up, the clowns will be performing an all-out, acrobatic slapstick, juggling, tumbling routine right on the reveal stage!

George also wanted to use water for his worm makeup, but goes instead with a glossy coat of paint for the wobbly worm arms on his clown. Midway through sculpting the face and head, he realizes that his makeup literally looks like poop, so he flushes that idea and starts over. It's gonna mean a lot more work, but he knows it's the right call. Dina also has to reimagine her tornado clown after Mr. Westmore notes that it doesn't read the way she's hoping. She comes back on day two with a much more whimsical idea of a clown who got stuck in a tornado and was impaled by all of the party favors. She keeps her head down and her spirits high to get it all done in time.

Damien, who's known in his home town for being the scary clown guy – no wait, that sounded wrong: he makes a lot of really cool, scary clowns back home – so he's pretty excited to work on his spider clown this week. He keeps coming up against setbacks though: the dozens of tiny spiders just won't come out right, and then the chin appliance turns out to be too heavy to stay put, so he loses valuable time fixing the rips in the piece.

Drew wanted to bring all the elements of spiders that scared him into one makeup, so come application day, he has more work than he can manage. His central concept of a spider leg as the nose gets lost in an incomplete paint job, and Drew winds up on bottom looks. Damien is also on bottom looks, and with its too-familiar facial forms, his clown sends him home. He's bummed that it was a clown makeup that made the axe fall, but he's proud to have made it so far in this competition and feels so much stronger for it.

The judges love the details Dina put into her clown, like wind-worn makeup and a playing card that slices the skin right off the face in a deliciously disgusting way. She's in top looks, along with Cig, who really pulled off the watery look with technical aplomb for a truly frightening skeletal clown. Sasha, whose fear was old dolls, is also in top looks. Instead of making a clown makeup with "old doll" tacked onto it, Sasha took a risk and made a porcelain doll with cracking clown makeup and that creepy, hair-plug doll hair. Her divergent thinking and attention to detail wow the judges, and she nabs her first win! Talk about a confidence booster – Sasha is all set to take on the game from here on out.