Freak by Dave Forrest

When you’ve been playing with magic tricks for 50 years it gets pretty hard to bother to add one more item to your regular performing roster.  But Freak by Dave Forrest is easily one that I could see myself doing.  Dave is a smart guy with some very clever ideas and if you look at how much nuance he jams into what seems like pretty basic props you’ll agree with me.

This effect requires a little bit of one-time prep work when you get it (tear in half three pictures, a tiny bit of gluing, 3 scratches on some cards, and a cut a tiny hole in some paper).  But also if you want to change or upgrade any part (the pictures, the names, the envelope, the story) all are possible, and you’ll still be left with the very clever structure that Dave has devised.

You have to listen to Dave explain the method and you’ll immediately appreciate this beauty.

I have zero time these days to add any new effects to my performances and this was going straight into my auction next month, but I have decided to keep it and perform it one day hopefully soon.  It is easy to do, very convincing and can easily be modified to suit a lot of presentations. 

Thanks for putting the effort in Dave – you have a real miracle here and I look forward to performing it soon in the Porcupine 🙂

Effect:  Dave Forrest presents ‘FREAK’.

When a torn photograph of a murder victim restores in the hands of your participant…

When that victim was correctly intuited, merely thought of, from three potential victims…

When that photo then changes in a truly disturbing way…

They can only do one thing…FREAK!

Genuinely solid methodology makes this bizarre, story-based, torn and restored nightmare happen pretty much all by itself in a way that is genuinely inexplicable and genuinely unsettling.

First, your participant is given a completely FREE CHOICE out of three potential victims. They don’t write anything down or say anything out loud.

Then they are given three torn photographs – portraits of three pretty girls from a bygone era – each one a potential victim. All three photo’s are clearly torn in half. It’s VERY clear that they are holding nothing more or less than six pieces of torn photographs – there are no false counts, nothing is stolen away and no sleight of hand is used.

They are thinking of one of the girls in one of those torn photo’s and when the actual murder victim is revealed, it is precisely the one victim they have in mind. Every time.

Now, the two photo’s of the non-victims are removed from their hand – very cleanly. You neither steal or add anything as you very openly table the four pieces of the other two photographs, leaving them with just the two pieces of the genuine murder victim’s photo.

Now, without any moves, in their hands, the pieces RESTORE! The correctly identified victim’s image has restored in their own hands!

But it’s not just restored…it has also changed…the pretty girl is now a horrifying ghoul and she has a message for you…from beyond the grave!

FREAK is a stone cold KILLER – literally! The routine is wound around the tale of the ‘Portrait Ripper’ – a serial killer from yesteryear who would taunt the law by sending them ripped photo’s of his next victims. The story has an intriguing twist in the tale as it is finally revealed, through the eerily restored and frighteningly altered photograph (that they were just THINKING OF!), who the ‘Portrait Ripper’ really is! Keeping in mind this all happens in their hands! I’m sure you can see why we call it FREAK!

FREAK will be supplied as a video download and all the necessary props will be shipped out to you.

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