Rick Genest

Rick Genest (August 7, 1985 – August 1, 2018), also known as Zombie Boy, was a Canadian artist, actor, fashion model, and musician. He held a Guinness World Record for his full-body tattoos.

Personal life

Genest was born in LaSalle, Quebec, and grew up in Châteauguay. At 14, Genest was told he had a brain tumor. After more examinations and tests, six months later, he had a laser procedure, claiming he was the second North American to survive the laser treatment.

Genest had himself tattooed over approximately 90% of his body and held the Guinness World Record for the most tattoos of human bones (139). He previously held the Guinness World Record for most tattoos of insects (176), until November 2018, when Joshua Thornton took the title.

Career

Tattooed as a living skeleton, Genest worked in various sideshows and freak shows across Canada as an illustrated man, eventually starring in his own show, called Lucifer’s Blasphemous Mad Macabre Torture Carnival. Not long after beginning his facial tattoos, Genest was first introduced to the public on November 13, 2006, in a blog post on Body Modification Ezine (BME)'s ModBlog. In March 2008 he had his first interview, by which time his tattoos were largely completed. In this interview, Genest clarified that he preferred the moniker "Zombie" to "Skullboy", as BME had been referring to him.

The introductions on RzyM's Channel led to increasingly mainstream media coverage, notably a June 2008 feature in Bizarre magazine. In the 2009 television film Carny, starring Lou Diamond Phillips as a small-town sheriff, Genest was seen as a Tattooed Man at the Carnival. In the summer of 2010, he was discovered by artist Marc Quinn, in Bromont, Quebec, where Genest was working with the sideshow, Alive on the Inside, at Carnivàle Lune Bleue.