ENTERTAINMENT
From Issue #7
The Torture King
Control (ouch) of the Mind (ouch)
By Karen Coyle
Tim
Cridland, also known as Zamora The Torture King or The Human
Pincushion, made his debut years ago with Jim Rose's Circus
Sideshow and has since appeared on Ripley's Believe it or Not
and Real TV. He is a man of many strange talents.
At a young age, Cridland became extremely interested in sideshows
and the unusual stunts performed at them. Through books he learned
about snake charmers and sword swallowers and he decided it
was something he wanted to pursue.
"It was an ongoing interest of mine that kept growing bigger
and bigger," he said. Tim's first side show accomplishment
was fire eating. That was a feat he mastered at the young age
of 15.
"I thought that was pretty cool," said Cridland, "I
thought that was something I'd like to see. But nobody was doing
it, especially in the small town I lived in." So he decided
to learn the ropes himself. It was a slow process that took
many years of studying mediation rituals and self-hypnosis to
become the torture guru he is today.
"I've been doing fire eating the longest," he says.
"Then putting the skewers just through the skin on the
fore arms, then it just went up from there."
Zamora's signature act is piercing his flesh with meat skewers.
At the show I attended in Toronto, one skewer went through the
arm and another went in his mouth, under his tongue and out
the bottom of his chin. According to The Torture King, this
act has made several people faint, including members of other
sideshows. At different shows he pierces different parts of
his body, although his arms and face seem to be the most common.
For the Guinness Book of Records, he had 106 pins in his body
at once. "I could have done twice as many," he claims,
"but it wasn't really for the record, it was just an excuse
to do fun stuff on TV."
Because of his extensive studies and years of practice, Cridland
is fully in tune with his body. He knows exactly where to put
the skewers when piercing himself to produce the least amount
of blood possible. Through self-hypnosis he has also learned
to ignore the pain.
"There is nothing abnormal about me physically," said
The Torture King. "Everything I've done, I've trained myself
to do. I'd say what I'm doing is demonstrating some kind of
extreme examples of what you can do with your mind and combining
that with your 
body. You could take the same techniques I use
to overcome pain and use them in your own life to inspire you
to persevere against the pains in life we all have to deal with."
Obviously,
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME - or anywhere else! Tim has studied
for many years to be able to achieve this level of showmanship
and expertise. Plus, why the hell would you want to do something
like this anyways?
Photos by Fakir Musafar, Jack Plasky
