Engagement photos: you’ve probably seen them obnoxiously displayed on your Facebook feed. Usually, they feature the happy couple, dressed to impress, in some beautiful location, showing off the new bling. For Shi Jaramillo and her fiancé Patrick Reetz from Austin, Texas, that sort of cliché just wasn’t their style.
“We’re a little bit different and didn’t want anything like that,” Jaramillo told the Daily Mail. What they wanted was a murder-themed photo shoot complete with fake blood, rubber gloves, plastic trash bags, and a “corpse.”
Yeah, that must have been a fun one to explain to Grandma.
“My fiancé teaches anatomy and I love horror,” said Jaramillo, “and we thought ‘What’s the craziest thing you could test someone with other than the location of a body?'”
True. You really don’t want to marry someone if they wouldn’t hide a corpse for you, right? I heard that’s how serial killers pick their mates.
“While Shi was the brain child of the whole affair,” said Reetz. “I suggested the minor subtleties like the knife behind the back and in a way what we did was satirizing traditional engagement photos.”
Photographer and friend Asha Poyzer took the photos in Austin’s Zilker Park last month and seemed less than disturbed, despite photographing them covering each others’ faces in blood, dragging a body bag through the grass, and putting on rubber gloves to clean up the mess.
“When I first heard about the theme I thought it was definitely a little out there, but I knew it would be a lot of fun and offer some unique engagement shots. I’m sure that along with all the people who’ll like it there will definitely be some who find it far out and maybe a bit gross.”
If anything, the couple certainly had some macabre fun with it.
“We spent a lot of time giggling—it’s hard not to when your hauling a ‘dead body’ along Austin’s greenbelt!” said Jaramillo. “It was quite funny—we went on this very busy trail and then wandered off into the woods for three hours and forgot to take anything to clean ourselves with afterwards. There we were covered in fake blood walking down this busy trail. People were waving and saying hello because they’re so nice in Texas. Eventually we found a mini water fountain to clean ourselves off.”
The wedding is set for August and the couple has decided to carry the homicidal theme through to their invites. The RSVP reads “Will you help us hide the bodies?” Instead of guests, attendees have been dubbed “accomplices.”
The whole thing definitely gives new meaning to the traditional “til death do us part.”
[H/T: Metro]
