The moon is full and you feel the need for a one-of-a-kind vampire mask. Who you gonna call?


Though the specialists at the PAL Special Effects and Interior Design Studio cannot compete with the sophistication of Hollywood's George Lucas, they can deliver some frighteningly convincing extraterrestrials, prehistoric beasts, chopped-off hands and pools of blood.


Since its founding two years ago, the PAL Studio, located in a backyard mansion at the Moscow Brain Institute, has become Russia's most unusual center for special effects, delivering everything from carnival-style masks to remote-controlled monsters and performance-art extravaganzas to film studios and nightclubs.


The studio's founding fathers are Leonid Geraschenko, 36, and Andrei Myagkikh, 30, who met while working at Mosfilm Studio and decided to try to restore the luster to what they believed was a declining tradition of cinematic special effects.


"This art was gorgeous and impressive in the folklore film tales and cartoons of Alexander Rou in the 1950s and 1960s," said Geraschenko, who worked at Mosfilm with such cinema luminaries as Rolan Bykov and Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky. "I grew up on these films and was deeply affected by them."


The duo's work began in the summer of 1992, when, with scraps of plastic and latex, they began making an assortment of masks. The demand for horror helped their business grow; today their main customers for masks are young businessmen who commission the masks to frighten their friends and relatives, said Geraschenko, the studio's manager.


A PAL mask of your favorite alter-ego -- Stalin, Dracula, Quasimodo -- costs from $15 to $30. A perfectly fitted mask that will change your identity while still allowing you to show facial expressions costs at least $300. To make such masks, which are commonly used by the film industry, Myagkikh, the studio's chief production designer, studies faces carefully. He said he may even know more about bone structure and facial tissue than some doctors.


Moving beyond masks, the PAL pair also has created dozens of beastlike costumes, including those for a "Beauty and the Beast" extravaganza and for elaborate Halloween performances they have produced at Manhattan Express and other discos and nightclubs. For major projects, Geraschenko and Myagkikh contract up to 15 other technicians.


Film and video are their true loves. Their work has been featured in dozens of television commercials, promotional videos and music videos for such clients as Inkombank, BIZ-Enterprise and the rock group Brigada S.


They have also created remote-controlled models of Baba Yaga and other monsters of Russian folklore for the debut film by the dancer Andris Liepa, and they created Arctic spirits and shamans for French filmmaker Claude Masseau's remake of the 1922 "Nanook of the North." Geraschenko and Myagkikh are now looking for backers for their own film project, about the modern urban adventures of a giant Abominable Snowman.


The creative duo have also begun working as interior designers.


"Our creatures are inseparable from their natural surroundings, so we have to design 'living spacs' for them," said Myagkikh, adding the final touches to a creature behind a bar at Master, a recently completed discotheque in the former Dom Kultury Ilyicha. "That's how we started specializing in interior design. A few sex shops, cafes and discotheques have already commissioned designs of prehistoric landscapes, with dinosaurs, pterodactyls and mutants."


Myagkikh, who before perestroika worked in the Soviet Laboratory of Futurist Design, has created two dinosaur heads and six full-scale dinosaurs. Two of his prehistoric statues now stand in the Moscow Paleontological Museum, a source of great pride for Myagkikh.


The artists, who work with exotic and expensive materials, such as a latex derived from Malaysian trees, will only divulge a few details about their techniques.


"There are tricks in my peculiar trade that I don't care to divulge, any more than a magician will give away his art," said Myagkikh.


Though a partnership with a computer-graphics company should help them develop high-tech, computer-assisted effects in the future, Geraschenko and Myagkikh rely mostly on ingenuity and camaraderie to craft their creations. Future plans even include venturing out of the realm of horror and into a more kindhearted fantasy: They want to construct a "park of Russian folk tales" for children.


Even so, some people fault the pair for concentrating on the destructive side of human nature. In conventional Western mythology, these creatures are real villains, but in some other cultures, the night breed is as much celebrated as feared. They are the spirits of man's darker nature, spirits that some theologies don't seek to suppress.


"Our customers do not commission kind creatures," said Geraschenko. "They are sort of their own psychotherapists -- excorcising the evil core from their psyches."