Turning a living person into a statue is an idea that goes back at least as far as the Greek myth of the Gorgons and certainly in the Internet era has become a sort of kink. More than a few covers of Dime Mystery Magazine strongly suggest the kink goes back at least to the shudder-pulp era. Consider this unattributed March 1937 cover:

Now I suppose it’s possible that our mad sculptor here is only using his victim as a kind of unwilling model. That would be criminal behavior in the real world, but mere kidnapping and assault don’t seem to rise to the level of menace one would expect from a Dime Mystery cover. I would submit that our lady’s fate here is not merely to model art but to become it.

Again, things become more obvious in other covers. There is this cover from March 1938 painted by Tom Lovell:

Helpless women being moved by pulley and dipped into a gilding vat, then hung up (to dry?). And this one from August 1939.

The curators at Pulp Covers remark, whether in innocence or in irony I am not sure “Yes, the evil cult leader is spray-painting the chained girl gold. No, I don’t know why,” A look in the background at one of the victim’s possible predecessors suggests an answer. That’s no ordinary spray-paint.