Lee Hardcastle was born in Leeds, United Kingdom. His love of cinema began when he was a teenager, and when he was eighteen years old he decided to study cinema in the Northern Film School of Leeds Beckett University. After graduating in 2006, he began his artistic work.

Hardcastle founded Missing Head Limited, and on 13 July 2006 started a YouTube channel with the Dead Corps series of videos. His popularity increased in 2011, when T is for Toilet was selected to be in the film The ABCs of Death. He has worked with many companies including Momentum Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Adult Swim, and has also worked with notable artists such as Sufjan Stevens.

At first, he worked with action figures instead of clay. He also combined stop-motion with live-action in the 2014 video Game Boy: The Movie. Usually, he uses clay for his works.

In 2014, he published the project Spook Train in the crowdfunding portal Kickstarter. It was declared “the first claysploitation movie in the world”. He did not reach his objective of £40,000 and left the project temporarily, until changing his mind later and coming back to it. The first chapter of the film was released on YouTube in September, 2018.