Reasons to use chicken wire as opposed to other techniques:
 1. Lightweight - easy to move your dummy around
 2. Poseable - you can bend arms to pose your figure, unlike a dummy stuffed with towels or paper
 3. Quick.  Once you have done this, you can put one together in 45 minutes or less.  I know some people get great results by wrapping people up in duct tape and cutting the tape off of them to make a dummy out of, but that seems like it would take forever and be pretty expensive.

   OK, so to start you'll need materials and tools.

I recommend chicken wire (sold as "poultry netting" usually) with the ONE inch mesh.  Two inch will work but because the wire is so loosely spaced, I find that it makes a much "weaker" figure that bends too easily when you don't want it to!
Good pair of wire cutters.  Don't go with a small wimpy set of cutters.  Get a good sized, strong pair so you can cut through the chicken wire like butter.
Protective gloves.  You won't be able to wear them for the more detailed work, but you can wear them most of the time and there are few things as painful as a "cut end" of chicken wire poking into your finger.

  OK, now to measure and cut.  I generally use myself as a measuring tool!  Unroll a length of your chicken wire (most rolls are three feet wide) that is long enough so that if you wrapped it around your torso, it would fit you snugly.  This will be.... you guessed it, the torso!  Cut it away from the roll, and using the loose ends where you cut it off, wrap them around the wire on the opposite side.  This, by the way, is the major construction technique:  using the clipped ends of the wire where you cut it to attach the wire to make various tube shaped body parts.   I'll call this "knitting" the pieces together.  You now have a large "tube shape" piece for the torso.  If you want your figure super sized, like I did for my werewolf, cut the piece bigger than a normal human would be.  If you want the figure to have a
powerful, V-shaped upper body, overlap the ends of the piece when you connect them so that it will narrow down toward the waist.  Finally, knit the torso tube together at the top, forming "shoulders" for the figure.  This is where the neck will attach later.

  Ok, let's move on to arms and legs:  unroll another length of wire and hold it up against your other arm so that it starts at your shoulder, then cut it where it reaches your fingers.  Now cut it in half down the middle.  This gives you two long, equal pieces that are arms' length.  Again bring the cut ends over and "knit" them together with the opposite side to form arm length tubes.  You now have the two arms.

  Do the legs the same way, by rolling out a length that will stretch from your hip to the floor.  Add an extra foot at the end if you want to have a chicken wire "foot" at the end to push into shoes, monster feet, of whatever your dummy will have at the bottom.  Now form a tube again and knit the two sides together as before.  Note:  I don't recommend cutting the three foot wide roll of wire in half to make the legs, the way we did with the arms.  They will end up too skinny and may be too weak for the dummy to stand up on.  Just cut it so that it's as big around as a large human leg, or, you can overlap it until its the right size around, but this may make it harder to knit together.  Your choice.

  Now attach the arms and legs.  Use the loose wires at the top of the leg pieces (or cut the wire to create loose ends, if need be) and attach them to the bottom wire of the torso piece.  I will often cut about an eight inch slit at the top of the leg pieces too, so that I can position the slits to the inside and knit them together to form a crotch on the figure.  This adds quite a bit of strength since the legs are now joined together AND joined to the torso.

  For the arms, you need to cut one end of your arms tubes at about a 45 degree angle, starting about six inches from the end.  This will allow your arms to lie "flat" against the side of the body as they should.  It looks like this:

x
x x
x  x
x   x
x    x
x    x
x    x
x    x
x    x
x    x
xxxx

 Put that angled side against the side of your torso, at  the shoulder, and knit it to the torso.  The arms will be positioned naturally against the torso sides.

  All we have left is the head.  I like to make the head and neck a one piece unit, for strength.  Roll out a length of wire that will be a little smaller than a normal head when you form a tube out of it.  You want it a little smaller because if it's too large you'll have trouble putting your dummy's rubber mask "head" on over it.  Now go ahead and knit the piece into a tube.  This tube should be no taller than a head and neck put together - about 12 or 13 inches.  Now take your cutters and cut a "T" from the bottom of the tube up, about four inches high.  Like this:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
x                       x
x                       x
x                       x
x                       x
x                       x
x                       x
x     xxxxxxx      x
x          x            x
x          x            x
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  Take the two sides on either side of the cut, overlap them till you have a tube about as big around as a neck, and knit them together.  The area under the chin will be open... that's OK.  Now knit the top closed  to form the top of the head.  Knit the whole thing in place at the top of the torso and your body is complete!

    Dressing your dummy.  Lightweight clothing is better although your figure should be able to handle most anything.  It's OK to bend the arms if you have to to get arms in them because you can pull out any serious crumples by feeling through the cloth.  Be careful NOT to put any serious bends in the legs or torso though because the strength in these figures come from the tube shaped of the parts.  If you put  a serious "dent" in the torso or legs you'll find the dummy may bend or flop over where the dent is, due to the weight of the clothing, mask, etc.  You will probably find that when dressing them, the clothes will get caught a lot on the pointy little ends of the chicken wire sticking out, so just be patient and work the clothes onto the body without bending the legs or torso.

  The arms can be posed almost any way you want and will stay that way.  You can slip gloves or monster hands over the "nub" ends of the arms (wiring them on will make sure they stay there), and as I said before if you allowed extra length for "feet" on the legs you can use shoes, latex monster feet, etc.  For my werewolf, I hand made the hairy "overshoes" that just covered the tops of the chicken wire feet.
  To stand these up, it depends where you are putting them.  They will easily stand alone if the figure has something to lean on (a wall, a fence) and they will easily sit in chairs, benches etc.   If you sit them, that is one time it is OK to bend the body and legs, and they'll look very real cause they won't "slump" like a stuffed dummy.  Just realize that you probably won't get that dummy to ever stand again once it is "bent". If you want one to be free-standing, there are a couple of tricks you can use.  Get a wooden post (like a broom handle with no broom head on it).  Pound it into the ground where you want your guy to stand , then slip the broom handle up one of the figures pant legs.  Then figure out how to arrange the shoe or boot so that it's in front of the broom handle.  You can also build a platform to put them on.  Both my Reaper and werewolf were on those big circular wooden discs you can get at Home Depot, with supporting wooden 1x1's to hold up the figure.  In fact when I crouched the werewolf, this became a must (can't bend the chicken wire in the legs too much, remember?) in order to hold him in that leaning forward position.