I see from your gallery that you are no beginner, so your frustration must mean there is something fundamentally wrong in your scene setup that you are overlooking.

Simply put, there is no light shining on your figure. Without knowing how you have set up your scene, lights and camera we can't tell you why that is. Is the light behind a wall? Is it below the GROUND which is set to cast shadows? Is it pointing out into space? Is it turned off? (Sorry, have to ask the obvious!)

The red glow is explained by basicwiz. With the skin shader you are using this will show up even though the figure is completely unlit. But that's not the main issue here.

If you are using a single spotlight, make sure you set it to Point At your figure, at least to start with.  (EDIT: and set start and end distances to zero. If you are using P8 or PPro2010, set fall off to Constant, so it does not matter how far away the light is. You can change these later once things are under control).

Keep us posted... you'll get to the bottom of this soon!

"If I were a shadow, I know I wouldn't like to be half of what I should be."
Mr Otsuka, the old black tomcat in Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)