Skip to Main Content
Online news & entertainment magazine at UT Austin

BurntXOrange

Online news & entertainment magazine at UT Austin

BurntXOrange

Online news & entertainment magazine at UT Austin

BurntXOrange

exc-5485da7de4b08063c0382a1a

Mortuary Science Student, Makeup Artist Finds Beauty in Death

October 26, 2014

Imagine a house with rooms full of squids, snakes and frogs floating in odd-shaped bottles. One room has a six-foot-tall rack of tarantulas, a tank full of beetles or an industrial-sized box of lizard corpses, bones or tortoise shells. Horror movie posters from the 1980s cover the walls. Masks of zombies, mummies, aliens and other monsters watch you with an eerie life-likeness. Behind the house, skeletons of boars, rabbits and goats lay decomposing in rows like an unearthed animal graveyard. To some, this may sound like the lab of a mad scientist, or a scene from the creepy intro sequence of the FX television show “American Horror Story: Murder House.” A nightmare. To Emma Campbell, however, it’s the dream art studio.