As a first-year student last fall, I was clueless on how to spend Halloween night amid a city full of activities ranging from haunted houses to comedy shows. Partly because I had class the following morning, I ended up watching my friends doll up for the night, then stalking their cute pictures on my newsfeed. Here are a few guidelines and friendly tips on how to spice up your Halloween night (unless you want to end up at home alone watching Netflix and stuffing your face with candy).

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.