Walking down a street in downtown Allegan, you might suddenly come up on a nightmare. There – a young woman with a horrible, bloody gash across her left cheek, blood pouring from the wound, her teeth protruding through her flesh. Don’t call 9-1-1. It’s just Emma Cook, a theater makeup artist heading to a stage on the other side of town, ready for the part.
“I’ve always been, from my very early childhood, a massive fan of horror movies,” Cook says. “I loved the movies that looked real. The ones with the real, physical, scary monsters and real blood and guts in them.”
Cook says she started working as a hair stylist years after working in theater. She had started doing theater makeup during high school.
“I figured it would give me some good brownie points if I had a license to do makeup,” she says. “And, of course, hair goes hand in hand with that, so now I do both. Halloween is a very busy season for me in the makeup room.”
Occasionally offering workshops to teach others how to apply theater makeup, especially in the horror genre, Cook recalls a lesson given to a girl scout troop.
“One of the [girl scouts] plotted a very specific scheme to have a gash on her forehead and then call her mom and pretend that she fell,” Cook laughs. “I’ve never seen a child so committed to the bit. When her mother walked into that room, that girl threw herself on the floor … it was fun. That made me a little nervous, but other than that, it was fun. I didn’t get into trouble. The mother was a very good sport about it.”
Cook is currently at work with a theater group in Allegan, Michigan, in preparation for a film. The group has been working on the film for six years and have now submitted it to several film festivals. The film shows a scene with an explosion, and Cook went to work creating realistic injuries. Between takes, she is back at Hairworks 404 in downtown Allegan, cutting hair.
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