Catching Up With ... Mike Hatgistavrou, East Hampton Class Of 2007

Life is about discovering passion and embracing risks. It is about traveling and chasing dreams. And sometimes it’s about zombifying the kind townspeople of Jasper, Alabama, for a Syfy reality show.At least for art director and Springs native Mike Hatgistavrou it is.

“If you grew up on the East End, make sure you leave it for some reason for an extended period of time, whether for school or a job in a different city. It’s always good to get out and experience some other part of the world,” Mr. Hatgistavrou said from his home in Brooklyn. “It just so happened that Jasper is just like Springs, where everybody knows everybody.”

The 25-year-old’s earliest memories are rooted in the tight-knit East Hampton community, where he embraced film at a young age, whether he was seated in front of a movie theater screen or perusing the aisles of Springs Video & Hardware—which has since replaced its wide film selection with paints and tools.

There was one film that stood out from the rest: “Home Alone,” a circa-1990 classic Christmas comedy starring Macaulay Culkin as clever Kevin McCallister, who finds himself mistakenly excluded from a family vacation and left behind to fend off two burglars by rigging a series of booby traps.

“It was always in the VCR,” he recalled. “I’ve always been interested in gadgets. I wondered, ‘How do they do this? Somebody’s setting this stuff up. How does it go down?’ That’s what got me interested in props.”

In 2007, Mr. Hatgistavrou left the East End for Drexel University in Philadelphia, where he studied film and made connections that led him to his first major gig seven years later, as one half of the two-man art department for “Town of the Living Dead.”

And he wasn’t exactly qualified—having never applied zombie makeup before.

“It was a pretty crazy experience, a very eventful summer, I can tell you that,” he said. “This was actually something I was thrown into, without knowing what the professional standards are and not having the resources that professional makeup artists have. We got our stuff from Party City and CVS and the grocery store, and we just went in.”

The Syfy network reality show centered on a modest film crew struggling to complete its own independent zombie movie, “Thr33 Days Dead”—already six years in the making. At this point, the whole town was involved, Mr. Hatgistavrou explained, and spotting a zombie roaming the streets was commonplace.

“It was pretty much, ‘Make these people look like crazy zombies,’ which, fortunately, makeup can be pretty sloppy for stuff like that,” he said. “It’s something you can wing. It was fun. I got to do something I had never done and, at the end of the day, it ended up not looking so bad.”

Even though “Town of the Living Dead” wasn’t renewed for a second season, Mr. Hatgistavrou isn’t complaining. He’s happiest when working on props in a studio, at a much calmer pace.

“These days, I’m looking to do more studio-scripted work, somewhere that has a shop to make props in, instead of going wild with reality,” he said. “I’d like to sit in my shop and work on the items I’d like to work on, and just turn those out.”

As for moving back to his hometown, “maybe I would someday,” he said. “I love where I grew up. It’s like no other place in the world.”

For more information about Mike Hatgistavrou, visit mikehatgis.com.