July 27, 2026
Beauty school, but make it morbid
A Dying Art: The last of the morticians
Inside the eerie contest to rebuild the dead — and commenters got very emotional very fast
TLDR: A feature on the fading craft of morticians spotlighted a contest where funeral workers repaired lifelike damaged heads for open-casket training. Commenters swung between calling the subject beautiful and simply "grim," turning the reaction into a tiny but sharp debate over dignity versus discomfort.
This story already sounds like something cooked up by Hollywood: a Chicago contest where funeral workers had just hours to transform damaged fake heads into faces fit for an open-casket goodbye. But the real gut punch wasn’t the spooky silicone props or the horror-movie backstory — it was the human side. At the center is Anthony Saldivar, a veteran turned mortician who went from war zones and reading Fangoria to what he calls protecting the dead. That alone gave the piece serious movie-script energy, and the tiny comment section instantly split into two moods: deeply moved and completely rattled.
One commenter cut through the gloom by pointing readers to the Japanese film Departures, calling it a beautiful take on this same work. That turned the conversation from “ew, creepy” to “actually, this is intimate, skilled, and kind,” giving the article a softer, almost poetic afterglow. But another commenter went the opposite direction with a brutally short reaction: “grim read.” And honestly? That became the thread’s accidental punchline. Two comments, two vibes: one says this profession is a quiet art full of dignity, the other says absolutely not, please remove this from my brain.
That’s the drama here: is restorative mortuary work a noble disappearing craft, or just too haunting for polite conversation? The crowd seems fascinated either way — half reverent, half shivering, and fully unable to look away.
Key Points
- •Eight contestants competed in the inaugural Restorative Art Technical Showcase at the National Funeral Directors Association convention in Chicago.
- •The competition required participants to reconstruct severely damaged silicone practice heads within three hours spread over two afternoons.
- •The training heads were supplied by Post Mortem Restorative Cosmetics, founded by former Hollywood special-effects technician Dean Jones.
- •The article focuses on Anthony Saldivar, a 50-year-old mortician and Army veteran with service in Afghanistan and Iraq.
- •Saldivar's path into mortuary work included inspiration from Fangoria, training in special effects in Los Angeles, and later mortuary-sciences study in Texas.