For hard-core Zombiephiles, watching gory gobs of the oughta-be-dead-that-aren’t is big stuff.

Kevin Wasner, a special makeup and prosthetic artist on AMC’s show “The Walking Dead,” delivers on the big-time grossout — chopped, axed, dismembered, decapitated or just bumbling along in that good-old zombie way, pick your undead.

Wasner, an Auburn native and a 1991 Auburn High School graduate, does it so well he recently won an Emmy for prosthetic makeup on the hit show.

“An out-of-body experience, a very surreal night,” Wasner said of the awards ceremony, by phone from Atlanta, where “The Walking Dead” is in production. Wasner didn’t even know he’d been nominated until a month before the ceremony.

“We flew from Atlanta to Los Angeles for the weekend, got all dressed up, the red carpet and all that,” Wasner said of the six-person makeup crew. “We didn’t really expect to win. All my friends were on competing shows, and we were up against ‘Glee’ and ‘Grays’ Anatomy’ and other well-known shows.

“A lot of times these things are popularity contests, and those shows are quite popular, so we were like, ‘OK, let’s go there, have some drinks, have fun.’ But we won. And it was fantastic.”

Wasner described his family’s reaction.

“I think my sister, Jean, tripped out when I called her. She said, ‘I knew you’d win,'” Wasner recalled with a laugh.

In the “Walking Dead,” a killer virus transmitted by zombie bite or scratch has upended the human world, because no one stays decently dead for long. And when the dead arise, they are filled with a terrible hunger for living flesh.Making it real under the terrific time pressures of television challenges even the greatest makeup guys.

“First, we get a script, and then we get a daily schedule of what we’ve got coming for the week,” Wasner said. “I’m used to working on films, so this is a stretch for me. With television a lot of times we don’t even get the script until a few days before we’re shooting, so it’s quick, go, go go.

“First we build gags, that is anything that requires more than makeup, like arms ripping off, people biting, gun wounds, things like that,” he added. “We have no time at all, so that’s been the biggest learning curve for us. We get up in the morning, we prep for that for a week, anywhere from one zombie to 50 zombies. At one point we had more than 250 zombies. We bring in some local makeup artists to help us out. It’s just turning out zombies, sitting them in the chair, slinging on makeup and kicking them out the door.”

It’s only going to get busier. In the first season the crew shot six episodes, but it will film 13 for the new season.

It began in Auburn

The road to the Emmy for Wasner began when he was growing up in Auburn, with parents Earl and Gerry and big sisters Jean, Patrice and Laura. He was a little kid dazzled by the special makeup effects he’d seen in films like “Star Wars.” When he watched those films, he said, he knew just what he wanted to do with his life, so he started making up his own effects, building his own creations.

“I was doing makeup effects at Auburn High School as a hobby, and I had a really awesome art teacher there, Mr. Carson. He really encouraged me to do what I did,” Wasner said. “I visited him a few years after I’d just started getting into this business and showed him a little portfolio, and he was really excited. He said, ‘You’ve gotta do it, man. You’ve gotta follow your dream.'”

Wasner followed his dream. After graduation from high school, he started working a series of dead-end jobs, still determined, however, to do makeup effects, still practicing. For his first paying job he cranked out monsters for a haunted house in San Jose, Calif.

“The job sounded cool, but it was enough that I built my portfolio,” Wasner said. “I just started throwing my photos everywhere to all these effects houses in Los Angeles. Finally, I got a phone call, and my very first gig was working on a music video for the band Tool. My first feature film I think was ‘Armageddon’ or ‘Fight Club,’ one of those. It’s not always violence or zombies. I did that movie, ‘Dolphin Tale,’ that’s coming out soon, and we made a full, animatronic dolphin, so I puppeteered on that. Sometimes it’s horror movies, sometimes it’s kids’ movies. I did body makeup on ‘Passion of the Christ.’

“It’s a job. At the beginning you get star struck with the actors, but that’s gone, and I feel very comfortable in my shoes,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like a job because we’re playing all the time.”