Stuffed documentary: Maybe taxidermy isn’t such a dead industry after all

The trailer for Stuffed, a taxidermy documentary.

AUSTIN, Texas—Growing up in a suburb of a suburb in Pennsylvania, my hometown's main street looked like you might expect: funeral home, gas station/convenient mart, VFW pub... and a taxidermy office. (Back then, the state even gave public schools a day off at the start of deer-hunting season.) As someone more interested in playing text-based adventure games afterhours on my dad's work computer, I never saw the inside of that last communal institution. But I had a pretty crude mental image based on context clues: antlers lining the walls, camouflage outerwear tossed over a chair, pickup truck parked out back with dead animals in the bed.Ars at SXSW 2019

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Hosting its world premiere this week at South by Southwest, the new documentary Stuffed has come to fix this exact kind of misconception. 'You get anything from, 'You do taxes?' to 'That's really creepy.'' That's how one profiled taxidermist describes people's reactions when he tells them what he does. (It's easy to see why another taxidermist has rebranded as a '3D-animal preservationist.') 'Some folks will lie and say it's not creepy, but in the back of their mind, they think you're Ted Bundy.'
The reality, of course, has little to do with any kind of fascination with death or killing. If Stuffed's ~85-minute ride is to be believed, modern taxidermy is as much if not more about art and nature preservation as it is about dead animals.
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