♪ < opening music > ♪ ♪ < creepy atmospheric sound > Hello, I'm Beryl Dakers.

Welcome to Palmetto Scene.

We're here at the Hall of Horrors in Cayce, South Carolina to explore the freaks, geeks and all the things that go bump into night.

First, the spooks come out at night on Halloween, and people fill the streets donning their most terrifying and creative costumes.

Sean Krumbholz with Redhouse Ethics is not only a prop maker and scenic designer, but also a makeup effects specialist for film and television.

He knows what it takes to make the creepy even creepier.

And the horror even more horrifying, especially this time of year.

♪ <Sean> Halloween is my favorite holiday, pretty much because it brings all the key people together.

They're my tribe.

I got inspired to work in the film industry when I learned that you could do makeup effects.

So I watched monster movies since age of five and wasn't quite sure how those came to fruition on screen.

I discovered a Lon Chaney book in my school library and that kind of showed what Lon Chaney had done to transform himself time and time again.

And I realized that was a job after I had watched the first Nightmare on Elm Street, which was really my launching point to wanting to do this.

<< one, two, Freddy's coming for you >> Through many years, I'd always wanted one of those gloves.

Mark Patton travels country to comic cons and film festivals and so do I, and we were having dinner one night.

He's like, Hey, Sean, I think Tessie was messing with my glove.

I got to the hotel and pull out a suitcase and half the fingers were off the glove.

I don't know what to do about it.

I need it for tomorrow.

Can you fix it?

I was pretty bowled over but I put on my poker face.

I said, yeah, I can fix that.

And I was able to make patterns off that original legendary artifact and then start replicating it screen accurate.

♪ < organ music> ♪ Hey, Jimmy, you know what spurts my veins?

What's that?

When people invest all that money in their costumes and makeup, and then they put that terrible Halloween store blood on?

Right?

Yeah, it's horrible.

Yep, so we're gonna do something really cool.

We're gonna show you how to make some amazing kitchen blood.

And for that, we're gonna need 16 ounces of dark Karo syrup, McCormick brand assorted food coloring, and then 100% Pure cocoa.

Yes, the first thing we're gonna do, we're gonna throw half of the 16 ounce bottle of Karo syrup in this cup.

And you do want to get the dark kind, that's important.

That looks good.

And to tint this, we're gonna use one full container of this assorted McCormick's food coloring.

It doesn't come out quickly, so just be patient.

Give that a stir.

So you could actually stop here.

But this isn't going to be any better than that Halloween store blood.

So if you look at this, let me tilt this cup here a little bit so you can see this.

It's really transparent.

And if that's what you're going for, you can use that but we want to take a step further.

We're going to add just under half of this yellow.

So real blood, when it smears, it's got like an orange tone to it.

Holloween blood typically just turns pink and it doesn't look very realistic at all.

And this will give us kind of an orangey tone, which looks a little more realistic more arterial than your Halloween store brand blood.

So you can already see that that's starting to look different.

And to give it a little grimy kind of grunge you want to use one drop of the green.

This definitely is a little bit darker.

But, you'll note it's really transparent.

But now we have kind of that orange smear going on, that we didn't have before.

That's good.

Now we need to combat that transparency.

And to do that, we're gonna use the cocoa.

Alright.

We don't need a lot of it.

Got this spoon here.

Gonna use just a little bit.

Pop that in there.

And typically you actually want to put the cocoa powder in first, but I wanted to illustrate a point to you.

And that's that transparency versus the semiopacity.

And be sure when you're doing this to scrape the sides, the cup and everything to make sure you get all that cocoa in there.

That definitely looks a lot more opaque.

Now we can, see this run down the side of the cup, and you can clearly see that this looks a lot more realistic now.

Got some good, good color going on there, a good tone.

And If you wet it, you can see a nice orange smear that's got that looks really good.

That looks like arterial blood to me.

But that's our kitchen blood recipe.

< eerie sound > The horror scene is pretty strong in South Carolina.

There's an amazing independent film community here.

You have people like Tommy Faircloth with Horse Creek Productions.

<< I want your soul >> Eternal Ground Films, John Johnson, with Flesher.

And then you have several other people in the community that make a ton of horror short films.

Charleston, South Carolina is home to one of the bigger horror film festivals in the country, Crimson Screen Film Festival.

And as of late, you know, Hollywood has taken a shine to Charleston and other areas in South Carolina.

So they've brought the Halloween franchise here.

Most challenging makeup was probably on Whistler's Mother.

When it came time to apply the appliance design for it, the actress thought that she might be allergic to the adhesive that we're gonna use.

So, had to go back to the drawing board in the middle of production and redesign the whole thing in 2-D, and then apply that and the production loved it.

In this industry, you do have to be able to adapt.

I think for myself to keep current with new looks and techniques.

I'm constantly learning from other artists.

I'm pulling inspiration from many different places, whether it be books, YouTube videos.

YouTube is an amazing resource.

Instagram as well.

There's some really cool stuff out there.

♪ < dramatic music > ♪ Being that Halloween is my favorite day of the year, we just made some really cool blood.

I wanna show you how to put it on makeup and dress it up and make it pop.

What I have here are some body transfer appliances.

You can actually buy these in Halloween store.

These are much better than the latex things.

You peel the backing off here.

All right.

I'll put this on my lovely model.

Place one here.

Now I need to remove the backing from this.

So I got some rubbing alcohol and a sponge.

All right, now go ahead and remove the backing from this appliance, fully saturate this paper so it separates from that sticky appliance.

It's a lot like fake tattoos.

There's one.

Alright, let's put on the second bite.

This one right here.

Peel this guy off.

Let's go ahead and put the second bite on.

Same as before.

Some rubbing alcohol and saturate the sponge.

Take the backing off.

Now we need to dress it with some blood.

Alright, so I'm gonna do is put a little in the hole and just start painting it on.

And there you have it.

Vampire bite.

So when somebody is interested in breaking in business, have a body of work of something you're passionate about.

It doesn't have to be a lot.

Just a couple things that you can showcase and look for your local union.

You know, IATSE is an amazing place to start.

Call 'em and see if you can come on as an apprentice or work with somebody and get your foot in the door.

<Beryl> Speaking of dressing up, cosplay is the art of dressing up like fictional characters, often characters from anime.

It's a hobby that requires passion, time and skill as cosplayers often spent hours designing and creating their costumes.

The preparation starts with researching the most minute character details.

South Carolina cosplayers showed off their costumes and skills at the 2021 Banzaicon just a few weeks ago.

let's take a look.

♪ < synthwave music > ♪ ♪ So we're here at 2021 Banzaicon here in the video game room.

The energy is great, everyone's really positive.

When I heard about Banzaicon, I think it was like maybe three years ago I came and checked it out for the first time and just loved the atmosphere and all the people that came here and I love to dress up as you can see.

So I was like this is a perfect time to get back into it.

♪ My cosplay is Kohaku from Dr. Stone.

This is my katana, aka the Blade of Science and I'm very proud of it.

It took about three days to make.

I painted it with metallic paints, and I gave it blue because I thought it would look kind of cool.

♪ And it can go in and out of this sheath or whatever it's called right here.

Both the shield and the katana are made of E.B.A.

foam.

I heated it up with a heat gun shaped it, sanded it and then painted.

My wig is actually two different wigs.

They're kind of fastened together.

So the inside of this is made out of insulation foam.

And then I airbrushed it so have a bit of a radiance.

♪ <Marcus> Another great aspects here at the con is they have a cosplay repair station.

So if you come in and you have patches falling off, or any of your pieces are broken, you can go and they've got super glue and E6000.

They can sew.

I got a lot of superglue on my hands, So they gave me some nail polish remover, so shout out to them.

♪ A lot of these people spent, I mean months and months in preparation for their outfits and building different attachments.

And if it's a passion, you know, you can really take the time to create your costumes and, you know, do color contacts and makeup and dye your hair and things like that.

♪ We've done a couple of presentations this weekend.

But the one we just got finished with was called cosplay materials and where to find them.

We basically talked through our process of how we find the objects that go into our costumes, because we use a lot of found materials, and a lot of things that aren't necessarily, how you would envision them working.

So we've used everything from like googly eyes to metal water bottles that people have donated to Goodwill.

We used the water bottles to make air tanks for an Attack on Titan costume.

We kind of come up with these ideas, and we sort of will all go to the thrift store, and we'll all be individually flipping through, you know three or four of us.

So we do a lot of sustainable cosplay, where we use a lot of a lot of things over and over again, and do a lot of what we call variant costumes.

So that, it's sort of an original design on it.

So sometimes I'll take pieces and I'll like sew new things on them.

I'll take them apart, reassemble them to kind of make it my own sort of thing because I love costume design.

So that's one thing that cosplay really does for me.

It lets me put my own spin on the characters.

So it lets me express myself not just as the characters but also like my sense of style and my sense of creative costume designing.

♪ Just a little bit ago, I saw someone in like a full, like armor suit.

It's a character from a game called Overwatch called Reinhardt.

Anyone who makes their own weapons I think that's so cool.

And it is not easy.

♪ It was really fun doing it with my dad.

We started playing the game together for a while.

And then he got connect to the characters and we figured it'd be fun to go ahead and make a cosplay out of it.

And so we just started making it and now we're here.

It took us about two months to make the cosplay.

We started out with the boots with a wooden structure and then started adding on the different E.B.A.

foams with heat guns to like mold it to where it needed to be.

And then we worked up to the chest plate.

It's made from football pads at the beginning and then we added on more foam and hands or hockey gloves and we painted over them and then the shield is from a different kind of shield and we cut it out of it and we sand down the edges and we painted over to look like the character's outfit.

He's going to be on stage at six o'clock.

<Marcus> The cosplay contest is later.

We're doing a performance at it actually.

A dance performance.

We're really excited.

<Cam> I've only entered around like, I want to say three or four cosplay contests, but I'm really excited to see how this one turns out.

♪ << All systems go!

>> ♪ < cheers > ♪ <Beryl> The South is full of old stories from the past; old traditions and beliefs.

For example, ghosts from the deep south in the Sea Islands were often called haints.

Local filmmaker Jason Gourdine explored this topic in his latest work which spotlighted this Gullah ghosts ♪ < dramatic music > ♪ I've been a historian for at least 25 years.

I've been interested in history ever since I was a child and listening to the elders tell stories.

As for the tales of haints and ghosts and such in the Lowcountry area, the area is full of them.

Right now we are by the statue of Denmark Vesey, a man who tried to unsuccessfully to lead the African Americans in Charleston area to fight for their freedom literally in the slave rebellion of 1822.

But unfortunately, he was caught and executed.

One of his comrades was a man known as Gullah Jack Pritchard.

Gullah Jack was what was known as a conjurer or sorcerer, if you will, who used the people's beliefs and ghosts and spirits, to encourage them to join Denmark Vesey's unsuccessful revolution.

And he would use that belief to get African Americans who still believed in such things to join his revolt by saying that these haints and spirits would attack them, if they didn't join his revolution.

Gullah Jack came from the Angola tribe of people.

The Golas, the Angolas and the Dongolas were very, very powerful spiritually.

And they were very, very independent.

So they did not really like to be captured.

Most of the people when it was that time to testify against Gullah Jack refused to testify.

They were willing to die physically, than actually cause harm to this man, because they know in the spiritual realm, he was just as powerful as he is on a physical realm.

Beyond Gullah culture, and beyond African Americans, you know, folks who may be southern or native whites, talk about ghost stories.

I mean, throughout Charleston today, you can take a ghost tour.

But I think there's a uniqueness when you bring in the word "haint," or "haunt" because of the Africanism.

That's there.

That's the central part that we want folks to understand.

That's a part of our culture, and part of our legacy.

As we came across on slave ships, that tradition, that knowledge that experienced that know how that connectivity also came.

<Ma'at> I don't really use the word "haint."

I use the word "hag" because it really, I think connects a lot deeper with the African spiritual world when it comes down to that.

When you talk about haint, you're just like, explaining them benevolent energy.

Okay.

But when you talk about a hag, now you actually personify that energy.

<Damon> Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner, who was the first African American who studied Gullah culture seriously, he recorded a number of ghost stories and haint stories from his informants.

He recorded a story from Mary Smalls of nearby John's Island, who said that a haint tried to attack her on several occasions, and the haint changed into a cat and a bird, as well as a cow, I believe, and by making different noises.

<Ma'at> It can shape shift, it can actually shed its skin, it can attach itself to a different person, it can be a person, <Michael> Gullah culture and language.

There's a variation, whether you on James Island, whether you in Mount Pleasant, whether you in Georgetown, whether you're in St. Helena, or whether you on Daufuskie or Sapelo, all part of the Gullah Geechee corridor from Wilmington, North Carolina, to St. Augustine, Florida.

But the bottom line, the tradition, the experience and the knowledge is one.

The way the word may be pronounced may be different depending on where you are, but the experience is the same.

<Ma'at> If you're in your room, and you're laying down in your bed, and it's pitch black, dark, and your mind is at ease, there's a very possibility that you can feel breath on your face.

And a lot of times your eyes go black.

So you actually don't see that energy, you can only feel that weight shifting on your bed.

At that point, then your body becomes paralyzed.

You can move your eyes, you can open them, you can't quite clearly see, you can breathe, but your chest gets weighted on.

You are blacked out with this energy on you.

But a lot of times, if there is nothing that actually interrupt this energy, then you will be a different person after your session with the hag.

So you have to be aware of all the negative energies that are around you and the people that are around you because it can be in any shape, form or fashion.

I think my storytelling comes from just knowing the real story of real people.

And I think that's where a lot of my passion is at, is telling real stories about real people.

I'm a full time filmmaker.

I started my company around 2012.

With haint, I really lay deep into some of the stories that really affected me as a child.

And that was that boo hag, man.

They used to tell us little stories growing up about the hag riding you at night.

And man, that'll freak me out.

And that was as a kid.

And as a grown up, like it still kind of bothers me.

So that's one of those things when you write, you want to write what you know.

You want to write what you understand, like what what can you write that's going to be come across most authentic because you lived it.

You can't get so caught up in just the scares.

You have to have a good story.

You can't rely on just your jumpscares and the little flickering of the lights and your music score.

Like, you have to have a story that's going to stick with the audience, because that's the only way that the fear is going to stick with them.

If they can see themselves in that predicament of, oh crap, that could be me.

So it's all about really sucking your audience in.

Letting them know you're watching this movie, but you're the potential victim.

And at the same time, giving the rules and the world where they can see themselves like having a real authentic horror experience.

The folks that raised you, they're not young anymore.

Like they're getting older.

Like we don't want to lose those stories.

We don't want to lose that culture.

So I felt like our generation needs to be more responsible for continuing the culture and keeping those stories going.

<Damon> I remember walking by a graveyard one day, and there was a gentleman named Joe Blunks, who had recently died.

So I was about 10 at the time, and I pointed to the grave, and I said, Hey, look, that's Joe Blunk's grave.

And my cousin said, "Bite your finger!

Bite your finger."

And I said, Why?

Because if you point at somebody's grave, the ghost is gonna make your finger rot off.

And I thought it was silly, but my dad always told me that when my relatives said such things to just be quiet and go along with them.

So I bit my finger and kept moving.

<Ma'at> I ask for the positive energies.

<Michael> It's important today in this conversation that we're having, that we respect this and not see it as some type of folklore or some type of fiction, or something that's make believe.

This is in the experience of Gullah Geechee people, that they believe in, that they firmly believe in, and probably some things about our culture and our landscape we may not always talk about publicly, by us being open and honest.

25 years ago, probably we wouldn't have this conversation, because we were not in a place in space where we were celebrating or making public the awareness of this knowledge.

And so even in this conversation, I hope those who listen and see it can have education, awareness and understanding.

♪ <Beryl> For more stories about our state and more details on both stories you've just seen, do visit our website at palmettoscene.org And of course don't forget to follow us on social media, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @scetv#palmettoscene For all of us here at Palmetto Scene and ETV, I'm Beryl Dakers.

Good night and thanks for watching.

♪ < creepy closing music > ♪ ♪