Woolfe Street Playhouse next week will become a Halloween haunted house that celebrates (and twists) the building’s history into a labyrinth of scares and fun for all ages.
Holy City Halloween director Lawson Roberts said this is the first time in 26 years that a haunted house attraction will open its doors on the peninsula, marking a return to old-fashioned Halloween fun that he says has been missing in the Holy City.
“For the first time in history, we have everyone who used to compete against each other all on one team this year,” he said. “Everyone believes in what’s going on here.”
Slaughterhouse days
The team behind the terror worked the building’s history into the scares.
“The building used to be an old slaughterhouse back in the day,” Roberts said. “So we wanted to take that storyline and play off of it. What would happen if tainted meat made it through here and got distributed out into Charleston and not only killed everyone, but made them into the undead?”
The building also spent time as a brothel, which Roberts and the team were more than happy to work into the new seasonal attraction. It created a spooky sex dungeon complete with torturous witches. Scary actors portray horrific butchers and decaying zombies haunt the halls of the hand-crafted haunt that ranges from circus-themed rooms to a meat freezer to a graveyard.
Behind the scenes
At the center of the story is Monsieur Pate Prosciutto and his brothers, mutated pig butchers who relish in the gore of the former slaughterhouse. According to the house’s story line, Prosciutto moved to Charleston from France for the shrimp and grits, Roberts explained, but he stayed for the scares.
“We’ve made that pig famous,” he added. “He’s been on a Lime bike riding down Rainbow Row. He’s been at the College of Charleston. We just had him at Home Team BBQ on Sullivan’s Island, and we have a video of him walking in and just shaking his head.
“We also partnered with Taylor Ann Green from Southern Charm, and we recreated a scene out of The Notebook where Monsieur Prosciutto asks her to marry him right in front of the marquee of the American Theater.”
While visitors may be too busy inside being scared to appreciate the work that went into the haunt, the creative team is thrilled with how it turned out.
“It really just all fell together,” said technical director Thomas Smith. “Finding the right parts and making about 10 different trips to the store, going up and down the aisles. There’s some parts of old scooters, lots of gears and motors and funky things that went into making it work.”
And that’s just one element of the haunt.
“The simple effects and letting people’s minds fill in the blanks is the most effective thing for a haunted house,” Smith said. “There’s probably 120 light fixtures in there, but none of them are over 2% on brightness. Everything is really lightly accented, very dark and mysterious.”
Permeating the whole haunt is a variety of scented fogs, the most notable of which was designed to smell just like — well — dead people.
“Who knew they made that scent? But they sure do,” Roberts said.
Fun for kids, too
A key focus for the event planners was to make sure families had a fun — and not too scary — place to take their kids for Halloween without needing to venture off the peninsula.
“A lot of my friends have kids, and they all say there’s not a thing for them all to do for Halloween except for maybe a pumpkin patch or corn maze way outside of town,” he said. “So I thought, why don’t we take this story … and water it down and make it fun. The mutated pigs become the three little pigs, the brothel turns into the Hocus Pocus witches.”
All the family fun takes place from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., but 30 minutes later, when it starts to get dark, everything changes.
“We wanted to do something that’s both family-friendly and kid-safe during the day, but also gory as f*** later,” Roberts said.”
Tickets are on sale now at holycityhalloween.com for $25. Special VIP passes are available for $100 and include one-hour access to a special loft section that will offer heavy hors d’oeuvres and an open bar as well as an opportunity to skip the line and head straight into the haunt. Find more information on Instagram @holycityhalloween.
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