There is something cool about a night out with friends at the local cinema. Occasionally, a few strangers in the theatre can add to the overall experience, for every high and low happening on screen.

Grayson Nauta, over at East Charlotte’s VisArt Video, is someone that seems to appreciate both of those sentiments. If not, their event on every second Monday each month, Ghouls Night Out, wouldn’t be such a blast from start to finish.

Using puppets that they crafted, the support of friends and local comedians for voicework, and the infinite number of B-movies available at the largest collection of viewable physical media on the East Coast, Nauta put together a movie-going venture not entirely different from Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K).

The major difference? The action is happening in-house instead of entirely on-screen, making for one of the most indie viewing experiences anyone could ask for.

“I grew up watching MST3K, which we totally did not rip off, with my dad,” Nauta told RF20XX. “And so I was like, well, we could just totally not rip that off into an event like that and call it, ’Ghoul’s Night Out’, because that’s the first name that came to my head.”

The puppetry involved, Nauta explained, had already been an interest of since before starting at VisArt, one of which the non-profit’s executive director Gina Stewart took notice of a month in to Nauta’s employment at the visual arts archive.

“I had been making puppets already, and my boss, Gina Stewart, Executive Director, mentioned them and said, ‘So when are we going to get your puppets here?,” Nauta said of the event’s origins. “It’s like, ‘I don’t know, sure,’ because I’ve just been making them in my house by myself and then just talking to them in my room, very normal like, and she asked me if I would do an event.”

Each cotton-filled member of the cast is entirely made from recycled materials, sourced mainly from Upcycle Arts, according to Nauta, which shares space in the same shopping plaza as VisArt, less than 20 feet away. “They’re mostly like couch cushions that I’ve cut into. I start with carving a head out of foam and then go from there. I never really have, like, a solid plan of action,” Nauta explained.

One of the main puppets at the event, which Nauta describes as their current magnum opus, is Uncle Skrunkle, a greenish-gray humanoid with a red fur collar.

“He is definitely the one that took the most time,” Nauta said. “I wanted to make a head shape, and I made that. And then I was like, ‘Oh, I have this fabric that is so scruffy,’ [and] I kept saying skrunkly, and so I just wanted to make him this creature that definitely smokes cigarettes. That was all I could think of him most of the time, and I just kind of winged it. It was also my first time making hands that don’t look like amorphous blobs.”

“Halfway through, I was like, he should have a big beer belly, so, I gave him a big beer belly, and then I was like, ‘Oh, he should have some sort of teeth,’ and I had this riband in my room that I just folded over and made kind of teeth. It’s very interesting. Oh my God, and he has like, little baby legs, like little turkey baby legs. They’re very chunky. I love him a lot.”

The movies themselves, ranging from the early 80’s to the 90’s, do go through a screening process before each month’s 7:30pm showtime, according to Nauta. While films today are a bit more censored when falling under the Motion Picture Association (MPA) film rating system, a few decades ago, scenes featuring nudity, gore and general violence were more uncommon under PG, PG-13 and R-ratings.

“I have my notes app in which I add movies when I think they would be a good fit, like recommendations. When I look up the recommendations, I actually check them on the parental guidance website to make sure there’s nothing too miserable to wash in them. And then I watch them,” Nauta said.

As of this past June, the event hit its first anniversary, with a massive crowd to celebrate the occasion. As of this August’s showing, the attendance doesn’t have many signs of slowing interest. Not only was every chair inside the main viewing room taken, but many attendees will utilize the outdoor chairs and tables while watching the movie via a projector screen in front of the VisArt Café, open during each month’s event.

“There’s more people, and I do enjoy that,” Nauta expressed. “It is very fun. It makes me really, really happy that people enjoy it and come out to see it because sometimes I step back and I’m like, ‘if I really did this, if I had nothing to do with it and I went to it, I would just be like, ‘Oh, my God, this is so cool. I’m so glad this exists,’ so it’s really cool to be like, ‘I did that,’ Because I would be so excited if I just happened upon this. I’d be really glad that it was something that I got to experience.”

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