Blood on Her Hands

This Halloween, as you’re planning your super-scary costume, your awesomely believable horror film series or your performance art piece about how the high cost of living literally bleeds New Yorkers dry, there is really only one gal you need to call to give the project an extra-gory oomph. Meet Stephanie Cox-Williams.

A respected “Jane of all trades” in the indie theater community, Cox-Williams has worked with companies such as Vampire Cowboys, Nosedive Productions and most recently as the prop designer for Boomerang Theater’s repertory productions of Endless Summer Nights, Uncle Vanya and Venus Observed. But her niche is designing stage horror effects—on a tight schedule and an even tighter budget.

Stephanie started dabbling in blood for the stage in 2006; Nosedive Productions had just launched its Halloween Blood Brothers series, and needed an effects person stat. So Cox-Williams, a lifelong fan of gore in film, volunteered to give it a try. In the past, Cox- Williams had only designed basic props for Nosedive’s productions, and had dabbled in prop design during college. So in order to dive head-first into designing blood effects, she studied horror movies whose DVDs included special features on how the blood effects were made, and pored over books that illustrated the Guignol style as a jumping-off point. While the blood effects she first created were fairly simple—using strategically placed “squibs” (mini blood bags) to make slashing and stabbing believable—she soon discovered that she wanted to keep experimenting to see how far she could go in creating realistic gore. Since then, she’s been working with tubes, paint, blood recipes, skin recipes and fake body parts to add to her list of stage effects, which already includes live eye slashing and throat cutting, severed blood-squirting penises and edible decapitated heads.

Sure, creating an eye gouge or limb decapitation is fun, but designing these special effects for the stage is definitely not easy. As a designer for stage effects as opposed to film, Brooklyn-based Cox- Williams comes up against challenges that an effects designer for film doesn’t necessarily face. “It’s all about consistency,” she says. “When designing effects for the stage, it’s important that the effect work at every performance, and more importantly, that it work the exact same way each time.

“With film, you can design effects that are a little more involved,” Cox-Williams admits, “but onstage, effects need to be efficient and easy to clean up.”

Every designer has a specialty, and Cox- Williams’ is blood. But as simple as that may sound, it can be tricky when it comes to believability and achieving the desired reaction. In the history of homemade movies, gross-out costumes and scare tactics used to terrify younger siblings, materials used to make blood have varied in color, consistency and even taste—ketchup, food coloring, cherry juice—but there’s an art to believable blood. When creating it, Cox-Williams says it’s about making the fake blood thick and sticky enough (Karo syrup usually works) and the right dye colors—a precise combination of reds, browns and yellows. As for the blood in action on stage, how it leaves the victim will determine whether the killing is comedic or chilling. Last year, Cox-Williams designed a severed penis for a vignette in Nosedive’s The Blood Brothers Present: The New Guignol, in which a man has his member sliced. The tube containing the blood went from the pump (operated by a “doctor” onstage) to inside the fake penis, so when the pump was squeezed, blood squirted out. The audience squealed with delight. “Aside of the fact it was coming out of a penis, the laugh was because the blood was spurting,” Cox-Williams asserts. “I’ve found that when blood spurts, squirts or flies around anywhere, it’s funny. But when it slowly trickles down, that’s when blood is bone-chilling.”

Over the years, Cox-Williams has successfully designed a variety of effects, but her dream is to design a believable live decapitation. (She’s halfway there as she’s already designed a head, and for extra yuck she made it edible.) But as far as she is concerned, the sky is the limit when it comes to creating effective live blood and guts, and there is nothing that can’t be accomplished with a bag of blood, some strategically placed tubes, a wild and vivid imagination, and a nagging thirst for making an audience squirm in their seats. Cox-Williams has all of these attributes, and she’s not afraid to use them—whether it’s to make you scream in the moment at the theater, or to ensure you have nightmares for weeks to come.