The South of Market parking lot of the Hypnodrome is splattered with multiple pools of blood at 1 p.m. on a Monday. “You can see we did blood bags this morning,” says Russell Blackwood, camp director of Creepshow Camp, a two-week day camp program now in its tenth year of teaching horror and sci-fi performance skills to Bay Area youngsters. The Hypnodrome’s Creepshow Camp is where adorable tweens learn horror-show things like creepy monster make-up, sleight-of-hand, and stage combat from local theatrical notables like Leigh Crow.

Creepshow Camp is not an overnight camp, because that would just be tempting fate, piranhas, and Jason Voorhees a little too brazenly. Instead, it’s a day camp where the tykes are coached in the dark arts of horror performance and learn public speaking skills like memorizing scripts, enunciation, body language and improvisation. Camp is currently in session, but there are two more Creepshow Camp sessions with slots still available in late July and early August. The camp is the winner of SF Weekly’s Best of San Francisco Award as the Best Camp to Send Your Little Monsters (whose web page is accompanied with some not-so-well-targeted sidebar advertising).

The above-referenced “blood bags“ are one stage trick the kids learn, utilizing sandwich bags packed with fake blood and tied up tight so the blood “splurts” properly when broken. “I prefer to use real blood instead of blood bags, because authenticity,” says 14-year-old Creepshow Camp attendee Winston Louton. He is kidding, but he has learned to deliver that line like someone who’s been cast in a ‘teenage Hannibal Lecter’ prequel.

The kids get to learn proper horror make-up, costuming and how to fire up a fog machine. They also learn the theatrical techniques to create the illusions of gouging eyeballs with screwdrivers and smashing skulls with hammers. The finished product of these kids’ creepy camping will be Science, a whimsical musical tale of a homicide spree that plays this Friday at 2 p.m. at the Hypnodrome. “We don’t pull punches. It’ll be the goriest kids play you’ll ever see,” says the show’s (grown-up) writer and director Andy Wenger.

I hate to be that monster who posts spoilers online, but the finale of the show is the “Swamp Thing” musical number seen in the video below. “We made up new lyrics to it based on the story that the kids came up with,” said Leigh Crow, who’s just taught the kids how to block the number. “That was a fun first couple-day project, now we’ve moved into actually visualizing it.”

Creepshow Camp concludes its current session with a 2 p.m. public performance Friday afternoon at the Hypnodrome. Registration is still available for the next 2-week sessions, July 20-31 and August 3-14, also at the Hypnodrome.

Image: Joe Kukura