Inspired by his youthful adventures, “The Dare” is about a group of boys who dare one another to go inside a haunted house and leave some sort of proof they had each been there for the others to find. One boy, however, doesn’t return until 20 years later.
DURANT, Okla. – As a boy, Mark D. Williams and his friends dared each other to go inside “haunted” houses, leaving behind objects as proof they had been there. As an adult, he’s still visiting ghosts - only now, he shows the evidence to everybody.
The Oklahoma City filmmaker screened two of his documentaries recently in Durant. A guest of the Choctaw Nation, Williams showed “Native American Paranormal Project: Wheelock Academy” and premiered his latest endeavor, “Native American Paranormal Project: Fort Washita,” Oct. 26 to an audience at the Donald R. Williams Library Theater.
As always, Williams, Choctaw, is a little anxious before the show. He never knows how his ghost hunting documentaries – or any of his work, for that matter – will be received. The last thing he wants is to be or appear disrespectful.
“When I do things, the paranormal documentaries, I do get asked this a lot: What does my dad think, him being a pastor and everything,” Williams said. “But he’s been very supportive of what I do. He actually likes it. He’s coming to the premiere tonight.”
Whether he’s filming at an abandoned Indian hospital, on the set of his next original thriller or at a school for his children’s comedy series, Williams has his family’s backing and the audiences’ full approval. He won best feature awards for his 2012 scare flick “The Unrest” at the Mvskoke Film Festival in Okmulgee and at the Red Fork Native American Film Festival in Tulsa. In 2012, his boy-hero tale “The Adventures of Josie the Frybread Kid” won audience favorite at the Red Fork festival. It’s impressive considering Williams didn’t study film at university (he has a degree in finance) and only began serious filmmaking in 2005.
Olin and Bernice Williams raised their five children in Bennington, a town 20 miles east of Durant where Williams and his siblings spent most of his childhood. Olin Williams is the pastor at the town’s Cornerstone Baptist Church. Mark, too, spent a lot of time in church.
“I was always into doing something creative to make people laugh or get some kind of emotion. I always was into projects,” he said.
He wrote stories and made comic books and, for a time, made a family newspaper filled with articles of the stray dog that showed up that morning, what happened at school and what was for dinner that night. His parents didn’t allow him to watch movies with cursing, violence and gore, all the ingredients of a campy horror flick, but occasionally a VHS copy of something-of-the-living-dead would wind up in his hands and he would sneak a chance to watch it.
“I might get in trouble now if my mom and dad read this,” he said, laughing.
Williams also remembers hearing ghost stories told by elders at family gatherings. He liked the stories and he liked to watch the listeners react to the turn of events and sounds. Spurring boyhood imagination, those stories stayed with him, even when his dream of becoming a NBA superstar didn’t materialize.
After high school, Williams went to a community college in Standing Pine, Miss., on the Mississippi Choctaw Indian Reservation (where his father is from) before transferring to Bacone College in Muskogee. He finished his degree at Oklahoma City University and worked in banking for a few years. Then, he found film.
In 2004, he started writing a book that he hoped would become a film someday. At a friend’s suggestion, he turned the project into a screenplay. “Closure” was written as horror film, and he submitted it to a screenwriting contest. Several months later, he was a finalist. Although he didn’t win, he was encouraged to do more. One Indian taco sale later, Williams had a video camera and a film called “The Dare,” a short thriller he finished in 2005. Filmed at his home and other locations in Oklahoma City, the film starred his brother, Nathan Williams, and other people he knew. It took two days to shoot.
“I didn’t know anything about directing. It was kind of a learning process for me, but it was fun,” he said.
Inspired by his youthful adventures, “The Dare” is about a group of boys who dare one another to go inside a haunted house and leave some sort of proof they had each been there for the others to find. One boy, however, doesn’t return until 20 years later. Williams concentrated a story ideal for a feature-length film into 20 minutes. When he showed it to his friends and family, they loved it. Soon, the Red Fork Native American Film Festival at Tulsa Community College called. “The Dare” was shown there in 2006. It was the first time he’d ever shown his creativity to a broad audience, and the audience liked it.
“It was amazing. I didn’t know what to really think. It was, again, my first film, my first movie. Putting it together, it was never my intent to show it to anybody, really,” he said.
That pushed Williams to write and direct even more under the moniker of Native Boy Productions. Several more short suspense movies followed before he switched gears and started work on “The Adventures of Josie the Frybread Kid,” a series set in the 1980s about a Choctaw boy who believes he gets super powers from eating his grandma’s frybread, which fortifies him to ward off bullies.
Once more, he was drawn into the supernatural and began the Native American Paranormal Project, a team of nine from various tribes that would go to supposedly haunted locations and document mysterious phenomena. They’ve explored buildings and cemeteries all around Oklahoma, and Williams has turned some of the footage into documentaries. They explored sites in Concho, northwest of Oklahoma City and headquarters of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. Then others turned the camera to Choctaw Country at the Wheelock Academy and Fort Washita.
Wheelock Academy was a missionary school for Choctaw girls that began in 1832. By the time it closed in 1955, it had seen thousands of children come through its doors. Stories of students abused and even murdered at the hands of instructors had accumulated over the years and the grounds are said to be haunted with their spirits. Fort Washita, located more than 100 miles west of Wheelock near present-day Durant, was constructed in 1842 by the United States to keep peace between the Choctaw and Chickasaw people (who had just been relocated to the territory) and the tribes native to the region. It, too, is said to be haunted by ghostly soldiers and Indians. Both locations are on the National Register of Historic Places.
Ghost hunters find sites with a history of volatility are prime locations for paranormal activity. They go in usually at night with cameras outfitted in night vision, digital audio recorders, atmospheric gauges and open minds to document what they find (unexplained noises, shadows, lights, aberrations) or don’t (as is sometimes the case).
It’s all storytelling.
“That’s one of the things I’m really digging about documentary filmmaking right now - is telling the story using other people’s words, using their interviews to tell the story, using their stories to tell my story,” Williams said.
And his story is about telling the tale of those who are now gone.
“The Unrest,” his 2012 feature film, is about an Indian boarding school. The story is fictional but based on reported disappearances of children at several boarding schools in the 1800s and early 1900s. In the film, the ghosts of five children appear for a reckoning. “The Unrest” also marked a turn in Williams’ film work.
“’The Unrest,’ I think, is the one that kind of took me to another level,” he said.
It is his first film in which he auditioned actors and cast for roles instead of using family and friends. It’s also the first in which he put together a crew of technicians and artists. Originally intended as another short film, “The Unrest” grew to about an hour in length, which was enough to categorize it as a feature film in the festivals.
“It (the film) was me taking on new challenges, trying to learn more about the craft of directing, learning how to communicate with a movie crew and actors … That was a huge learning process for me,” he said.
And Williams hopes to take the craft even further as he continues his work, which includes another short about a haunted house and another paranormal investigative documentary.
As for the screenings in Durant, they sold out with mostly elders in the audience, many of whom later came by to shake his hand and thank Williams for telling their Choctaw stories.
He sums it up with one word: “Awesome.”
– Native American Paranormal Project Presents "Grisso Mansion," December 13th 8pm-11pm, at the Dream Theater in Tahlequah Oklahoma
A poster for Mark D. Williams' film "The Unrest"