It's 3 p.m. on a beautiful fall Wednesday and five teenage girls sit in the dark. Some rushed to get here as soon as school let out at 2:45 p.m., ready to buckle down for nearly nine straight hours.
As familiar and haunting minor-key music fills the room, two more girls hurry in, late.
They are here for Carmike Cinemas' Harry Potter marathon leading up to today's 12:01 a.m. premiere of the beginning of the end: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1."
The theater at Broadway at the Beach offered all six previous Potter films (three on Wednesday and three on Thursday), plus a ticket to "Deathly Hallows" for $25, and though there weren't many takers Wednesday, Thursday's crowd numbered in the hundreds - pretty good considering all the movies have been out on DVD for some time now.
Theater managers opened the doors to all the movie houses Thursday night, with room for 1,700 Potter fans to see the first of the two-part movie series final films on one of the 16 screens, and said they planned for staff to dress in character for the big Harry Potter weekend.
"I grew up with these books," said Julie Gorcesky, 17, of Myrtle Beach, who attended the movie marathon from the beginning. She and her three friends at Wednesday's shows count themselves as huge Potter fans.
They cannot estimate how many times they have seen the films, but Gorcesky said she saw movies 2-6 at each one's midnight premiere. They came to the marathon to relive the magic of the old films and get even more psyched up for the new one.
"It's going to be amazing," she said of "Deathly Hallows."
Gorcesky and her friends said they had avoided reading about the new film - no clips or trailers, either, said Mikyla Pieterse, 17, a movie-mate who hasn't read all the books or even seen the sixth movie yet.
"She hasn't seen the most important one," Gorcesky said of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," in which Harry's mentor, and seemingly the only wizard who can really save him, dies.
She said she attended the marathon to catch up before the seventh and eighth films.
These are the kids author J.K. Rowling was aiming at - kids who would read the series and age with the characters, able to handle more and darker drama as Potter's magical world becomes ever more dangerous.
Hundreds of reviewers, psychologists, college students, pop-culturalists and fundamentalist Christians have written thousands of pages about Harry Potter and his fantastical world where dragons exist and students learn how to make potions, cast spells and charms and battle evil.
They've analyzed, theorized, romanticized and demonized the tales that grew out of Rowling's fertile imagination, made enjoyable for adults because of Rowling's penchants for consistency and authentic detail down to the Latin-based names for spells or the mention of real 14th century alchemist Nicholas Flamel.
But what it all comes down to for fans is this: The stories are fun to read, and it's fun to see this magical world come to life on the big screen.
As Gorcesky, Pieterse and their movie buddies said, who wouldn't want to go to school in a castle and use magic to do chores, zip around on a broomstick, or go from one place to another in an instant by apparating?
But there's also something more serious about the Potter stories. Rowling wrote a world where love is prized above all, but love always comes at a price. The more you love, the more you have to lose, and Harry must deal with his destiny while losing nearly everyone who is important to him.
And as these kids have watched Harry and his friends Hermione and Ron grow up, they've been watching themselves grow up, too, familiar with the themes in Harry's world - teenage crushes, fear, feelings of inadequacy, the struggle to know what the right thing is and the sometimes-greater struggle to do it.
"We all have trials and tribulations, and magic is a great escape," Pieterse said.
Gorcesky, who planned to take her Harry Potter blanket with her for Thursday night's four-film, 12-hour extravaganza in case she wanted to nap for a bit, said for her, there's one big attraction to all of this.
"I love Harry Potter," she said. "He's my childhood."
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