The senior drama class at Rossland Secondary put on the annual Fright Night Tuesday. The senior class includes grades 8 -12.
Tickets for the show were bought in advance and guests show up at their allotted time, and are then toured through a maze, with stops for scenes of horror, including zombies, satanic rituals and screaming mental patients.
Drama teacher Lisa Henderson said the Fright Night goes back a long time. The drama classes took it over completely in 2009, before that it was run by the Parent Advisory Council.
“It used to be attached to the kid’s carnival and PAC used to run it,” Henderson explained. “They used to charge a dollar. There were no time slots and people would line up and be stuck in this hallway for an hour waiting to go through.
“We’ve been doing it on our own since 2009 but helping to do it for years before that, possibly ten or 15 years.”
She said when they first began over 10 years ago, it was called the haunted house.
“All you did was went in one end of the home economics lab, went through some tunnels and then went out,” she said. “Then I got involved and it took awhile for people to learn that it wasn’t something to drop your three year old off at.”
Henderson said a lot of work went into the display and the complete makeover of the auditorium.
“It’s a lot of hours, a lot of duct tape and a lot of staples that go into that,” she said. “My husband doesn’t even recognize me anymore.”
They usually have 10-15 scenes every year acted out by a class of anywhere from 22 to 30 students.
Profits from the event go towards paying the cost of all that duct tape and makeup that was used - not to mention the fake blood.
“We had a few hundred dollars of staples, tape and blood, lots of blood was used,” she said. “Other money gets put aside for our scholarships and some will help kids get to the New York trip.”