Linda Hayes isn’t sure what she likes best about the Fright Night fundraiser she and her colleagues at Two Rivers Wildlife Park mount every Halloween in the lonely, wooded outpost of Huntington, N.S. Earning enough money to feed the animals that keeps the tiny Cape Breton community from becoming just another cartographic afterthought, or scaring the pants off the customers.
“I made a man throw up once,” she reminisces. “It was my proudest moment.”
If you press her, though, she’ll have to go with the money. “We’ve got cougars, lynx, bobcat, wolves, emu, some barn animals,” says the park’s special events co-ordinator, a former accountant, about the 200-hectare non-profit that’s home to 50 species of native and non-native animals it’s rescued over the years. “Food costs at least $100,000 a year. How else are we going to pay for it?”
It’s a good question, and one that community advocates around the Atlantic region are asking more often these days. In an era when governments are strapped, and a head of lettuce costs $9, how do you now pay for the things that keep towns and cities alive and well, or even distinctive and alluring? How do you keep the real monsters — austerity, inflation — from eating all of their lunches?
Fortunately, Hayes, who has been in charge of the past few annual Fright Nights, which launched in 2001, says her paying audience just keeps growing apace with the rising cost of everything else related to the park, Huntington’s sole civic dynamo, which employs seven people, full time, year-round.
“We can charge about $18 per person on a Fright Night, which is actually six full nights in October,” she says. “Obviously, it’s a huge community thing, with a lot riding on it, but people even come down from Halifax for this ... Last year, I think we had 7,000 go through.”
It’s a gauntlet of ghoulish delights along a winding, 1.4-kilometre trail through the woods. Each year, a different theme — vampires, pirates, clowns, twisted fairies, ghostly fishermen — assault the senses, thanks to about 100 volunteers who build the sets and play the parts.
“People go through in groups of about 20 or 25,” Hayes says. “The first building is a maze. It’s terrifying, pitch black ... We have the Vortex, which is a spinning tube and it disorients you completely — you get dizzy and fall over ... There’s (bodies) hanging where you don’t expect to see them. We have cabins featuring different things, like a slaughterhouse. We have a bus with one character dropping down through the roof ... You come out and meet everything you’ve ever been afraid of.”
On the other hand, she says, “we also have a family day when we don’t dress up scary but (wear) cute, family-friendly costumes. All the kids come and walk through and go trick-or-treating ... Otherwise, this whole thing is extremely frightening. It’s not something I would recommend for anybody under 14.”
That said, she winks, “People are happy to be scared ... And I love scaring them.”
Bill Lamey approves. He’s the professional engineer-cum-volunteer promoter of what has become one of the signature annual fundraisers in New Brunswick’s capital city. Freddy Fright Fest aids a growing slate of local non-profits, including Fredericton Arts and Learning, Charlotte Street Arts Centre, and the Fredericton Hospice. As the need has grown, so too has the money the event generates. “We raise well over $30,000 a year,” he says. “It’s very popular.”
When he and his fellow organizers lost their set walls in a fire in June, the community rallied on their behalf. “Somebody lit it all up,” he recalls. “It wasn’t a huge loss, maybe $2,000 to $4,000 worth of materials, and we could recover from it. But that was money that could have gone into somebody’s hands, so I set up a GoFundMe to replace it... It turned out, I didn’t need to do that, because different organizations said they’d pay.”
Despite the real life Nightmare on Elm Street, Lamey expects this year’s Fright Fest — which has operated under the auspices of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of New Brunswick since 2008 — to be every bit as gripping as previous outings, even more. The Paramedics Association of New Brunswick is back for a third year to help stage the week-long tour de force of terror tours. “We’ll probably grow to 35, from 20, official stations,” he says. “We now have what I would call, a very good high-scare quotient.”
In recent years, there’s been an Evil Chop Shop, a Haunted Nuclear Reactor, and a zombie run. Extra-terrestrials flipping light switches and Clowns from Space waving laser pointers have messed with visitors’ minds. Face-painted dolls brandishing broken teacups have transformed smirking dads into trembling mounds of jelly. Through it all, there’s been Lamey, who is a customer relationship manager at NB Power, running around like a happily mad scientist.
“I generally use a lot of controls and pneumatics and stuff and make a lot of things happen,” he says. “I once had a cheap piece of roofing sheet metal on the top of this thing. And I had a chain on it and every time it moved, you’d think hell was coming at you. I also had a lot of buzzers going off ... All these groups come in and participate, and we supply the money for them to build whatever.”
Once Lamey decided to switch up holidays in mid-flight. “So, we had everybody going thorough all these crazy boneyards and stuff before we got them to this cast-iron door,” he says. “They all go through and, now... it’s Christmas with all these kids and their parents opening gifts ... Then, all of a sudden, one of the gifts has a severed head in it, and a guy dressed like Santa Claus comes out and starts chasing everybody around with a chainsaw.”
In end, he says, it’s all about team-building. “I like the community aspect.”
Calla Lachance in St. John’s, N.L., feels the same way about her annual scare tactics. She’s the artistic director of Neighbourhood Dance Works. The troupe’s website notes, “We are dedicated to creating inclusive and welcoming spaces that gather together dance practitioners, audiences and supporters.”
And what says that better than a flash mob of dripping, drooling, jazz-hand-prancing zombies?
“I guess we started the zombie gram, oh I want to say, about 10 years ago,” says Lachance, who studied dance in Toronto and the United States and has performed at tree planting camp Saskatchewan, by a river in Northern Ontario, and in a forest in Massachusetts. “The idea was to get people out, get people participating in something collective, and fun,” she explains. “It was sort of the same idea as the singing telegram, except, in this case, it was dance performance that could be delivered to people’s homes or workplaces or communities.”
There was also a more practical method to the madness. “We’re a non-profit charity, this is a fundraiser for us,” she says. “We host a dance festival, artists residencies, support other community programming, all kinds of things. We’re always fundraising to diversify our revenue stream.”
Ordering a zombie gram, she says, works this way: “We have a schedule, and we map it out for the two or three days around Halloween. People have a form they can fill out with the time they want us, indicating the community we’re going to or the workplace or the personal residence. We then work with up to 40 volunteers who participate as zombies. Then, we all jump in our vehicles and car-share to the various points and perform it over and over, as many times as we get bookings.”
Typically, they perform their version of the zombie scene from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video but, she says, “we have done some choreography to other Halloween songs … Sometimes, people want one for their whole street, and the whole street gets involved … Sometimes we do it just for office parties and that can be very hilarious. We walk into these places and people are sort of stunned to see a group of zombies coming into a restaurant or a workplace or a grocery store. It has a real name for itself now. People recognize it and go, ‘Oh my gosh’ and get really excited.”