Halloween at Schools, Societies and Clubs
If you’ve read the previous article about Hall-oween of NTU through and through, the only question that prevail should be: Why should the halls get all the — I’m sure well-appreciated — very good post-event publicity for their Halloween events? The people may reside in the halls, but they live in the schools and thrive in the clubs with those of their own kind, their chosen very extended family if you will. In this article, we stalk some of these safe havens for a look into how they celebrate Halloween.
WKWSCI
Covered and Written by Vivian
In WKWSCI, the turn-up for its Halloween Event “Resident Weevil” was met with a cozy crowd as it was held amongst other Halloween celebrations around campus. Despite this, the Halloween festive atmosphere remained present with many interesting activities and spook-tacular costumes! WKWSCI’s celebrations were centred near the Level 1 benches, where performances by their in-house band, WeeJam, took place!
While enjoying WeeJam’s performances, many students visited the various booths clustered around the area, with each booth offering something unique! At the booth managed by student club WeeNails, participants could get halloween-themed designs painted on their nails! Meanwhile, at WeeVo’s tarot reading booth, students could get a tarot card reading! Additionally, participants had the chance to design their own shrink keychains at the Shrink Keychain booth!
Various game booths were also present in celebrations, and one of them was the Police Sketch game. Participants were tasked with describing halloween-themed objects or creatures to an “artist”, who would then draw based on the described features.
Of course, Halloween celebrations are designed to be scary, and to add to the scary element, WKWSCI had a haunted house, Five Nights At Fred-Wee's, where participants hunted for batteries while facing jump-scares and terrifying stalking from scare actors!
Last but not least, participants looking for a memento to take home were able to snap some pictures with their friends at the Resident Weevil photobooth!
Now, let’s talk about some amazing costumes! While many costumes caught our eye, here are two of them that stood out.
Dressed up as King Triton and Sebastian from The Little Mermaid, this duo on the right were crowned as “Best Dressed” in WKWSCI’s Halloween Costume Contest and won themselves an Exclusive Bundle from Maroon Clothing worth $115!
We also have Year 1 undergraduate student Zafyra dressed up as Jewel from Rio! Her shimmering dress and matching tudung produce a boo-ti-ful fit, while the blue feathery wings add a touch of Jewel to it! Definitely one of our favourites!
Film Society
Covered and Written by Eishani
Pearl is a scary movie. Scary Movie is not a very scary movie. And more such insightful opinions are just waiting for you once you move past this sentence to the next, for it is the 30th of October, in memoriam, which was also a Thursday, ergo Film Society horror movie night.
Halloween for film soc is a pretty big deal, or at least it should be as half the reasons any other facets of the festival can exist- the community, the trick or treat, the gore and especially the costumes- is because they leech of the worlds created by film. It could be said they both influence each other, but the horror movie genre grew to be more than just one day’s celebration a year. And that one day’s celebration by NTU’s Film Society is exactly what I will cover in the rest of this review.
This year, film soc had a lot to show and sell. They had a double screening- clearly, they do give Halloween its due credit- starting with the recent “Pearl”, a prequel to the fairly successful and well received “X” from 2022 and ending with “Scary Movie” a clever subversion of tried tropes of the horror genre. During the intermission, members could step out of the dark lecture theatre to be greeted with a display of a wide range of horror movie posters for sale that the society has made throughout the years, a real testament to its impact over the years.
One of the programmers- the ones who exercise the great power of choosing which movie the members watch each session, and thus indirectly how its choices of plot and direction, cast and crew would move you to perhaps even influence your choices (to be fair, you can choose whether to come or not)- tells me how they choose the films that night.
“A good balance of horror and enjoyment so a bigger group of people can enjoy it”
On the choices themselves and how they complement each other, the programmer, Janani, who was bloody well dressed as Jennifer from Jennifer’s Body, says
“The interesting thing about scary movie is that it's one of the first of its kind, where it's subverting the horror genre and making it something more comedic” and how it's quite notable for its release during that specific decade, which is why they choose to spotlight it.
Pearl, on the other hand, was chosen as it's an enjoyable horror movie, that has its “gore” moments but also depicts “horror of not being able to live the life that you want”. These were “two very different themes that we thought would fit.”
The response to the films was good, as was the overall turnout, with some of the members leaving after the first but some coming for the second. Rhea and Phyllis, the president and vice president, dressed as the queen of hearts and white rabbit from “Alice in wonderland” talk about how the Halloween culture has grown in film soc with almost no one coming in Phyllis’s first year to having built a community now- “which we really needed after the loss of The Projecter and Cathay”. Rhea adds how it's fairly niche to be having a cinephile party for Halloween, and “everyone’s quite excited to dress up and come.”
The exco members were one of the best dressed organising committees I’d seen this Halloween. Which makes sense, as Aisha and Eliza tell me, “It encourages regular members to also dress up” and how “its film club, we have a lot to choose from”. Very true. There was also a costume competition at the end; a few of my favourites from the line up were a duo dressed as Mickey 17 and 18, and another pair more asynchronously, but still-looked-very-cute-together, dressed as Coraline’s Other Mother and Dani, the protagonist from Midsommar.
German Society
Covered and Written by Rhea
If there’s one thing the NTU German Society knows how to do, it’s bringing cultural charm with a dash of chaos — and their Halloween Stammtisch was no exception. On the eerie night of 10th October, nearing the much-awaited day of Halloween, NTU’s German Society brought a spooky twist to the society’s Stammtisch by hosting their Halloween themed event titled “A Night Of Mystery”. This event combined classic Halloween festivities and a whole lot of exciting games and spooky stories, all in German spirit!
The night kickstarted with a series of chilling stories. It featured some exciting tales from a 19th century German children’s book, Der Struwwelpeter. These tales were known for their dark and comedic twists. Next up, it was game time! A Kahoot quiz challenged contestants on their Halloween trivia prowess. Each contestant fought tooth and nail to claim victory!
Then came Der, Die, Das, the crowd favourite game, played in authentic Squid Game style and testing contestants on their knowledge of German language. For the more chill crowd, the event hosted trivia games, and assorted boardgames.
The evening had everything needed for the ideal Halloween mix: a little scare, lots of fun, and just the right amount of German flair! With games, candy, and spine-tingling stories in between, this night was one to remember!
School of Art, Design, and Media
Covered and Written by Eishani
Sirens have a look to them, some say of untold beauty, which is a bold claim considering it must have been told a thousand times over for the myth to even exist—it is a myth though, I fear, and those can only be told true from the soul just once before the rest is mere gossip and rumour. The siren can be of false beauty luring sailors to their hungry, ugly, and inhumanly grotesque jaws, or they can be horrors to behold from the start.
It is in this dichotomy we can find the costumes of Halloween, especially from those who we can rely on to do it just right -ADM. We can change our looks to seem fiercely disturbing to the naked eye, embracing the spirit of horror, or shapeshift behind the guise of beautiful garb. Whichever we choose, however, we are different from the Sirens because we parade our charade as blatantly as can be —neither is the truest nature of the person underneath. Such is the saga of Halloween.
On the night of 29th, the stars, the sky, and the stars in the sky watched the embrace of such spectacle with the theme being "The Sea that Devours: A Siren's Descent" from the stars of ADM. (Yes, they watched the spectacle in themselves. Yes, it makes sense- moving on) The organisers are much to be thanked— as such of their kind must be regardless of success or failure for their very pursuit of success— but truly tonight, for their dedication in bringing to fruition a ambitious vision within a tight schedule. From the rest of my review, I’ll let you, dear reader, make your decision on whether it was a success. To sailors’ hell with journalistic decisive conclusions.
But, just to get my bases clear- the performances lasted an impressive one and a half hour with a lot of ADMers out supporting their friends, the decorations were creative and well executed to have once been from their storehouse of old props and the quick efforts of new ideas, and the game booths fostered bonding and the churros booth fostered the overall good vibes. At least, I should think that’s where those came from. Anyways, back to sailors’ hell.
Sirens — lest we forget in the foolish sole focus on appearances that has gripped society as of late and if The Picture of Dorian Gray is to be taken as the norm- it really really should not- as of forever—are creatures of song. The voices and instruments you heard the night of ADM’s Halloween were strikingly different than what one may expect of sirens; they rung true. The choices of songs, the singer’s voices echoing through the room-hushed from disturbance yet alive with claps— felt raw and earthly, appreciative of the art. Not to say there weren’t hauntingly serene moments as well, “Unravel”, “Strategy” and “Umihe”’s renditions, to name a three, were insane vocally.
It was possibly the main highlight of the night, but who’s to choose such an objective stance in an Art Design and Media event of all places. Suffice it to say, the people who thought so did and there were enough of such for a data science student as myself to lump them into a base categorisation- the bands were the highlight of the night.
The night was incomplete without the underlying tone to its highlight; the blue-green sea of decor was merely a backdrop to the real showcase of costumes that ADM students had to offer. That’s what they’re here for. The fourth years clearly knew this from years (=<3) of experience and wanted to graduate with a bang, for their costumes were some of best there were. Quite a good show for their last chance to win the competition, and most of them did. Start the scroll to see the struts of the winners if you please.
Stills from the fashion show
And scene.
Writer in Charge’s note-
I do not know what audacity possessed me to write half of what I have, but it did. However, the possession is over now. Halloween has ended. If any part of this two -parter article was to your liking, be sure to keep in touch- with the NTUSU U-Insight page so you can find the next one as soon as it arrives, fresh off the press of our minds if not the events we cover. Thank you beyond words for reading all of them (or any honestly) till the very end.
Eishani
