The lights will be dim to pitch black, the mood will linger somewhere between spooky and terrifying, and for 15 minutes you'll be on a supernatural roller coaster through the theatre of your mind. There will be special effects, props, and many actors laying on the thrills and chills but the ultimate monster in the city's biggest haunted house is you.
The Haunting On Brunswick is a commercial-scale Halloween event made for the easily frightened kid inside us all. It's a theatrical production created by an ad-hoc group of Halloween enthusiasts and it is all for charity.
There will be a significant contribution made by the haunting organizers to their chosen charity: Costumes For A Cause (C4AC), a volunteer all-local agency that provides costumes, toys and fun times for kids in medical difficulties.
"We walked through rehearsal last night. It's horrifying," said a C4AC statement.
The presale tickets for The Haunting On Brunswick flew out the door and a second round also had strong sales. The response was so overwhelming, said Haunting spokesperson Dave Leach, that the organizers nixed any plans to sell tickets at the door. If even one remains, it must be obtained via the Facebook page.
All this for a set of tours (several per night, about 15 minutes each, running from Oct. 27-31) through the defunct RCMP detachment on Brunswick Street.
"This town is obviously hungry for Halloween," said Leach.
He has the ways and the means to create such an event, as the co-owner of Excalibur Theatre Arts and also a veteran of this sort of thing. When he got the idea together with the folks of PowerUp Prince George (a charity gaming group in P.G.), they were an unstoppable Halloween force.
"I was part of a haunted house they ran at the (BC Northern) Exhibition a number of years ago," Leach said. "It was more of a narrative experience and smaller scale, but it went really well, and people told me ever since 'we should do that again, but bigger' and this year we did that."
Leach praised the City of Prince George staff for helping execute on their vision. A number of big, unused buildings were presented as options but all agreed the former RCMP detachment was ideal, with all its concrete and cells. It was also a place with which Leach was quite familiar. His father Steve was once the superintendent there.
"I was pretty old by the time my dad took over in P.G. but I definitely did spend some time in that building, I knew my way around," he said. "The whole thing is narrative. It's not a bunch of people jumping out saying boo. There's a whole immersive storytelling element to it, and that is tied to the location."
The cast is about 25 people, the crew more than 10 in number, so this is no small production.
"We haven't even done the first one yet and people are already on us to do another one next year," said Leach. "This will be our proof of concept. After we're finished we will decide what to do next year, but I think we should move it around to a different place each time, to keep the story fresh and the experience surprising for the audience."
