Written by Zoe Vedova, Peak Associate

It’s Thursday evening — October 31. While all your friends are smearing on eyeshadow from garish palettes they’ve saved since middle school and ripping open miniature Kit Kats with their teeth as they pre-game on straight vodka, you’re shuffling alone through the AQ after your 9:20 p.m. lecture. Fog has already suffocated the mountain when you receive a TransLink update: severe weather will prevent busses from driving up Burnaby Mountain. 

You have become trapped on campus on Halloween because TransLink has inconveniently left you for dead. It is now up to you to celebrate and survive the night by yourself. But where do you head first? 

PART I: Trick or Treat-ment 

If you wish to engage in North America’s only acceptable form of communism, trick-or-treating, try the psychology department. There are usually a few psych majors holed up at night psycho-analyzing each other as a form of flirting. All it takes is a knock on their department door to find out whether they have any candy left after being stingy at Clubs Day. 

But be warned: the Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists has no power after dark. If you get lured into a quick test, you could be battling more emotional demons than you anticipated. But you will get $2. 

PART II: Communications labyrinth 

Do you wish you could manufacture the nail-biting paranoia of a haunted corn maze in the comfort of indoors? Since you’re already stuck on campus, your next step should be to check out the bottom floor of the communications department. After twisting and turning under low cement ceilings, you’re sure to feel that you’re being chased down by a killer, eerily beckoning you to your death with the promise of an easily accessible advising appointment. 

PART III: Evil Minimart 

Closing out the festivities, your night slinking around SFU will inevitably lead you to face the ghost children of the AQ and the vicious ghouls in West Mall. But you’re not going to be able to fight the spectres crying out haunted curses or the wraiths shrieking about destroying civilization if you’re only armed with a dried-out highlighter. Evil Minimart, operating as the Maggie Benston portal to Hell, has your back. 

In the depths of the convenience shop, find potions (expired Gatorade), weapons (mechanical pencils that double as switchblades), and ornate, demonic scrolls filled with supernatural-slaying incantations (all the Latin phrases pulled from the Criminal Justice Code). It might be a shock when it turns out the creepy ghost children were just a few lost first years, and the ghouls were business students at a networking seminar. That, honestly, is even worse.

FIN: The Final Girl ™

It’s Friday morning — November 1. 

Bleary-eyed, you collapse ragged and traumatized onto the deceptively, torturously hard bench across from Images Theatre. You’ve beaten the business students and escaped the first years. You are the Final Girl. And, oh god . . . good luck on that 8:30 a.m. midterm of yours.