A monstrous double feature put on by the graduate students of the University of Wyoming English Department served as a fundraiser for a spring conference.
The spring academic conference, “The Brain is Wilder than the Sky” is scheduled for March 27 to 29,2015. This is the first large scale fundraising effort of the year for the graduate students.
“We are very early with our fundraising since the conference is not until March and this is the first large scale event we have had besides donations. We are planning on doing many community nights at local restaurants possibly a book sale and another screening,” said second year graduate student Jay Gentry. “It is Halloween, so horror films sounded great and we wanted to do the night of the living dead and have an original vampire movie.”
The first movie of the night was the 1968 movie “Night of the Living Dead”. In that film people barricade themselves in a rural house in order to survive the night from a horde of zombies. The second movie of the double feature was the 1922 silent movie “Nosferatu,” an adaption of “Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”
“I thought the first movie was delightful and the second movie was also very fun, but it was different for my brain to handle because it was silent,” said Junior Meghan Neville. “It definitely had its charm, though.”
Not only were there screening of classic horror films, but a costume contest and raffle as well. Audience members dressed up as colonel Sanders, zombies, and even Edgar Allen Poe. As well as prizes being donated by various businesses around Laramie for the raffle and winners of the individual and group costume contests.
“The costume contest was really amusing. The costumes were really well done. There were some goofy ones flat out and I think overall the choices for best costumes were quite accurate,” said Neville. “I think the audience made the right decisions.”
