Visitors to Theatre Santa Fe's fourth annual haunted house fundraiser got an eerie greeting Friday and Saturday night.
"Welcome to the nightmare," announced the club's adviser, Gregg Jones, wearing white face paint and waving a purple plastic baton.
The house, themed "Fear Injection: Nightmare on 83rd Street," took place in Santa Fe Community College's Black Box Theater.
Between 8 p.m. and midnight both nights, a total of 323 people came to wind through the maze, trailed by Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Bloody Mary and other horrific characters.
The house raised about ,1,100, Jones said, and cost about ,500.
Theatre Santa Fe members will vote on what to do with the remaining ,600, which will probably be used to buy new equipment or fund workshops, Jones said.
Jones said the difference between this haunted house and others was the talent of the drama students involved.
"I think that's the difference, because [others] are just standing there in great costumes going 'Boo,'" he said. "But these students have been onstage and are used to acting, and they get totally into it."
Theater students also contributed with lighting and stage-makeup skills. Some of them know how to make "really convincing-looking wounds," he said.
Cacie McKnight, a Theatre Santa Fe member who collected money at the door, said that she was most impressed by how actors stayed in character and never laughed.
"I know the people in there because I helped," she said, "and I thought they did an amazing job."
Around every corner of the maze, about 20 characters dripping with blood screamed and leered while ominous music played in the background.
Some eerily rocked back and forth on rocking horses, while others sat in front of plates of dismembered body parts with forks and knives.
Radha Selvester came with her 9-year-old daughter, Sita, and her friends to see her son Nash perform in the house.
"It was really, really well done, and the kids were terrified," Radha Selvester said.
Sita's friend Naomi Glaser, 11, agreed.
"I was traumatized," she said.
Jones said that when small children go through the house, he says the code words "fairy-tale light" over his microphone, and the actors know to tone down the show.
The students who acted in the house were also the ones who built it.
Jones said the group spent Thursday night and Friday putting up walls and setting up the house. He estimated it would take five hours to dismantle.
Each year, the house gets a little better, Jones said.
"It builds on itself," he said. "We learn from the previous year."
