This past Saturday, over 100 zombies took over the SURC for the annual Zombie Bash event.

The main event of the night was the Zombie Zone, which was organized with help from students in the Resident Hall Association (RHA).

“The main part of the Resident Hall Association is that we want to foster leadership on campus, but we’re also putting on large scale programs that give students a chance for alcohol free nights,” Dylon Burger, senior and treasurer of the RHA, said.

At Zombie Zone, a team of four got a nerf guns, one person got a head lamp, and the teams went on missions.

“Last year we had three missions and had to turn away 300 students,” Burger said, “So this year we have 6 missions.”

One of the missions that students could choose was the zombie birthday party. During this mission, students had to battle clown zombies and a little zombie girl, who was burnt from falling into her birthday cake.

“One of the things we got feedback on last year was the clown zombie,” Burger said. “We decided to make that bigger and have an entire mission about a birthday party gone wrong.”

The planners for the Zombie Zone were able to stretch their creativity with the mission planning.

“Another mission we have is called ‘Everybody Hates Lori,’ based on Lori from the show ‘The Walking Dead,”’ Burger said.

During that mission, teams had to rescue Lori, who wouldn’t leave without her baby.

When the teams tried to leave, the baby would start crying, forcing the students to go back and forth between the locker rooms in the rec center to find an item that would get the baby to stop crying.

Another new mission this year was the refugee camp, which took place on the basketball courts in the rec center.

Joshua Tavenner, a senior theatre arts and psychology major, did the set design for the refugee camp mission.

“We borrowed items from OPR like sleeping bags and coolers to set the scene,” Tavenner said.

Tavenner and eight other theatre students, who are a part of the Central chapter of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (UITT), volunteered to help with costuming, makeup and set design.

“This is something fun that we all like to do,” Caitlin Cardinale, a senior theatre costumes design major, said.

Central’s UITT members spent a lot of time preparing for the Zombie Zone. They have been working on collecting photos since the event last year.

“A lot of preparation for four hours of work,” Rae Hengst, a senior theatre costumes design major, said.

According to Hengst, the make-up artists loved doing this event.

Many of the make-up artists photograph their work to be added to their portfolios.

“We don’t get a lot of opportunities to do zombie makeup,” Tavenner said.

The UITT students spent a lot of work making the atmosphere perfect. According to Cardinale, they searched Goodwill for sheets that they could make bloody in order to create a more believable scene.

The Zombie Zone event is so popular that students were willing to wait in line for over an hour to select their mission.

“I didn’t know how I was going to make it through,” Juliana Golding, a sophomore elementary education major, said.

Golding and her friends chose the outlast mission, where they had to survive waves of zombies coming at them.

“It was creepy to go into the gym without the weights and lights on,” Jacqueline Musser, junior business major, said.

The Zombie Bash event had more to offer students this year than in year’s past.

“We want to scare people and give them a good time,” Burger said.