Organisers of a nightclub event have issued an apology after promoting a serial killer-themed Halloween party - featuring pictures of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy on a poster. The event, which was due to be held at Rock City, was announced on the Crisis student night Instagram page.
The post was then swiftly deleted after receiving backlash from students. Crisis took to Instagram to issue a public apology on October 10, and disabled the comments to the post.
It reads: "On Friday evening we released our Halloween event with a Serial Killers' theme. After consideration, we realise this was an upsetting and triggering concept.
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"We would like to unreservedly apologise to anyone we have offended or caused distress to. In response to your feedback we changed the theme in less than 16 hours of its release. The event will proceed, but it is now simply a general Halloween theme."
Crisis is known for being the University of Nottingham's official student night at Rock City on Wednesdays. However, the initial promotional poster for the Halloween event featured mugshots of infamous killers Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Rose West, John Wayne Gacy and Richard Ramirez and was uploaded on Crisis' Instagram page on Friday night (October 7). But it was met with swift backlash, with critics saying it glorified the infamous criminals.
In the statement from Crisis, the event organisers made clear neither Rock City nor the university's students' union were involved in choosing the theme. One Nottingham student, who said she worked for Crisis, wrote an open letter in which she said she was "in complete disbelief" an event "would encourage the behaviour to dress up as such controversial 'costumes'".
"Knowing that I am seen as a 'rep' for this club I immediately called my manager to voice my concern about this and to make him aware of how students were going to feel about this when they saw it. But they took the opposite opinion that these were just 'Halloween costumes', not thinking about the wider effect it'll have in their audience.
"The Jeffrey Dahmer series on Netflix was released very recently in September. With this being so close to Halloween, there has been an uproar on Twitter of people begging others NOT to dress up as him for Halloween, in an attempt to try and stop the glorification of Dahmer."
Despite the backlash, tickets for the event - which started at £7.40 and went up to £9.70 - are already sold out. An update of the event has now been published on Crisis' website, which reads: "We have updated our theme for this event to a generic Halloween theme.
"We wish to apologise to anyone who was offended by the previous theme. Tickets will go on sale for the second time at 4pm on 10.10.22. There will be approximately 1,200 tickets in this release. We will not be releasing paper tickets for this event." Rock City declined to comment.
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