SCARYPURA: What Really Scares Singaporeans?

Forget Dracula. Forget Frankenstein. What really scares Singaporeans?

A $13 plate of cai png? A two million-dollar HDB flat? A message from HR? A scammer pretending to be your best friend? Your child’s exams? Medical bills? AI taking your job? Or the annual return of the haze?

SCARYPURA Halloween Event

This Halloween, the Wilkie Arts Collective at the historic enclave of 11 Upper Wilkie Road is inviting Singaporeans to confront their fears – and have some fun with them – at SCARYPURA: What Really Scares Singaporeans? a frighteningly funny family-friendly (and FREE TO ATTEND!) arts experience on Halloween: Saturday, 31 October 2026.

Rather than simply watching a Halloween show, visitors are invited to make things, draw things, watch things, tell stories, dress up, wander through artists’ studios – and eventually become part of the spectacle themselves.

The Wilkie Arts Collective comprises:

The Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI) – featuring ITI artists-in-residence Afiszan Amat and James Anthony Carino
The artists of 11 Upper Wilkie Road: Juliet Wee; Sheena Bharathan; Zhang Qiao / ArchPlate Studio; Jolin Nai; Tan Sock Fong; Sunar Sugiyou; Adi Yadoni.
The Private Museum
With The Substation

The experience begins at 11am, as 11 Upper Wilkie Road’s resident artists open their studios for art encounters and hands-on activities ranging from printmaking and fluid art to glass charms, drawing and face painting.

At 3pm, ITI Director of Advancement (and also filmmaker, satirist and bestselling cartoonist) Colin Goh presents The Scariest Costume in the World!, a storytelling and cartoon workshop where children dream up horrors from their own imaginations.

At 4.30pm, SCARYPURA journeys into Singapore’s own horror heritage with a screening of the 1958 Cathay-Keris classic Sumpah Pontianak, directed by B.N. Rao and presented in collaboration with the Asian Film Archive’s Maria Menado retrospective.

SCARYPURA Halloween

Then at 6pm, the audience becomes the show: THE NIGHTMARE PARADE – presented by theatre conservatory the Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI) – invites visitors to gather at the atmospheric front porch of The Private Museum to join a procession of home-grown horrors, including creatures inspired by some of contemporary Singapore’s most persistent anxieties.

Visitors are encouraged to arrive dressed not simply as ghosts and vampires, but as something that really scares Singaporeans.

Cost of living. The housing market. Your child’s tuition bill. Retrenchment. Scams. Tiger mums. Haze. The more Singaporean the nightmare, the better. COME AS WHAT SCARES YOU.

From 6:30pm to 7:30pm, ITI artists in residence Afiszan Amat and James Anthony Carino present their work-in-progress, Subject: Anomalous Biological Entity, a participatory experience inviting audiences to interact with an unknown creature.

And from 7:30pm to 9pm, The Substation presents SCAREDY CATS ANONYMOUS! – an invitation to gather around a metaphorical campfire with fellow scaredy-cats to share, swap and listen to stories about spooky encounters in the arts.

The monsters finally go home at 9pm. Hopefully.

Two old branches of the same family tree meet again

SCARYPURA also marks a particularly meaningful first: the first collaboration between ITI and The Substation.

The two organisations share intertwined histories through Singapore Cultural Medallion winners Kuo Pao Kun and T. Sasitharan (“Sasi”). Kuo founded The Substation in 1990 as Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts centre. A decade later, Kuo and Sasi founded the institution that would become ITI, building an actor-training programme around encounters between cultures, traditions and ways of seeing the world.

Sasi himself subsequently served as The Substation’s Artistic Director before becoming the founding Director of ITI.

SCARYPURA therefore brings together two institutions descended, in different ways, from the same restless belief: that interesting things happen when artists, disciplines, cultures – and audiences – collide.

Said The Substation General Manager Denise Dolendo, “We’re really looking forward to working with our ‘cultural cousin’ – and on such a fun event too!”

SCARYPURA – WHAT REALLY SCARES SINGAPOREANS?

📅 Saturday, 31 October 2026
🕙 11am – 9pm
📍 11 Upper Wilkie Road, Singapore
🏷 FREE to attend

Featuring: Intercultural Theatre Institute, The Private Museum, The Substation, Asian Film Archive and the resident artists of 11 Upper Wilkie Road

For more information, visit here.

Come dressed as what really scares Singaporeans.

Halloween 2026

Halloween is on 31 October and is creeping up fast. We have compiled a list of Halloween parties in Singapore just for you!

It is the year-end November & December holidays. We have compiled a list of November-December School Holidays 2026 Activities for Kids. Click on the image below to find out more.