Covered with fake blood and hair unbrushed, senior Julian Lafayette was almost unrecognizable. He stood at the entrance to the scene shop, a prop leg in both hands. Directly across from him – a man with a chainsaw. But this wasn’t a scene in a graphic horror film, but rather a scene from the Theatre Department’s haunted house.

“The scene shop is super spooky, because I would be at the door, eating a leg, and someone else would just be laying on the floor,” Lafayette said. “They’d get up right as people walk past and then chase him out.” 

This Saturday, the Theatre Department will host their annual Haunted House fundraiser with a $5 entree fee from 6:30-10:30 p.m. This year’s theme, “House of Horrors,” will include new scares and a kid-friendly section from 4-6 p.m. 

“The theater department puts on over six productions a year, so to do the very best week we can, we have to come up with some creative ways of doing fundraisers,” director Melissa Carpenter said. 

The Haunted House gives theater students a unique opportunity to be scare actors, allowing them to expand on their improv skills. At the same time, it also gives the community a chance to experience a professional-level haunted house locally.

“My favorite thing is when people come through and they’re screaming,” Carpenter said. “You turn the lights off in the school building and it gets super creepy.”

The set consists of multiple parts of the school including the auditorium, backstage, storage rooms, the theater hallway, and the debate classroom. The department works together in sectioning off and covering parts of these rooms with tarps, transforming them into complicated sets.

“The hardest part about it is putting it up in time,” junior and stage manager Bella Barlow said. “We have a very short time span that we’re allowed to get all of this done.”

To transform the department all of the tarps, pallets, walls, and props must be set up quickly, requiring an extensive amount of work and dedication from actors and technicians with a strict deadline. 

“The kids focus in and we all work as a team,” Carpenter said. “Friday night, it’s gonna be all hands on deck.” To save on the cost of the haunted house majority of the materials used for the set and props are from previous years.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle, is kind of the motto around here,” Carpenter said. “We build walls on palettes, and so it’s just creating the different elements and putting in the lighting instruments.”

The sets are only one piece of the production; costuming and makeup take the horror to a whole new level. 

“We usually put a bunch on our face and hands, just to make it look like you’re more bruised and worn out,” Lafayette said.

This year, the haunted house will only perform for one night and will offer a kid-friendly experience nicknamed “Sesame Street.” 

“In the past, we weren’t able to tone it down,” Carpenter said. “This year, since we’re only doing it one night, I want to try and open up community-wide and get more kids involved.”

The annual haunted house though isn’t just an exciting fundraiser. It is an opportunity for the whole department to come together to achieve a horrifying haunted house. 

“My favorite part – it’s hearing reactions, seeing all our hard work,” Barlow said. “We will be having it one night this year. I’d like to encourage you to go as many times as possible.”