Searcy, Ark., (LP) — This year SHS is hosting yet another year of scares with their fun filled, spooky haunted theatre. The haunted theatre takes place every year around Halloween time where any and everyone is invited to take a tour of the haunted theatre which is filled with screams and whole lot of fun. Along with fun comes a lot of work, which is where the drama club comes in. The drama club along with Mrs. Taylor, the head of the drama club and the drama teacher go through the hard work to make haunted theatre as real and scary as possible. Thinking of different ideas, designs, and themes every year isn’t as easy as everyone thinks. Mrs. Taylor puts great effort into making the haunted theatre different and unique every year.
Drama club and students, the Thespian Club, and Mrs. Taylor, the drama director do the preparations and set up the haunted theater. Officers and members of the drama club including Ariadna Leyva are “going to guide the tour and help set up the routes.”
She, along with fellow officers have to “organize and plan the maze, paint the sets, assign parts/costumes, and practice being scary.” The overall theme this year is toxic spilt and as Mrs. Taylor stated, “we have one big theme with small themes that go throughout the rooms.” The crew needs to first pick the routes their going to use for that year. There’s a different route every year “so that students don’t have any idea what their expecting,” stated Mrs. Taylor. After all the planning and setting up, the crew has to make flyers and advertise their event. They pick out dates for hosting it and hand out flyers to all the students.
This years haunted theatre was a real fright for the students that experienced it. Junior Tyrah Gulledge stated, “they were playing with a oujia board, and they jumped out and scared me several times.”
Many students of different ages go to experience the haunted theatre and there’s always good feedback. Sometimes students “have to be escorted out of the building, but we show a cautionary slide show before hand so they know what their dealing with,” said Mrs. Taylor.
Over hundreds of students went to the haunted theater over the past half decade. “We’ve been doing the haunted theater for five years in this school,” said Mrs. Taylor. She enjoys setting up the routes and designs every year because “we never get anything new, we reinvent all the items we used in the previous year using the reuse reduce and recycle method.” The haunted theater at SHS is definitely one to check out!
