Merced Union High School District

Students at Buhach Colony and Atwater high schools can spend their lunch time enjoying haunted houses staged by the drama departments for each school. The students have been working hard for the past month to come up with concepts, build sets and create characters that will scare their fellow students. 

 

“Expect a lot of scares,” said Buhach Colony senior Samantha Segales, who helped turn the Buhach Colony theater into a crazed circus filled with clowns, fortune tellers and a disillusioned ring master. 

 

The Atwater High haunted house is located in the P.E. room and principal Alexi Parle says it’s drawn a large crowd of students each day with a line out of the door. As they make their way through the twists and turns and different rooms, they’ll see spiders, clowns, skeletons and a variety of other scary things. 

 

Atwater High Theatre Arts CTE Instructor Julianne Aguilar says that over 400 students have already gone through the haunted house. Both drama programs have tried to create immersive environments for their haunted houses. ”A couple years ago, we took this group of kids to Disney for their ‘Imagination Campus,’” said Buhach Colony Theatre Arts and English Instructor Kimberly Holl. “We did a unit on immersive environments – so sight, smell, sound, light, all of it – and how Disney creates these amazing, immersive environments, and that's part of why Disney is so popular. So they took that, they learned from that trip and then took all of the things that they have learned in theater throughout the past three or four years and created this.”

 

Aguilar says the project started with her students researching phobias and why people are afraid of certain things. Students were then asked to narrow down that research and determine what would translate into a haunted house attraction. Students were able to get certified in ladder and power tool safety, which allowed them to build sets, make masks, design the lights, costumes and run the event. “It’s way more than just throwing a haunted house together,” 

 

Holl says the haunted house project is great for her students because they are learning many different skills along the way. “Theater is this pathway to so many different professions as a CTE pathway,” Holl said. “It's not just acting. These kids learned how to make the blueprints. They had to work with math. They learned how to plan this whole thing out. They have to do the advertising for it. They do the sales for it. They do the costuming, they plan the makeup. They do the logistics of it, like, how are we going to get people through here? How are we going to make sure nobody falls? How are we going to make sure the sound doesn't overlap between rooms? So there's so many aspects to theater that people don't realize. It’s a lot more than just being up on stage.”

 

Aguilar says one of her students Jaden Church learned how to sew to help create his tent walls. Church then taught three other students how to see, which allowed them to improve their areas of the haunted house. 

 

The students have worked hard to put the haunted houses together, sacrificing their lunches, working after school and even on weekends. “It was a lot of work,” Segales said. “We had a lot of students put a lot of hard work into this. We did a lot of after school days. There was a lot of painting days. We had a lot of hiccups with building the sets and figuring out what we're going to do with certain rooms. But it was a lot of fun.”

 

Both haunted houses will be open during lunch at both campuses. The cost is $3 at the door. “I hope they're terrified, but that's what this age group is looking for,” Holl said. “They want to be scared so I hope they're scared.”

 

Shawn Jansen is the MUHSD Program Manager Digital Media. He can be reached at Sjansen@muhsd.org.