Screams echoed through the corridors, supplemented by eerie sounds and flashing lights all emanating from Little Black Box. On Wednesday, Oct. 30, Drama Club put on their first ever haunted house, marketed as Stage Fright Night.

The brainchild of the senior officer team, the haunted house was a step up in scale from last year’s haunted house, which was only for Drama Club members. 

“This kind of started a year ago when we planned our first ever Drama Club haunted house,” Drama Club President Sabrina Kim ‘25 said. “The plan was always that we were going to start out with one that was just for Drama Club members, see how that landed, and then kind of increase the scale for the next couple years.” 

To up the ante from previous years while simultaneously building community with future theater students, the officer team decided to reach out to Westwood’s feeder middle schools, Canyon Vista and Grisham. 

 “We knew going into it that we wanted to make the scale a little bigger than just Drama Club, and so we decided that the best way that we could balance not having to make things too scary that [it] would really impress high schoolers [was to reach out to middle school students],” Kim said.

After deciding on the scale, planning became a matter of deciding on the specific details of the haunted house and beginning to gather volunteers to make it come to life. 

“The actual haunted house that was almost a month’s worth of floor plans, going through all of our prop room and costume room and seeing what materials that we had to work with, and ultimately seeing what would be exciting for people,” Kim said. “We decided to make it theater-themed because we knew that that was going to excite a bunch of theater kids and that would be fun for us to work on, and then from there it was just a matter of getting all of our volunteers and putting all of these minds together.”

Every member of Drama Club had the opportunity to work on the event, in roles ranging from performers in the haunted house to concession managers at the social happening concurrently in Big Black Box. 

“My job as a tour guide is I was the guy who was walking through all the scares,” Drama Club member Kaya Chen ‘25 said. “It was kind of this idea that I’m facilitating all of these scares and making them happen, so a lot of my responsibility was ‘can I get [the group] to this point’ and ‘can I get them through fast enough so that they’re not seeing through the magic.’”

Other Drama Club members acted as performers in the haunted house itself, acting out macabre scenes and startling jump-scares. 

“I was the person underneath the [fallen stage] light, and so that was really interesting because obviously you have to think about the actor’s safety, as well as the aesthetics, and so  figuring out proper placement, and how to not get a headache[was important],” Drama Club member Olivia Parkey ‘27 said. 

All the members’ hard work paid off on the day of the event, when various middle school students and Drama Club members came to experience the haunted house. 

“Honestly I’m really happy with [how the event went],” Kim said.  “Everyone was just so enthusiastic about it, and it makes me feel so hopeful for the future years of this program. Getting to see all the freshmen, sophomores, juniors get so excited about [the haunted house] and put so much energy into making something awesome makes me feel so inspired, and hopefully there will be more events like these to come.”

In addition to providing a fun and immersive performance for the theater community, Drama Club intended to demonstrate to incoming freshmen and future Warrior Theater students what the community can look like. 

“I think it’s important because it’s a good opportunity for the middle schoolers to see what fun things we do in high school,” Parkey said. 

Beyond fostering community in theater spaces outside of Westwood, Stage Fright Night also provided myriad opportunities for bonding amongst different grade levels within Drama Club. 

“I think something about the broader theater community is not everyone gets into all the plays, and musicals, and so what you really want to do in my opinion is foster different grade levels coming together,” Chen said.  “With [Stage Fright Night] specifically, you didn’t have to be in any of the shows, you didn’t have to be a particularly good actor to do this, or you didn’t have to be good at tech or anything. It was just everyone coming together to do one thing, and really form a theater community.”