Boulder High seniors Leo Servetar and Io McCarty like their horror with a big dose of surrealism, leading them to pitch nightmares as the theme for their school’s haunted house.
Their pitch won, and the two are co-directing this year’s production.
“I wanted a haunted house that was somewhat whimsical, but scary at the same time,” said Leo, who is also the president of Boulder High’s Theater Troupe 60 and celebrates his birthday on Halloween. “We have 27 rooms. We’ve got some crazy stuff — dentists, a tea party, a forest of mannequins, a massacre after a picnic.”
Added Io, “There are a lot of odd corners and turns. It’s a fairytale feel, with a decent amount of gore.”
The school’s annual haunted house, now in its 14th year, opens Friday. The house will be open from 7 to 10 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Oct. 28, 30 and 31. Tickets are $8 for students and $15 for adults and will be sold at the door, cash or check only. Boulder High parents and students also can buy tickets online at boulderhightheater.org/fall-2021/.
The haunted house is the theater department’s major fundraiser, helping to keep the program self-sustaining. Students promise an experience that’s on par with for-profit haunted houses in the area.
“We want to make it an incredible haunted house,” Leo said.
The house is set up on the stage and in the “bowels” of the theater, with customers led through rooms in small groups of no more than six. The student directors said the set up follows current pandemic guidelines. All actors also have masks incorporated in their costumes, while guests also will wear masks. Instead of bringing people in the lobby to wait, customers will be asked to wait outside.
But while it was easy to adapt the haunted house to follow current guidelines, the pandemic is adding other challenges.
Students had to wait to start working in the theater until they could be sure they could go ahead with the project, pushing back the start date to the first week of October — and giving them just three weeks to build sets, figure out costumes, design lights and sound, and create and practice makeup looks.
Skipping the haunted house last year because of coronavirus concerns also meant many students working on the house this year have less experience and knowledge than usual. That’s because seniors usually take on the responsibility not only of designing and running the production but also mentoring younger students.
“It’s not as seamless; students weren’t trained,” said Chris Sweeney, who retired as Boulder High’s theater director but comes back to oversee the haunted house. “That’s been the hardest thing.”
Despite the challenges, he said, the students working on the house this year “have been awesome. They’re so responsible and eager. They’re just amazing.”
Added stage manager and senior Eithne Mulligan, “We work best under pressure.”
Senior Katelyn Love, head of makeup, has worked on several theater productions and said the haunted house is where makeup “really shines.” She signed up as a freshman as a haunted house actor and makeup crew member, discovering she “wasn’t that good at acting,” but finding a talent for makeup. This show’s challenges include incorporating masks and covering some of the actors in bugs.
“It’s a really learn-as-you-go type crew,” she said.
Altogether, close to 70 students are working on the production. Earlier this week, students painted stripes on set walls, crafted prosthetics from latex, practiced applying makeup to create cuts and bruises and tried on costumes.
“We reuse a lot of our costumes, but occasionally make or buy some” said junior Audrey Muir, who heads up costumes with senior Rowan Finney. “It’s a lot. You have to bloody things and rip them up and destroy things.”
Senior Gigi Wright, who uses they and them pronouns, was adding makeup to their first attempt at a prosthetic, an anglerfish mouth of pointy teeth. Along with working with the makeup team for the first time this year, Gigi has acted in all the previous haunted houses.
“I love Halloween,” they said. “Halloween is my favorite holiday. The haunted house, it’s so much fun watching people go through. Just the environment of it is so exhilarating.”
Kaya Surden, a freshman, was getting a few flesh wounds applied to her arms for her character, a “slightly mangled little girl.”
“I love acting,” she said. “I’m not personally a fan of being scared, but I like scary things. I really love this. It should be fun.”
Sophomore Tessa Goldman is helping build sets and acting as a mannequin in one of the scenes. In middle school, she said, she was always the villain in school performances, so a haunted house character seemed like a good fit, even though she’s a self described “scaredy cat.”
“You just have to be scary,” she said. “It’s really fun to be the one they fear.”
