The week leading up to Halloween was a blur of candy and costumes at Emory University’s Oxford College. On the night of Oct. 31, the week of festivities culminated in the grand finale: “SAC’s Sacrifice,” a haunted house in Dooley’s Tavern.
The Oxford Student Activities Committee (SAC) and musical theater club OxBroadway planned the event together. SAC organized the logistics while OxBroadway produced the haunted house. The clubs spent the past month preparing for the 3-minute experience through the haunted house, transforming the timeworn graffitied walls of the Tavern into a chilling experience.
A wooden sign propped up on the gravelly path warned approaching students: “DANGER, enter if you dare.”
As students walked up to the dull white building, the chill in the air set the scene for the horrors that awaited them. SAC adorned Dooley’s Tavern with cobwebs, pumpkins and lights for the occasion. Attendees huddled together at the tables near the entrance, where there were plates piled with candy corn, gummy worms and hot popcorn.
SAC split the students into groups of four to six people, with each group entering one at a time for a more “intimate” atmosphere, SAC President Aanya Ravichander (24Ox) said.
Anticipation ran high as the line of haunted house hopefuls grew. Zaria Parris (25Ox) waited in line with her friends.
“I think it’s going to be very scary,” Parris said, laughing. “I’m a big scaredy cat, so this is going to be interesting.”
In the back corner of the Tavern, Junchen Fang (25Ox) stood on the grass, taking pictures of the dimly lit tavern, capturing half-smiles and warm hugs on his Polaroid camera.
Inside the haunted house, student actors from SAC and OxBroadway surprised the visitors at every corner. The actors wore ripped black shirts and pants, with detailed scary makeup on their faces and arms.
There was just enough light to walk through the entire haunted display, but the constant jumpscares from the production actors made the decor secondary to the performances.
The actors utilized every move in the haunted house playbook. They popped up from behind walls, thrashed on the floor and screamed in the students’ faces. OxBroadway President Finn Reilly (24Ox) said he was impressed by the actors’ performances.
“Most of our actors, those who have been in SAC and even the OxBroadway people, had never done anything like this before, and it was really impressive to see them jump into character so fast,” Reilly said.
Reilly himself acted in the haunted house production, and a day later he still sported bruises on his arm, battle scars from his night of thrashing around on a pool table.
“You couldn’t even really tell that they were student actors,” attendee Nadira Hassan (25Ox) said. “I feel like they were really serious about it.”
Makeshift walls and actors guided the visitors through the space as they walked further into the house.
“What we really wanted to do was be able to create multiple rooms within one large room so that people had something new to see without seeing everything at once,” Reilly said.
A new bracing thrill awaited around each corner. Ravichander referred to the jump scares as “moving pieces” of the production.
The visitors’ quick trip to the haunted house culminated with an actor screaming “Get out, never return!” as they rushed out of the haunted house.
“Dooley’s Tavern is just the perfect untamed space to do something like this inside of it because you have this really old building that already has a lot of mystery around it,” Reilly said. “I think the average Oxford student doesn't know a whole lot about it.”
He described the tavern as carrying the “cobweb effect,” alluding to the dust and the unkemptness of the erstwhile Oxford watering hole.
“There's this mystifying element of the decrepit building behind Haygood that is really attractive,” Reilly added. “It also provided a fantastic large empty space that we could fill however we wanted that you just can't get in any other building on campus.”
Even Emory’s unofficial mascot, Dooley, made an appearance at the event, eliciting excitement from attendees.
Reilly, who worked in a haunted house for two years prior to his time at Oxford, expressed ardent interest in widening the scope of this production.
“Being able to get more people into spontaneous events would be fantastic,” Reilly said. “I do hope next year to bring a haunted house to the Atlanta campus because it's my understanding that they don't have something like this over there, and it's really special.”
