The Haunting of Hill House

Hello! Thank you for taking a moment to consider donating. Our team is almost completely college seniors, and this will be many of our last projects here at Northwestern University-- and one of the few we've been able to do after losing much of our college years to the pandemic.

We are looking for funding to create a full-scale production of The Haunting of Hill House, adapted by F. Andrew Leslie based on the novel by Shirley Jackson. As a Senior Honors Thesis Project under the Theatre Major at Northwestern, I am investigating why horror as a genre has faded from the theatres in the US, and how to bring about a modern production that harnesses cinematic elements to elevate the theatrical space. Specifically, I and my team will be exploring jump-scares, fluctuating mise-en-scene, and sharp, subliminal editing-- all three of these tactics are those that thrive in the cinematic medium, due to the camera’s ability to stop and start, which differs from theatre’s one take format. We believe that theatre can be a competitive medium within the horror genre, and will be staging these three devices to prove the validity of that belief. Given Haunting of Hill House’s multiple adaptations in several different forms of media from film to TV to radio to stage, this script is the perfect option to bring horror into the larger conversation around modernizing the theatrical scene to draw audiences back to the stages. We aim to elevate theatre to the cinematic level by investigating the question: is it possible to use staging and theatrical technical techniques to smoothly and effectively create experiences previously only found in film and television for the audience of a stage show?

Funding will go toward furniture, light, speaker, prop, costume, and transportation rentals. This is a fully student-produced show, so every penny counts! We are most excited to play with shadow puppetry and infrasound to incite fear in our audience; we'll be creating soundscapes with both foley and prerecorded work, and letting images sear in our audience's mind through the use of custom-shaped lights (gobos). Our set will be created through boxes of light and antique furniture to convey our abandoned and haunted setting, while our costumes will be vintage in style in order to capture the late 1950s aesthetic of the script. Finally, we'll need UHauls to carry larger furniture, lights, and speakers to and from rental shops.

Thank you for taking the time to donate-- again, any amount matters.