Seventh-grade students at Abington Friends School have been investigating the topic of “What makes a story horrifying?” By exploring deep fears and anxieties that accelerate heart rate, the students reveal what makes them feel unsafe and unnerved even in familiar, warm places.

The students found that while most people scream at jump scares, terrifying monsters, and gruesome displays, horrors can also lurk in everyday life depending on tone, style, and mood.

“Middle school can be really scary,” said Maya Kassutto, seventh-grade English teacher. Kassutto had taught a horror unit in English for several years, and even though she doesn’t personally love the genre more than any other, she thinks it meets her students where they are. “Seventh graders run the gauntlet that is middle school every single day. It kind of makes them experts in the horror genre, and it gives them the ability to turn a critical lens from the stories they read to the world around them.”

Originally built by English teacher Sunshine O’Donnell, the seventh-grade horror unit had been structured to guide classes through stories like The Tell-Tale Heart and Lamb to the Slaughter to teach them about mood, suspense, and other literary techniques they would encounter all across the literary landscape.

Students engaged with these stories, and it always seemed to Kassutto like there was an opportunity for something more. So when the English department received a curricular development grant, Kassutto and two other middle school teachers, CJ Miller in theater and Pete Thobaben in art, collaborated on developing a multidisciplinary unit that would take the suspense from the page to the stage.

“First, I took my horror unit and I made it into a social horror unit, specifically with an emphasis on Black horror,” said Kassutto.

In social horror, suspense and terror are used to highlight and critique real-world social issues, often drawing on themes of racism, discrimination, misogyny, and classism to convey important messages. “It reminds us that the monster isn’t just the monster. The monster is also a messenger,” said Kassutto.

The students read works of social horror in the classroom, learned about the evolution of Black horror stories, and completed the unit by writing original scenes of social horror. At the same time, other classes began to jump in with collaboration and extensions of that work — Miller led his group toward putting on productions of four of the scenes written in English class, and Thobaben’s classroom produced artwork and supporting designs for the productions.

These efforts culminated in a student-run House of Horrors on Tuesday, Jan. 23, an immersive theater experience that took viewers all over the school to watch these four productions and enjoy short discussions with student critics about their meaning. Each play was written, directed, staged, and acted by students, and student tour guides ferried viewers from station to station, all while providing little behind-the-scenes facts and nuances to the performances.

“There aren’t really different types of social horror as much as there are different problems they are tackling,” said Jeffrey W. ’29. In a small group, Jeffrey co-authored one of the performed pieces (A Library of Lies) about a group of friends who sneak into a library to find some books but are stopped by a monster. “The monster guarding the library wanted to keep the kids from reading the books … books that contained people’s vivid thoughts and feelings and opinions.”

The production of Jeffrey’s story fully leaned into the setting and the conflict, with the director staging the play in the Faulkner Library and leveraging the warm library light for ambiance. Lily J. ‘29, the critic for A Library of Lies, loved the premise and could immediately see into the social commentary. The reasoning the monster gives for keeping the books hidden, Lily sees, is the same one that people use when banning books.

“Books are typically banned when they have differing opinions from the masses, opinions that go against authority, religion or cultural norms,” Lily said. “From the printing press that spread Luther’s Bible to today in 2024, books hold a mighty power to spread knowledge, stories, and perspectives, causing many to ban certain books so that their beliefs cannot be spread.”

At the end of A Library of Lies, the kids overcome the monster after much turmoil — though only after rejecting their fear and fighting back. (Followed by a darkly humorous song-and-dance number.) The Seventh Grade House of Horrors at Abington Friends School tests the limits of the horror genre and proves that anything is possible.

Learn more about Abington Friends School and how it cultivates fearless, curious learning in a culture of intellectual and creative ambition.