By Alex Ringgold
Staff Writer
On October 31, SLA had a couple of students dressed up for Halloween in frightening, humorous, or just plain weird costumes. However, at the end of the day, the whole community was taken by surprise when a mob of zombies tore through the hallways and attacked several advisory meetings.
The mastermind behind the undead invasion? History and Digital Video Teacher Mr. Herman and his advisees.
Mr. Herman has a history of directing scary scenarios, as he has been involved with haunted houses and other horror-themed events since 2003. He is usually tasked with scaring older kids during these haunted houses, so his advisory dressing up as zombies on Halloween should not have come as a surprise.
Mr. Herman’s love of scary is not a recent thing. “I’ve always loved horror movies, but psychological horror movies,” he said. During his first year at SLA, he and a group of students worked on creating their own scary movie.
“We wanted to do something that was never done before,” Mr. Herman explained. “So a zombie outbreak starts in a high school because of the school lunch, and we wanted a heroine for our story, but the spin is that she’s half zombie and half human.”
He continued to add an even bigger spin. “When she is around zombies she feels like a human, like Blade, so she’s killing them and slaying them, but when she’s around humans she feels the urge, you know, to eat.”
Mr. Herman’s projects at school are only a small part of his experience with video and media. He’s been on production teams before and even doubles of certain films and shows, like Power Rangers. He was even a part of the stunt crew for the movie Star Trek: Insurrection.
In the movie, Mr. Herman played one of the inhabitants on a planet that was being invaded for its source of power. He was dressed in a brown sack-like costume and told to run across a bridge before it blew up as an effect for the movie.
As for his most recent role, many students were surprised and amused by the event. Junior Jenn Wright, one of the students who was “attacked” by the mob, and she had this to say when they shambled into her unexpecting advisory:
“At first I was like ‘What is going on, what are they trying to accomplish?’ I was just confused but then I was like, ‘Oh, okay this is what SLA does.'”