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And now, tales from a classroom

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By KLINT LOWRY

The Suncoast News

Published: October 31, 2009

NEW PORT RICHEY - Some might say Tom O'Connell is pulling a trick on his students; for them it's definitely a treat.

For four years now, as Halloween has approached, O'Connell's mild-mannered classroom at River Ridge Middle School transforms into a holiday house of horrors, complete with cobwebs, strobe lights, eerie music and creepy props.

"It's gotten bigger and bigger," said O'Connell, who is made up to look like the Heath Ledger version of Batman's arch-nemesis, The Joker.

It would seem to be just a school Halloween celebration. But there is another element lurking behind the haunted house motif - an educational element. O'Connell has turned Halloween into an opportunity to get his students acquainted and comfortable with the idea of literary analysis by not just consuming entertainment but by studying it for its content and structure.

And what better way to introduce this idea than with something kids like.

"Right now, the horror genre is hot, especially vampires," O'Connell said.

Go to a bookstore, look at what's on TV or what's big at the movies. Young people feast on stories about bloodsuckers and other supernatural beings. "From a teaching perspective, if you can put your finger on the pulse of what the kids are interested in, that's huge," he said.

And if you look at it with an open mind, he said, there are a lot of rich narratives and characters, much of which is steeped in literary tradition and actual history.

Assistant Principal Nancy Guss didn't need any convincing. Her office is filled with bobbleheads, snow globes and other desktop items featuring the likenesses of great authors, including several of Edgar Allen Poe.

It all started with Poe, Guss said. He invented the genre.

Each year, the Halloween project has a different theme. This year, the focus was on characters. The classroom was turned into a museum of the macabre with several stations dedicated to infamous antagonists of popular horror movies such as Freddy Krueger, Jason and Jigsaw.

O'Connell's students were assigned to get background information on the characters, describe their fictional stories, and find out how they were created and how much was inspired by real-life events.

They presented their essays to Alicia Green's sixth-grade language arts students, who would later be asked to write papers on what they found most interesting from the presentations.

Each station was set up in a gruesome homage, with life-size likenesses of cinematic figures hovering near the presenters, along with some of their favorite tools of terror, severed body parts and other creepy accoutrements.

The first stop for the sixth-graders was with Nathanial Peterson, who presented things he had learned about Freddy Krueger of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" fame. Freddy is based on events that took place in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s. There had been a series of attacks on teenage girls, Peterson read. Some girls claimed they had dreams of the attacks before they occurred. One girl's father had an idea who was behind the attacks and set fire to the man's house, killing him.

"Many of the girls continued to have nightmares only now the man in the dream had severely burned skin," Peterson said.

After the last presentation, there was a station where students could get candy and soda - it is Halloween, after all. Finally, they got to watch a 10-minute legendary tale of horror - Michael Jackson's "Thriller."

Today's pop culture is tomorrow's classic, O'Connell said.

As popular as the genre is today, it's easy to imagine it will be the stuff of serious academic study 50 years from now. After all, everything was new once.

"I compare it to teaching Greek mythology," he said. "It's a lot of myths and legends, it's just more modern-day."

Even Shakespeare has his "awful, dark aspects," he added.

Klint Lowry can be reached at (727) -815-1067 or klowry@suncoastnews.com.

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