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It’s a big place, they exist. Not the norm, though. Most are a much smaller sort of thing.
Movies tend to be exaggerated versions of real things.
It’s probably happened at some point in American history but what you see in movies is definitely not the norm.
Literally never happen like that irl.
High school parties are 6-8 people in a basement trying to hide that you are all sharing a single bottle of captain Morgan rum from the parents upstairs while each kid runs up stairs to pee every 10 minutes.
They exist but they probably won’t have the whole school invited (most houses can’t fit that many people) and are pretty uncommon. Maybe 2-3 parties a semester, hardly every weekend.
Definitely exaggerated but not completely false. Most of the time parties would be a dozen or so kids drinking and smoking in someone’s basement.
But I absolutely went to parties in highschool with a couple hundred kids in one house (or mostly in someone’s backyard, a little in the house).
Someone’s band would play. People would chip in for a keg and someone’s older sibling would buy it. Or someone with a fake ID would.
*And definitely not the whole school. My graduating class had like 600 people in it. Around 2000 in the whole school.
Yes, but with qualifiers.
1. I was in high school in the 90s, so this information is 20+ years out of data.
2. House parties are more of a college thing in my area. For high school, they were usually held in fields or by lakes/rivers.
3. They usually don’t include “literally the entire school.” My ***SMALL*** high school had about 600 kids. The parties were usually more like 50-200 kids.
There were like 450 people in my graduating glass. Not in my school, just my grade level. So the answer for me personally was not even close.
You’ve never seen a movie or TV show from the UK where there is a huge house party? I specifically remember a scene in “Quadrophenia” where there is a house party.
Thinking about the party at the end of Superbad and I’ve for sure gone to a party like that. So it really depends. Often it’s just a few friends who might have scored some alcohol. Or it could be loads of people. I remember a few really big parties at someone’s house. And others that were out in the woods around a huge fire.
Common? No, but they happen.
Only got to go to one myself (I wasn’t particularly popular). I remember the front window to the house got smashed (don’t know how). I was like, “Oh fuck. Party’s over.” But the parents showed up out of nowhere with a huge piece of cardboard and duct tape, threw that over the window, and the party continued. I was shocked that the parents weren’t out of town or some shit. Apparently the parents and told their (yes, cheerleader) daughter that she could throw ONE major party her senior year of HS and (until the window break) they just hung out in the back of the house. I don’t know that the WHOLE school was there, but there were at *least* a hundred of us, and every cabinet in the kitchen was full of (cheap) booze (yes, I looked). Basically the front half of the house and the front yard were one giant mosh pit.
Fucking awesome party.
Our houses tend to be larger, and a lot of our 18-22 year old students go away for college and live on their own.
The entire school isn’t at the parties. Our schools can be very large. The high school in my city is over 6000 students.
Yellow transportation modules for students and drinking out of red plastic cups? Clearly made up for the movies. The entire school in one location partying in harmony and spontaneous synchronized dancing? Clearly happens at every high school party.
The entire school is an exaggeration, but how big of an exaggeration is going to depend on how large your school was. There were tiers of parties. Usually somebody had something going on every weekend. Sometimes it might just be 5 or 10 people. Other times it may be 50+ people. Usually the bigger parties were holidays or homecoming, stuff like that.
Usually if there wasn’t much going on we would just throw out an open invite to come over to my buddies house to his garage or machine shed to drink, play beer pong, basketball, cornhole, etc. I also grew up in a place where it would not be uncommon for somebody to just drive by your house and if they see people outside they stop to talk or drink a beer. Sometimes that was how things just slowly evolved into a little get together.
Look up high schools with large enrollments. You’ll see schools with 3000 +. But overstuffed house parties do occur. There are YT videos of parties in San Bernardino County that were busted. But some of those are $40 at the door, houses rented on Airbnb nightmares.
I’m interested in what parties are like where you are from.
I was in high school in the early 00s. The biggest parties I ever went to were like 50-100 people. It felt similar to what you see in movies although films are very exaggerated. And it certainly wasn’t typical. It was like a once or twice per year thing. Most parties were a lot smaller.
I think they are less common now than 20 years ago, but these are a thing. The whole house part with dozens of people have always been a bit of a rarity because the cops break them up pretty quickly.
Exaggerated versions of the reality.
There was a lot less open drinking and fewer people. Still they did occur. We had a few large parties in backyards or even in a house but it was never quite as wild as depicted in movies and TV, which should be pretty obvious for even a casual observer of fictional media.
The entire school is a bit of a stretch
But house parties are a thing
The reason they exist in the US and not most places in the world is our drinking age.
As soon as you turn 21 in the US, the appeal of house parties starts to drastically diminish.
I’m from a small school so where I live it wasn’t uncommon for the majority of high school to be partying together. Also we would go to surrounding schools area parties. It’s very rural where I came from in MI.
It’s exaggerated. At the most basic level, hardly anyone actually lives in a house big enough to host a party that big. Seriously, you see these parties being hosted in gigantic 3+ story mansions in Southern California, or some other high cost area, and we’re just supposed to believe that’s reasonable. It’s kind of ridiculous actually, but those teen movies almost always portray upper-middle class/wealthy lifestyles.
I started drinking and partying during my junior year of high school. I can think of *maybe* ten parties during my high school years that had more than 20-25 people there. Only two of those were anything close to what you’d see in a movie, and maybe 15% of the junior and senior class from my school and a local private school that a lot of my friends attended. That was maybe… 150-200 people? I went to a pretty big and diverse high school. I should probably note that sometimes it was easier to go to someone’s family farm/ cabin or lake house an hour out of town, too.
Most of my drinking in high school consisted of me and my 5-6 shithead buddies stealing a few beers from our dads’ garage or basement refrigerators, sitting in someone’s basement or detached garage, and stressing about which prestigious colleges we were applying to. Occasionally we’d get invited to something bigger, then unsuccessfully attempt to talk to girls.
Yeah, mostly that’s a TV/movie thing.
Big parties may happen on rare occasion, but nothing like what you see on movies or TV. If they’ve happened like that, it’s very, very rare. Real parties are usually much smaller.
The things you see on TV and movies are exaggerated and idealized.
My kids school has 2,500 student, and isn’t anywhere near the biggest one around.
So no, they don’t ever have the entire school there.
50 or so people at the crazy ones? Sure.
I had a senior class party at the home of my older cousin’s house in 1974. She was also a teacher at the high school, my how things have changed. I provided pop and other mixers and snacks for 50 dollars(about 300 today) and it was a bring your own booze affair(although a friend procured a case of Cutty Sark scotch for general use for free). It was for seniors only and there were around 150 people in attendance. We talked about this on the phone right before she passed away from a heart problem at 76 last summer; we agreed that societal norms have certainly changed radically. Every cop in town knew what happening, but no one intervened and no one was arrested or had an accident. We grew up in a whiskey town and by then we knew you didn’t drive drunk because that’s a good way to die. The only person to die before graduation was a guy who pulled out onto a major highway and didn’t see a semi truck coming in his peripheral vision, he was completely sober
When I was a teen it totally was a thing. Sometimes there was a party house (my best friend across the street mom owned a restaurant in a town 45 minutes away and was away on the weekends with her boyfriend that was a mobster at a nearby apartment). Every room was packed or occupied with a couple. We’d party until cops came which they inevitably did because people were throwing up out windows and causing problems in the street.
There were also whole school parties when someone’s parents went away on vacation. Again, usually broken up. SO many cars on the road clued people in and cops loved to get free beer and drugs. I can remember once cops loading good beer into a cooler they had in the truck of the cop car that already had ice in it.
When it broke up though? It sucked. No cell phones. People just scattered and then drove around trying to figure out the next party spot. Some times it was in the woods or just someone else’s house.
It was never as good as the first broken up party though.
A bit exaggerated. Not terribly common. But not unheard of.
It isn’t the standard party but it does happen. There were several in my community when I was in High School and one was right next door to my parents house. Probably close to 100 kids out of control. Drunk people passed out in my parents yard and bushes, property damage, fights, cops ended up busting it and drunk kids scattered in all directions.
I graduated in 2010 from a small school so instead of it being full of kids from my school it was from schools around the area. After high school the ones who didn’t go to college tended to be the big partiers. 50+ quite often but we were mostly degenerates
I don’t know about nowadays, since I’m 46, but when I was in high school we definitely had them.
We never had the entire school at one, but there were definitely 50-100 kids from 10-12th grade at some.
It was a very small town with only 3 cops, so the rule was basically as long as nobody left the property there’d be no police involvement.
Maybe a couple highschool house parties a year in suburbs areas are a massive house/yard full of a few hundred teens, but most of the time highschool house parties are a few dozen kids or just a small group of friends who managed to get their hands on alcohol hanging out in someone’s basement. They definitely aren’t the entire school which is usually thousands of students unless it’s out in a rural area where they have a barn to party in and much fewer students.
For college, parties that size are a lot more common than in highschool if they have frat houses or some students live nearby off campus in a larger house with roomates and are willing to host.
I remember a handful of parties where it really seemed like the whole school was there. But of course, that wasn’t the case. I was 16 and had no perspective. It was just a really big party. *That* is pretty common.
They are generally exaggerated. However, there are things you in media that do happen at parties. I was at a house party in DC during an internship. One of my buddies worked with a Swedish guy who had never been to the US before and wanted all of us to shotgun a beer with him because he saw it one time in a movie. He accidentally spilled half it because he lifted the can in the wrong direction, but he was still a good guy and got to experience what he wanted haha
I never got invited to any but I had heard about some decently size parties
Depends on where you are. Where I went to high-school they definitely existed. Not every weekend but they were frequent enough. It wasn’t the entire school because my school had a fuck load of kids but it was like everyone who knew the person whose house it was at plus whoever those people brought. They can get massive.
I went to high school in the late 1990’s and we did this on someone’s land. Everyone in Texas knows someone who has an uncle/cousin/grandpa with land, often with a pond or something on it, where we could set a large fire, drink ourselves stupid, and hook up. I maybe went to one or two house parties with a large group of drinking teenagers, but the party on someone’s land was much more common.
Edited to add-I would say not more than 50 kids or so, even at land parties. Unless it was a preplanned thing
House parties with 100+ kids are **definitely** a thing. For you as a guest, this would feel like the “entire school” because it’s basically everyone you know at school.
But plenty of high schools have 1,000+ students. My high school had more than 3,000 kids when I was there. No shot you’re fitting an entire high school into one house party.
Back in the 1980s we threw an epic party at my friends house complete with a keg of beer in the bathtub, half naked girls, dirty condoms found on the floor the next morning, and the family dog that went missing for two days.
I went to a small town high school and the kids of a particularly wealthy family threw a big party every year during winter break, until the last of them graduated. Maybe half of the student body showed up.
I was a teen in the 80’s, and there were always house parties-never 100’s of people, but would definitely pack a house. They seemed to have died out in the late 90’s, my kids never went to any when they were in high school, and I never hear about them anymore.
They’re heavily exaggerated but not entirely fictional.
I went to two parties like that.
Really also depends on where in the US you live. I grew up in a big city and most of my classmates lived in apartments. We had plenty of house parties but it was mostly like 20-30 kids max. We also had a lot of rooftop parties or park parties. These almost always would eventually get broken up by the police but again, the numbers were fairly low just because its very hard to hid massive groups of people partying like that in a big city where there are just too many eyes.
After college however, I dated someone from Michigan who grew up in the same town that the movie American Pie was based on. She confirmed for me a lot of stories of massive parties (usually involving a big lake house that was someones parents who were away on vacation) and having gone to a massive school her experience was completely different and much closer to the depiction you see in those movies.