HAUNT: Enter At Your Own Risk

Following the recent success of A Quiet Place, and using a familiar premise that’s almost certain to grab the attention of gore-hounds and midnight movie crowds, American screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Haunt seems like a horror movie that should have these audiences licking their chops with delight. Now sharing the director’s chair, the duo obtain all the right tools to build a lean, mean gore machine, but somehow fail to construct something beyond their obvious forms of inspiration, while making more promises than they can deliver.

If These Walls Could Stalk

Emotionally fragile from a traumatic childhood and current abusive relationship, Harper (Katie Stevens) is coaxed into going to a Halloween party with her two girlfriends. Following an awkward interaction with Nathan (Will Brittain), the two form a brief connection on the dance floor before Nathan’s friend Evan (Andrew Caldwell) convinces Harper and her friends to journey out of town to explore a haunted house attraction. Greeted by a wordless clown on arrival, the group are lead into a maze of old-school illusions; mirrored rooms, dark passages and unimaginable things falling from high places, which all seem harmless as first, but as the journey progresses and unexpected violence begins to unfold, the teens soon realise that the grisly acts of carnage are in fact real and they are next on the list.

Harper is our final girl, which is evident from the beginning…and let’s be honest, she’s something a film of this sort requires in this day and age. Yet, there is an attempt to develop her character through the use of childhood flashbacks involving domestic violence that feels awkwardly placed; as if presenting unpleasant memories to the audience will justify her behaviour and ultimately influence her to switch gears into revenge mode; it’s an idea that doesn’t always project the emotional resonance that’s most likely intended, and quite frankly feels narratively intrusive and distasteful.

As for the others, they are teenagers we’ve all seen before; the sensible girl, the cute jock, the drunken dimwit and so on. Needless to say, the acting is competent enough for a film that serves no purpose but to pick clueless kids off one-by-one in imaginative ways, but the characters are just too generic to develop a rooting interest for and the plot is far too predictable to build tension. We just need more reasons to care about their safety, but instead, we find ourselves looking forwards to their anticipated stand-offs with the crazed villians rather than their escapes.

I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts

Given its title, one would suspect that supernatural forces would come into play at some point throughout the story, but strangely enough, they don’t. In fact, Haunt includes almost everything but paranormal thrills; booby-traps, creepy crawlies, murderers – you name it! And it makes you wonder why Beck and Woods didn’t just throw a malevolent spirit into the mix somewhere.

The clowns are certainly scary, there’s no doubt about it, but they have zero personality and the only thing distinguishing them between one another is their creepy masks. There’s no denying that they have some nasty tricks up their sleeves, but that’s never quite enough to sustain our level of sadistic voyeurism for the runtime. It’s like we always know what’s coming, we just keep checking the time to see how long it takes to get there – and that’s never a good sign. 

Take a Ride on the Schlocky Side

Theme parks and sideshows are among the few locations that often feel criminally underused within the horror movie universe. They are places where distant screams flooding the night sky are often lost between the twisting metal of coaster tracks and the colourful cadence of public theatricality. More specifically, haunted house attractions are where the real fun can be had; tinny sound effects, low-lying fog and cheap mechanical spooks popping out from every corner; they practically tick all the boxes for the worthiest place to stage dazzling displays of cartoonish murders. 

Yet, apart from Tobe Hooper’s, The Funhouse, which has developed a sense of appreciation over time for its sheer cheesiness and sleazy killer with an axe to grind, it’s debatable whether any horror film in recent memory has taken full advantage of the endless options these gnarly structures have to offer. While it’s possible that comparisons will be made between Hooper’s film and Beck and Woods’ vaguely-inspired effort, the events unfolding in Haunt are somewhat closer to those in Rob Zombie’s 31; where over the course of a night, a bunch of redneck hippies are forced to fight for survival up against a posse of manic clowns.

However, the difference between Haunt and these other films is not so much the nuances in story or plot, but each filmmaker’s utilization of these endlessly resourceful environments, which in Beck & Woods’ case, is unfortunately the least impressive of the three. While it’s not entirely ineffectual, Haunt fails to use its wonderfully garish setting to its full cinematic potential, lacking the goofy charm of Hooper’s ghost train extravaganza, and the grimy sleaze of Zombie’s underground slaughter-fest.

The Chopping Block: Final Verdict

Even by the low standards of modern slasher films, this concept driven horrorshow feels half-hearted and thoroughly repetitive; a going-through-the-motions kind of deal that pumps out the gore in short bursts with minimal creativity or visual flair. While it’s slightly better than the countless arrays of low-budget slashers you’d find on streaming services or at the bottom of a bargain bin at your local video store, Haunt still feels like a missed opportunity by refusing to take its own ideas to the extreme. From what could have been the pot-of-gold at the end of the bloody rainbow for horror fans, results in a conspicuously suspense-free story about the systematic slaughtering of teenagers who should have known better on Halloween night.

Have you seen Haunt? If so, what did you think? Did it give you the spooks? Let us know in the comments below.

Haunt was released in the UK on August 23rd, 2019, and in the US on September 13th, 2019. For other release dates, click here.