Thursday, October 29, 2020

Haunt is the greatest movie of all time

Do you still want to see my face? It's a work in progress, but I think you'll like it. Sort of a standard slasher elivated a little bit with intriguing killers and a cool location. I'm sort of a sucker for these horror movies set at a haunt. Basic gist is that folks think they are going to a haunted house to get scared by dudes in masks, but people really start to die. The Funhouse back in the day was sort of like this, then you got two pretty interesting ones that were ultimately unsuccessful in The House October Built and The House October Built 2

As someone who goes to these more extreme haunted houses, I get it. Twice I've gone with chicks who freaked out, thinking it got real like it does in these movies. The first time I was in eighth grade and the girls started to cry. The next time I was in college with a pair of friends and my sister. My friends were from Germany and France and had never experienced anything like a haunted house. The French girl locked on to me and screamed at anyone who came near us. The German girl went ahead with my sister. When we got out of the corn maze, we saw the German girl absolutely sprinting away from a guy wielding a chainsaw. "Ze chain-saw wus real, Ay-run." That was a fun night. I thought what a good idea this type of movie would be that night. Now, 10 movies later, it's starting to get a little overplayed. However, a Shudder original, this was the most popular movie on the streaming service this year. So don't expect these to go away. Also, this is better than most of the ones I've seen. 

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Haunt is spooked by the spirits of its obvious influences, but still packs enough thrills and chills to satisfy horror fans up for a haunted house excursion.

Gist of the movie is that a group of college kids go to a secluded haunted house. The kind where you have to sign a waver and shit. Eventually they discover that the actors are real killers after several of them indeed die. 

Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. These guys wrote A Quiet Place. The kids include Katie Stevens, Will Brittain, and Lauryn McClain. Haven't seen or heard of any of them. One of the killers, Damian Maffei, the Devil, was one of the killers in The Strangers movies. He's masked in that as well though. 

There is some dumb shit about this movie. First, there is this whole abuse victim/chilhood drama subplot that the writers throw in for the survivor chick. Gets them a car at the end though and pads the bodycount a little bit. Then at the very end, the Clown goes to the survivor girl's house, she had to put her address down when she went into the haunt, to finish the job. However, chick has Home Aloned her house and she ends up killing the dude, which is deserved, but come the fuck on. 

Overall, the movie is some pretty creepy shit. The people that work at the murder house all wear these masks. Shit like a ghost, a devil, a witch, a clown, so forth. Underneath those masks their faces are tattooed and mutilated to look like a much more horrifying version of the mask. These are guininely pretty scary. No thank you. We get told that one of them is a tattoo artist and all the workers are into death metal and they earn their faces by killing people. Producer Eli Roth, the "Bear Jew" in Inglorious Bastards and director of Hostel, told the writers to write out backstories for all these killers even though it wouldn't be used in the film. I feel that definitely gave the characters some richness that shined through. For that, I'm giving him the MVP. Hell of a talent, that Eli Roth. 

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