Mark Reviews Movies: HAUNT (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 12, 2019

The foundation of Haunt is as simple and obvious as a high-concept horror movie can get: There's a haunted house, but the threats inside it are very real. Anyone who has been in a haunted house probably has had such a concern, if only in the way back of his or her mind.

That's what these places cater to, whether we're aware of it or not. We know the things popping out from the walls are just toys or props. We know the eerie sounds of the wind, some unnatural laughter, a few growls and howls, and everything else on the attraction's soundtrack are just being sent out by speakers. As for the guy who shows up with a chainsaw, we know the blades have been removed.

Such attractions are all bark and no bite. Some are scared by the bark, and that's enough. Once you understand the entire enterprise as a work of stagecraft, though, maybe your mind starts to wander to the notion of what would happen if a single player decided to bite.

It really wouldn't take much for such an attraction to become real, if someone or a group of people were so inclined. After all, these haunted houses seem to pop up out of nowhere every October, in abandoned buildings that haven't seen business in some time and run by people whose faces you can't see, on account of the costumes.

The point is that this is a very clever conceit, dreamt up by writers/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, and the best thing about this film is that it doesn't simply present a clever premise and call it a day. There's some chillingly effective technique that keeps the premise going.

It is, naturally, Halloween night, and college student Harper (Katie Stevens) doesn't feel like doing anything. Her boyfriend recently has revealed himself to be an abusive cad. She's ignoring his repeated text messages and considering what to do next.

Harper's roommates Bailey (Lauryn Alisa McClain), Angela (Shazi Raja), and Mallory (Schuyler Helford) want her to dump him and go out for the night. She does, and at a bar, they meet Nathan (Will Brittain), a former baseball player on the school's team, and Evan (Andrew Caldwell), the requisite loud-mouthed comic relief. The next stop, someone suggests, should be a haunted house, advertised as an "extreme" one on some flyers going around town.

The first sign that Beck and Woods aren't resting on the strength of their concept arrives with the introduction to the main attraction. The central sextet, driving down a dark road at night, stop to see if a pickup truck is following them.

The camera just stares down the road, and our eyes are transfixed on a turn in that road, in the background on the right side of the frame. We suspect what's coming. We're certain that some light will appear. It does, only not where or from what we expect. It's a simple bit of misdirection, but in this age of cheap jump-scares and excessive gore presented as the primary means of frightening an audience, it's rather refreshing to be a bit startled, simply by the appearance of lights from a part of the frame we aren't observing.

The whole of the film's technique is based on such simple things. The characters, greeted by a creepy and silent clown, arrive at the haunted house, sign a liability waiver, and hand over their cellphones. It seems like a relatively normal haunted house, with a skeleton popping out a wall, some people in costume wandering around to scare visitors, and the central gimmick of a maze for guests to navigate—one side "scary" and the other "not so scary." There is a bit, though, presented as a little play, in which a screaming woman has her face branded with hot iron. Everyone agrees that it looks quite real, but surely it's all for show.

We, of course, know otherwise, if only because this movie probably wouldn't exist if it were only a bunch of people wandering through a perfectly normal haunted house. The filmmakers play a series of games on the characters and, by extension, us, suggesting that something bad might happen in seemingly ordinary games—a secret door that can only be opened if someone is shut up in a coffin, a maze of claustrophobic tunnels, sticking one's hand into a hole to guess different "body parts" by feel, a series of speakers seeming to blast the sound of a chainsaw (The use of sound here, especially when it's relatively quiet, is particularly effective in establishing the creeping feeling of doom). It's all a layered bit of misdirection, in that, sometimes, nothing bad happens and, other times, it does—only after we already have been trained to think that it's just another fake-out.

The simplicity of the setups—only things one would expect at a haunted house or a Halloween party—is why this works. We believe it, especially as new rooms are introduced (a sterile space filled with mannequins that actually gets creepier when the lights are on, a child's room with phrases written backwards on the walls, and the "backstage" area of the haunted house, where the workers scheme and execute their plans) and even after the identities of the attraction's employees are revealed (Let's just say that they probably don't need the masks).

Basically, the film works in the same way as its central attraction—promising scares and then doing everything in its power to provide them. With the filmmakers' strong use of sound and lighting and timing, though, Haunt isn't just bark. This horror film has some bite to it.

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