Haunt is the new film from the duo, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who are known best for being the writers behind last year’s surprise horror hit, A Quiet Place. Working alongside producer, Eli Roth, Haunt is a horror film that follows a group of friends going out on Halloween night, and they stumble upon a haunted house. But this isn’t just any haunted house, it’s one of those extreme ones, the kind that makes you sign forms before you can enter. They decide to take part, and things go perfectly well for a while, but they soon realize the dangers in the haunted house are far more real than they initially realized.
This is something we’ve seen plenty of times before, films about haunted house attractions that turn out to have real dangers that our characters face. I’m reminded of films like House of 1000 Corpses, The Funhouse, Dark Ride, The Houses October Built, The Funhouse Massacre, and even something as recent as last year’s Hell Fest. It’s not a fresh premise, by any stretch of the imagination. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t much to mine out of the material.
Haunt gets right to the point, getting our group of friends – played by Katie Stevens, Will Brittain, Lauryn McClain, Andrew Caldwell, Shazi Raja, and Schuyler Helford – to the mysterious and isolated haunted house pretty quick into the picture. The story follows the beats you’d expect, but there’s a good sense of drive to the story to where it doesn’t waste too much time on anything that isn’t moving things forward. Though, there are some elements that felt underdeveloped (more on that in a bit), it is a film that is, for the most part, tightly constructed.
While there are numerous characters that we are following, the lead is very much Katie Stevens’ Harper, who ultimately has the most characterization. Stevens is quite good in the role, bringing a gravitas and sense of vulnerability that I’m not entirely convinced the film itself has truly earned. This is where the film stumbles. Harper is introduced in the opening scene applying makeup to a bruise under her eye while one of her friends finds a truck outside speeding off after having thrown a pumpkin at their doorstep. The big cloud surrounding Harper for the whole film revolves around her history with abuse, and not just with her current boyfriend, but the abuse that she also experienced at the hands of her father, who was also violent with her mother. Harper hasn’t been in touch with her parents for a long time; at one point even talking about how she’s afraid to knock on the door and find her father answer the door.
This isn’t an inherently bad idea, but there is a strange thematic disconnect between Harper’s history of abuse and the experience she’s having through the haunted house. I think there is an attempt to show her survival instincts, which she gained from living with her abusive father, but the parallels are superficial at best. Harper’s boyfriend, who has been constantly texting her the whole night, shows up later in the film as he tracks down her location, but the payoff to having him show up at the haunted house was deeply underwhelming, especially considering that she doesn’t ever come to aknowledge his presence there in any significant or meaningful way. There might have been an interesting idea at play, but it needed more time and care to fully flesh it out because it just comes across as tacky and borderline exploitative otherwise.
Other than that, Haunt is a still a solid little horror film that does exactly what a film like this should do. It has its fair share of tense sequences, playfully designed traps and rooms, and the kills are satisfying and appropriately gory. The film has a slick look that captures the danger of the haunted house while also tapping into that gleeful and colorful Halloween spirit that the film plays with. Beck and Woods clearly have a knack for this kind of material, and while it lacks the finesse that A Quiet Place had, it remains engaging and suspenseful, and the cast isn’t the annoying, rambuctious teens you would often see in these movies. It’s a perfectly serviceable horror film, the kind you can watch with your friends around October to get into the Halloween spirit. Sometimes, that’s all you need, and that’s what Haunt delivers.