Review #68: Haunt (2019)

This review was originally written in October 2019.

October Horror Movie Review #16: Haunt

So, while watching this movie I kept going back and forth between really enjoying it and being perplexed as to what kind of a movie I was watching. For much of the film it's a fun Halloween horror flick, but the tone and the style keeps changing and I can't tell how seriously it's taking itself. It's directed by Eli Roth so I'm inclined to think it's just having a good time, but some parts of it really turned me off and I'm not entirely sure why.

Haunt is about a group of friends (question mark?) that go to a haunted house attraction on Halloween night, which starts off exciting but then the effects start getting a bit too realistic. If it had remained with that premise for the whole film (much like Hellfest, of which this movie seemed like a carbon copy for the first half hour) then I think I would've felt much more favorably towards it; but it becomes this self-serious torture porn experience where the killers are all these seemingly supernatural self-mutilating maniacs that somehow know everything about the protagonists and seem to want to torture them with their greatest fears. But that feels like an entirely different movie to me, and it goes back and forth between the two for the entire movie's runtime. The very end has an extremely fun twist, but by that point I was already scratching my head about whether I could even say I liked the film so it felt like too little too late.

Also worth mentioning: the movie teases us with a short sequence where the protagonist's abusive alcoholic boyfriend is coming to the rescue; it ends up being fruitless (he gets killed basically immediately) but I find it really odd that this movie actually has you rooting for the abusive alcoholic boyfriend, if even for a moment.

One more complaint: The shotgun. WTF, movie? There's a part where a shotgun is rigged at the end of a hallway to shoot every few seconds. The protagonist specifically uses this trap to kill an attacker (by holding him up in the way of the blast), BUT THEN SHE RUNS STRAIGHT DOWN THE CENTER OF THE HALLWAY INSTEAD OF MOVING TO EITHER SIDE. What is wrong with you? Is that seriously something the writers thought would make for a good sequence? And then, when the shotgun turns out to be empty (otherwise it would have killed the idiot running straight down its line of fire), by the following scene it's magically reloaded itself so the protagonist can use it to kill someone else. COME ON GUYS.

I liked how this movie waits an incredibly long time before the viewer or the characters can be sure whether anything untoward is actually happening. (All of the violent acts could easily be played off as just a special effect of the haunt.) I feel like there's an alternate universe version where the entire back half of the movie is cut out, and instead it turns out that it WAS all part of the act, and everyone is fine at the end (except for the girl who accidentally cut her arm sticking it through one of the holes). I think that's the part of the movie where it was truly at its best; once the killers start taking off their masks and then I have to ask what their day-to-day life is like the other 364 days out of the year then the movie loses my interest. Either give me horrifying supernatural demons, or give me ordinary maniacs. Don't go for a middle ground where even the writers probably aren't sure.

Overall this movie was more fun than unfun, but its thesis statement was too diffuse and I think some changes should have been made early on in production.

Overall rating: 6/10

Favorite Trap or Puzzle: The coffins that you have to close yourself in to proceed out the back

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Next up: The Forest

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