Haunt (2019) / Piece 1 of 2

 I'm really in that Halloween/October mood right now. I just can't care that October is still months away. I do sort of agree with what many horror fans feel: it is October all year. I don't stop being a horror fan when October 31st ends. Now back in October of 2020, Joe Bob Briggs' Last Drive-In had Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' 2019 Halloween-set Haunt as a double feature with "Hack-O'Lantern" as part of their Halloween Hideaway. I wish I could say October 2020 was a good to great year. But 2020 is a year I just put behind me. I really want October of this year to just completely eclipse it. But as much as I want to save some films (gem-hopefuls), I have this urge to just go all-out already. I realize that takes from my favorite holiday of the year. So Haunt is a film I have noticed gets compared to Plotkin's "Hell Fest" (2018), but I think that is unfair. Haunt and "Hell Fest" are two totally different films. The killers wear masks, yes, and the films take place at Halloween...cool, but besides the age of the victims being close in proximity (college age twenty-somethings), both take place at different kinds of locations and the killers have different agendas and personas. Now, that Strangers kind of killer seems to be the new wave of how killers behind masks behave. They hide behind a mask, embodying the thrill of killing with their everyday faces disguised. Those behind the masks don't say much, if anything at all. And even a recent India serial killer thriller, "Game Over" has the type of masked psychopaths who tilt their heads and cold-bloodedly attack without a care in the world. Also, those behind the masks even take their time, not always so quick to go right after their prey. 

Actually, such films as "The Collector" and "Hell Fest" seem to indicate that outside the psychopathic extra-curricular activities, they have regular lives where their friends and family probably are clueless as to the monsters they really are. In the case of Haunt, not only do the killers in an old building (set up with traps, weapons, games, etc.) wear masks of different types, they also have human faces altered by surgery...so in Haunt, they truly seem committed not just to the "characters" with the mask and their roles as killers hunting "customers" at the place for a "good scare" but desire to be monsters of a type as well.

As entertained as I was just as a pure horror fan with Haunt, you still see so much of "Saw" and "Escape Room" and other myriad "escape so-and-so in order to survive" films in its story. The "survive and advance" is very much the DNA of Haunt, along with the film's masked psychos hoping to take advantage of any mistake or opportunity to add to the body count or decrease the amount of "visitors" attending their booby-trapped playhouse.

Yet, much like "Hell Fest", Haunt is disturbing because what could be just a night of fun on Halloween, visiting a gimmicky faux haunted house filled with locals disguised and ready to freak out customers or an amusement park filled to the brim with lots of gimmicks set up to rattle the cage of paying visitors who will get a good scare and laugh at the experience once that is over, real horror is boosted by what should just be theater (but isn't). The killers that occupy Haunt have the leg up on their victims because they know at the very beginning what awaits the unfortunate visitors unaware of the true danger ahead of them.