On Halloween, six friends encounter an extreme haunted house that promises to feed on their darkest fears. The night turns deadly as they discover that some monsters are real.

When horror movies amass and queens start to scream moviegoers know ’tis near Halloween…and at the frontline of Halloween seasonal thrillers comes the new haunted-house, slasher film Haunt (2019) Written/directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote the highly-awarded, box-office hit A Quiet Place in 2018, the dynamic duo returns as directors for this haunting thrill-ride. Produced by the ghoulish Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel), Haunt premiers just in time to make you think twice about going into any houses this Halloween.

Children’s’ nursery rhymes are so innocent until they are set against screams; the trailer is pretty creepy, and the film does not disappoint on the jump-scares, gore, or twisted turns. The best part about Haunt is the group of masked baddies, who deliver brute punishment with a tinge of dark humor from behind their various masks — clowns, ghosts, witches, and random devils. Haunt stars a cast of good-looking people, but more than that, they help Haunt to be a character-driven film. The final girl can be seen from a mile away at the film’s outset, which made me believe Haunt would rest on static characters and sometimes cheeky Millenial dialogue, but the main characters carried the film over the bloody trail of tears and fears as the film trudged towards its climax. Andrew Caldwell as Evan and Lauryn Alisa McClains as Bailey made for compelling characters in real-time, though the only character who was at all fleshed out was Katie Stevens’ Harper, whose background story of being an abused child and eventually an abused woman made her badass ending all the sweeter as she came full circle and fully overcame her nightmarish existence. The film also stars the magnetic Will Brittain who last year did an amazing job in the western-thriller, Desolate, and who apparently continues to grow better and better as a leading male. With a cast that didn’t rest on their laurels and a screenwriting team fueled by a love of B-films and haunted houses, the recipe for Haunt was destined to be a treat.

On one Halloween night, a group of friends — Nathan (Will Brittain), Harper (Katie Stevens), Bailey (Lauryn Alisa McClains), Evan (Andrew Caldwell), Angela (Shazi Raja), and Mallory (Schuyler Helford) — all go out to enjoy the evening’s festivities at a club. Though some are looking to call it a night after a while, others in the group are looking to up the ante, and as if the hand of the devil reached up from below to point them towards their fate, the group sees a sign flicker into existence on the side of an isolated highway reading “Haunted House”. And so the night continues on, after all. Arriving at the front gate to the haunted house, which suspiciously has no line, a clown directs them to sign a waiver with their personal information, as well as surrender their cellphones. Promising to be an extreme haunted house, the group decides to give it a try because YOLO and ventures inside to see what all the screams are about. Whereat first the haunts seem bearable and the smoke and mirrors antics non-threatening, the group’s anxiety begins to raise as their participation begins to elicit doses of pain and a friend mysteriously goes missing. They know they are in for a real haunted house when the friend reappears, only to be killed before them, and the proprietors grow more violent as the team works their way through the maze.

Compared to A Quiet Place, which is touted as a “smart” horror film, Haunt is comparatively dumbed-down; the backbone of the premise utilizes the trope of having a typical cast of attractives that becomes so much fodder for some random, masked slashers. Having that said, horror doesn’t need to be smart, it just needs to be a good film, and Haunt was a very fun watch with little downfalls. I found it to be reminiscent of the Saw movies in that a group has to find their way out of a house of horrors, and also reminiscent of Scream in that Haunt calls upon so many horror tropes — final girl on deck, slow-walking killers, and whoops the black girl dies, to name a few. If I look really hard and squint my eyes, this movie could be about the rise of sickos in real-life, identity, and the masks that we wear being ripped from us when we are faced with survival. But just watching it at arm’s length, Haunt is another merry go round of horrors as a coed group is picked off one by one for no rhyme or reason nor lesson learned, other than maybe that one should not go into a haunted house with no line outside. The movie requires me to suspend reality in the wrong places sometimes, where people are shot in mortal places but are somehow still able to deliver the needed smackdowns, but otherwise, Haunt perfectly pits baddies against babes in a hellish haunted maze run by psychos.

It’s all fun and games until someone gets their eye poked out, or arm sliced up, or their face literally ripped off. Though overall not the goriest or smartest horror film, Haunt did build suspense as the acts crescendo into the full realization of the no-win nightmare the characters had found themselves in; it does a proper swan dive in the beginning, but cannonballs into an amazing end! If you would like to get to know the rising filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods better, Haunt will give you a good insight into the mindset of this duo who love horror and Halloween; in a Director’s Statement on the film, the two-note that “Halloween is simply the movie business: masks, make-believe, a dash of horror, and a hell of a lot of fun.”