So this is a horror movie that was on a Joe Bob Briggs Halloween special thing on Shudder that I watched with Jess. It’s a movie about a haunted house. But not like a real haunted house, a Halloween one.

Basically a bunch of teens go out to a random haunted house attraction in a run-down building in the middle of nowhere (as Joe Bob notes, that’s both a horror movie setup, but also how a lot of actual haunted houses are run, because they’re low-budget things that depend on cheap rent), and then they go through this funhouse that’s full of horror setpieces that start out as cheesy haunted-house tropes, quickly escalate into high-end top-notch haunted house things, and then escalate further into “um what the fuck that actually seems dangerous,” and then into a bunch of dead people.

So there are two things about this movie that really work. The first is the setting. It lends itself to these fun setpieces, which are often very clever and interesting; and then of course there’s a wonderful geography of the haunted house, how it’s this linear path that you have to follow, but also there’s corridors and stuff that go behind the attraction. Like, just the idea of having a haunted house be the setting for a horror movie is great, because it gives you license to have all sorts of absurd-in-any-other-context setups and environs.

(As an aside, one of my all-time favorite issues of Daredevil is one where Daredevil gets trapped in this old mansion, and has to go through a series of elaborate, but also malfunctioning, traps. This isn’t quite the same thing, because there was this mystery in the Daredevil one of wtf was going on, whereas here you see the people running it, but it has some of that same energy. Also, TIL that Harlan Ellison (co)wrote that issue!)

The second thing that works well is that being in a haunted house gives you a lot of room for “is this part of the show or actually a horrible thing happening?” questioning. Like, one of the common tropey things of horror movies is that there’s this sense of increasing foreboding doom, but everyone keeps going, right. Well, here it makes sense, because… it’s a haunted house. “OMG this is super creepy, cool, what’s next” is very much part of the whole driver of it.

And then plus, as bad shit does start happening, there’s still the question of whether it’s real — is that person really dead, or was that just cleverly staged fakery? — and the ambiguity keeps it interesting. This is sort of a post-Scream movie, in that there’s a layer of meta here, because the characters are modern teens who are aware that they’re in a scary attraction, and that lots of things that seem scary aren’t real, and they’ve got that detached ironic nervous-laughter reaction to a lot of horrible things that you’d get when they seem horrible but also you “know” they’re not happening.

The thing that works less well for me is the part where the movie finally comes down on the side of “yes, this is in fact a horror movie” and now you just have a bunch of people running around and being chased and stabbed and so forth. People who like the horror genre must like this part of movies, because for a lot of movies, it’s like the whole thing, and I feel like this was a reasonably well-executed version of it (see above re the geography of the haunted house being a great setting for that), but it’s not really a thing I enjoy. That’s not so much a flaw of the movie as a reason why I don’t watch horror movies much, though.

The thing that’s probably an actual flaw is that… kinda the whole setup doesn’t make any sense? Like, literally the writers never even attempt to motivate the bad guys at all (according to a Joe Bob interlude, the writers actually did sit down and make sure they had a worked out motivation amongst themselves, and that it made sense in their heads… but none of that makes it into the movie, and I tbh question how rigorous they were being). Maybe that’s for the best, because “plausible motivations” and “cool haunted house deathtrap setting” really don’t mix well together, but it’s definitely a thing.

Recommended to people who like the kind of movie this is, I guess.