Haunt (2019)

Directors: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods
Writers: Beck and Woods
Starring: Katie Stevens, Will Brittain, Lauryn Alisa McClain, and Andrew Lewis Caldwell

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Six people looking for an adventure stumble upon a mysterious haunted house, where they quickly learn that the sinister forces inside are interested in much more than merely scaring the hapless collection of good-looking visitors...

It's an idea that's been done millions of times before, and that will no doubt be done a million times more. But the main frustration with Haunt is that, while it does build up an unnerving atmosphere and has some effectively “icky” kills, it doesn't really aim to be anything more than that. Which is a shame, because underneath its predictability is a truly classic film waiting to be born.

Katie Stevens is Harper, a young woman who is trying to get out of an abusive relationship with her controlling boyfriend. In order to help take her mind off things, she reluctantly agrees to hang out with some friends—and in the process, of course, meets Nathan, an attractive, athletic man who quickly takes a liking to the freshly single lady.

The group head off to find a haunted house, and instead stumble on one when Harper suddenly feels like she is being stalked by her boyfriend. As they sit off to the side of a dark road in their old van, a “Haunted House” sign suddenly lights up, and the group has very little qualms about entering an otherwise unpromoted haunt. From there, the red flags continue to pile up: the bizarre man at the gate who requires no money; the seemingly vicious torture of another soul unlucky enough to wander in; the bloodcurdling screams heard off in the distance; but these are just explained away as completely normal events for a random haunted house off the side of a mostly abandoned road that no one knows about.

I think we all know where this is headed: the creepy masked “characters” in the haunted house are more than they seem, and the characters get picked off one by one in gruesome ways. Can anyone put a stop to the bloodbath? Or will all of them meet their end inside the abandoned building?

The synopsis itself reveals the underlying problem: it's all too familiar. For a film that seems hellbent on throwing up some shocking violence and maintaining a tense feeling of unease—two things it does rather well—there's just too much straightforward, linear storytelling to truly elevate it into the higher echelons of the subgenre. It's pretty obvious from the get-go who's going to survive and who's going to die, and the filmmakers show no real intention of subverting that tired formula. Most of the side characters are still stupid caricatures who do stupid things to put themselves further in harm's way, making the jobs of these murderers way easier than it should be. Even during the meandering finale—which goes on about ten minutes too long—when the audience is no doubt expecting one final, decimating twist to justify the elongated length, we basically just end up with the ending we already had ten minutes prior, with nothing shocking or necessary details added.

And can we stop with the trend of horror movies half-heartedly trying to pull on heartstrings? In this case, we not only have Harper dealing with an abusive boyfriend, but also a backstory involving an abusive father that's never resolved. There's no doubt that horror movies can effectively deal with heartrending issues (see The Orphanage for a perfect example, and to a lesser extent, The Babadook), but it takes complete commitment from the creators for that to work. Here, Harper's troubles feel thrown in more as an afterthought, as a cheap way to give her character more dimensionality, while the lack of resolution is ultimately a slap in the face to the viewer.

That's not to say at all that it's a bad film—in fact, I would definitely say it's still above average for what it is. The acting really carries it, with no one turning in a poor performance, while Katie Stevens absolutely steals the show as Harper. It's certainly not her fault the floundering backstories fail to resonate with the viewer, because she does her part to sell them: she cries, cowers, screams, or acts confident, all to the whims of the script, and with a clear commitment to the material that's sometimes missing behind the scenes. She better watch it though: her 2019 output includes two horror films (this, along with Polaroid), which just might pigeonhole her into the genre; she's more deserving of greater chances than that.

The effects work is also excellent: although limited to quick shots, the film's use of practical effects gives the death scenes much stronger impact than any amount of computer generated imagery could provide. The kills really help to carry the tense mood along, even as the characters seem to get dumber and dumber, setting themselves up for easy—though often predictable, as is par for the course—demises.

In other words, Haunt works when it's doing what the title implies, but falls off the rails in the fleeting moments when it feels like it has more that it wants to say. This is a good movie full of “what ifs” that will leave you pondering just how much better it could have been.

OVERALL: 6/10