Haunt just popped onto Netflix.
I have been waiting to see the slasher movie Hell Fest - it is based around a group of friends getting stuck in a fairground fright house and getting stalked by a masked killer.
Hell Fest did not come out in theatres in NZ and I was not sure enough that it would be worth spending money to see it via a streamer. Plus, since it was a smaller genre movie, it always felt like perfect fare for Netflix.
When I saw the premise for Haunt, it sounded like the perfect substitute
The movie features some effective scares, but it is never consistent in its tension or understanding what makes its villains scary.
There is something kind of anonymous about it - there are some gore-y kills and some effective jump scares but no real building tension. The effect might have been greater on the big screen, but the movie suffers from a monotonous tone that is just unrelentingly oppressive.
It is an issue that I have with a lot of modern horror movies - the tone is bleak from the outset and so when the killing starts, it does not feel like a significant development in the story.
The key issue I had was that I did not have any investment in the main characters. It is nothing against the cast - the script gives them nothing to work with.
I wanted more character development from the group of teens. I know this genre and the expediency of teens for the bodycount, but I could not even lock into what archetypes they are using - we are introduced to them at a party, which feels like a great opportunity to give us a sense of who they are, and how they relate to each other.
It means that when they start dying, I did not care and the movie became a bit dull.
The climax relies on some editing cheats and other contrivances to get our heroine out of peril that ruined any good feeling I had left.
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