‘Haunt Season’ VOD Review
Stars: Ana Dragovich, Stephen Kristof, Sarah Elizabeth, Brent Bentley, Craig Benzine, Adam Hinkle, Terry Holt, Samuel James Howard, Janet Jurado | Written and Directed by Jake Jarvi
Haunt Season is the latest in a long line of scary attractions turned into real houses of horror, films like Haunt and Teddy Told Me To. Of course, you can go even further back, before haunted houses were popular, to films like Tourist Trap, the original House of Wax, all the way back to Mystery in the Wax Museum from 1933. It offers a great setting for films, with plenty of opportunity for jump scares and misdirecting the viewer, which keeps attracting filmmakers. It also means that it gets harder and harder to stand out from all the other similar films.
When Taylor (Ana Dragovich; Immersion, Butane) doesn’t show up for her shift at the local haunted house, everyone simply assumes she flaked out and ghosted them. Having seen the prologue, we know it’s a case of her being made into a ghost. Either way, the manager, Bradford (Stephen Kristof) needs to replace her and that’s where Matilda (Sarah Elizabeth) comes in, currently broke and living in her car she’s happy to make a few dollars being scalped several times a night.
But as she’s making friends with the rest of the cast while dying several times a night, someone else is taking death a lot more seriously. Using the attraction’s costumes to hide in plain sight, they mark their victim-to-be with a bloody fingerprint before dispatching them. And he has one hell of a show planned for All Hallows Eve.
Haunt Season was shot at a real haunt attraction, Realm of Terror Haunted House owned by Stephen Kristof, who also produced the film as well as playing Bradford. That gave writer/director Jake Jarvi (The Platoon of Power Squadron, The Girl) and cinematographer Alexander Lakin (Taken from Me, Mollywood) a perfect setting to film in with its neon-lit rooms full of gory decorations.
The problem is, Haunt Season doesn’t make nearly enough use of it. Much of the film takes place away from the haunt and the genre for that matter. The film leans heavily into backstage drama, centring around Matilda’s hesitation to take the leap and move to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actress, and many of the other characters have similar issues about the direction of their lives.
While that would be a logical and acceptable subplot for a film like this, Jarvi never really integrates the two threads. They pretty much take turns being presented to the viewer, we get scenes in the attraction with the killer, and then we get scenes of the characters hanging out discussing their lives the next day, and occasionally wondering about missing friends from the cast. Then we go back to the haunt, repeat until the inevitable final act slaughter.
When it is dishing up the horror, Haunt Season actually does a fairly good job of it. There are some inventive kills, including one late in the film involving a chainsaw that, while not overly bloody, caught me off guard. While several of the kills do happen off-screen, the ones we see do look good, with key makeup effects artist Corey Ruby (The Rake, The Demon’s Rook) delivering a hacked-out heart and severed arm among other things.
While it has some fun moments, Haunt Season suffers from uncertainty over just what kind of film it wants to be. It bounces back and forth between horror and drama, frequently killing its own momentum in the process. It’s not until it ditches the drama in the final act and concentrates on scares that it really comes to life.
**½ 2.5/5
Haunt Season is available on Digital via Epic Pictures’ Dread label.
______
