Movie Review: “Haunt”

By Matt Pascarella

Runtime: 1 hour, 32 min

Rated R

It’s October! And that means scary movies. ‘Haunt’ is from the writers of ‘A Quiet Place’ (if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it) and produced by horror movie producer/writer/actor Eli Roth, so immediately I was onboard. It tells the story of six friends who go through an extreme haunted house, only to find out it’s much more than they were expecting.

The movie opens in Carbondale, Illinois where three girls are getting ready to go out on Halloween. They go to a club where they meet a guy who tells them about a haunted house. They meet up with two other friends and head to the haunted house. They are greeted by a silent clown and in order to enter they must deposit their phones in a lock box as well as sign a waiver. In the distance, they hear a woman screaming. They enter the house anyway and the clown closes the door behind them.

As they walk through, it starts out a little cheesy, but soon becomes creepier. They see a few unsettling images. It gets creepier when they come across three doors designed as coffins and they must decide which door to go through. They begin to suspect they are being followed...are they? Things go south quickly when a member of the group becomes seriously hurt. A member of the haunted house offers to help them. This only makes things worse. One member of the group manages to find his way out of the haunted house. He quickly notices the box with their cell phones is missing. Now things go from worse to horrible. The group does eventually find their phones, but has trouble accessing them. Can the group make it out of this haunted house gone very bad?

I went into this movie with high expectations, maybe too high. Eli Roth is a decent horror movie producer/writer and has done movies like the ‘Hostel’ trilogy and ‘Cabin Fever.’ What really drew me in was that it was written by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck who wrote ‘A Quiet Place.’

‘Haunt’ does have a strong start where you wonder about the weird clown who says nothing and what this haunted house could have in it that a waiver would be necessary (I kind of knew, but was still curious how it was going to happen). About halfway through the second act, they kind of lost me. This movie is very, very gruesome and bloody. It has a few jump scares but is not really that scary overall. It drags in the middle and never really regains its momentum.

I got bored once I realized what was about to happen and lost interest in the outcome. This was definitely not worth renting and I wouldn’t recommend it. You should watch anything else instead. Two severed thumbs down.