Haunt (2019)

There is a haunted house in Carbondale, Illinois, and inside it a group of friends is methodically disassembled by people in masks. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods have made a lean, mean machine of a slasher, one that understands the genre's oldest contract: establish the bodies, then spend them. The film does not pause to editorialize. It does not pause at all. The killers are members of an extreme body modification collective who operate a seasonal murder attraction, which is a premise that could carry an economic critique if anyone involved had the slightest interest in mounting one. They do not. They want to stab people with a pitchfork, and they do.

The cast includes women of color in the central friend group, and the film treats their presence with the indifference of a slasher assembling six warm bodies, which is to say no one remarks upon it and no statement is made. Harper, our survivor, is fleeing an abusive boyfriend and a childhood of hiding under the bed from an abusive father, and she proves resourceful enough to turn the killers' own mechanisms against them. This is competent final-girl engineering. It is not a thesis. The film would be baffled to learn anyone thought it was arguing something.

The body modification imagery is deployed for revulsion, not affirmation. The masks come off and the faces underneath are the punchline, and the joke is horror. There is no climate anxiety, no class warfare, no lecture, no history being corrected, no neurodivergent interiority, no queer subtext. What remains is a tight eighty-nine minutes of trapdoors and shotguns and a jack-in-the-box that times a firing mechanism. It is, by the standards of this ledger, a nearly blank page. Some films arrive carrying a message. This one arrives carrying a pitchfork, which it uses. A rare and restful thing, honestly. The killers burn the attraction down at the end, and nobody learns anything.