Review: ‘Haunt Season’ arrives as one of the best modern slashers -

A great slasher needs a few things to be effective: practical effects, inventive kills, and buckets of blood. It’s a bonus if there’s decent acting and cool cinematography thrown into the mix. Many of horror’s best slashers, from John Carpenter’s Halloween to modern fare like The Final Girls, give each component significant attention that allows the audience to actually invest in the story. You can now add Haunt Season to the list of slashers that just get it. Writer/director Jake Jarvi checks all the right boxes when it comes to delivering a slasher we’ll be talking about for years to come.

Matlida (Sarah Elizabeth) has just graduated from college and decides to take a breather before she dives into the deep end of the acting world. Rather than immediately moving to Los Angeles or New York City, she auditions for a Chicago haunt for the last few nights of the season. We first meet her during her audition when she delivers a guttural, Jamie Lee Curtis-worthy scream. Haunt owners and other employees look on in amazement and offer her the role without hesitation.

Rosemary (Katelin Stack), Bradford (Stephen Kristof), and the rest of the haunt cast welcome Matlida with open arms. Mika (Tyra Renee), however, mistrusts her for presumably replacing her maybe-girlfriend Taylor (Ana Dragovich), who vanished a few days prior after spending a late night at the haunt. Mika obsesses over her friend’s disappearance – the only person among the cast who finds it odd she stopped showing up. But, as another character counters, people always leave seasonal gigs without so much as a goodbye. It’s just the way things operate.

Armed with her bone-shaking scream, Matilda takes Taylor’s spot in the scalping room where co-haunter Danny (Adam Hinkle) twists the sharpest blade into her skull. Her performance is so convincing, you can see the fear bleeding from attendee’s faces. Even Danny stops for a moment, clearly impressed with her immense lungpower. As Realm of Terror continues its run, a masked maniac circles the cast and begins picking them off in increasingly grisly ways. There are garden shears and chainsaws galore – oh my!

Jarvi clearly has a taste for blood. Throughout Haunt Season, he satiates slasher fans’ bloodlust through carefully crafted setpieces boasting ghastly practical effects and SFX makeup (shout-out to artist Stevie Calbrese, who appeared on season 9 of SYFY’s Face Off). Mutilated bodies mean nothing, though, if you don’t have empathetic characters attached. The haunters feel like real people with complicated relationships, desires, and flaws. In building out a compelling batch of protagonists, Jarvi also threads together themes about reality versus fantasy, the masks we wear in life, and how some people are just wired to be psychopaths. Characters and concepts collide spectacularly in one of the year’s best horror flicks. It’s primed for a midnight audience, and while it’s a Halloween movie through and through, it’s perfect for any time of the year.

Haunt Season isn’t attempting to reinvent the slasher. It’s simply injecting some excitement into one of horror’s tentpole subgenres. From electric cinematography to creative kills, the indie slasher uses every resource at its disposal. Its effectiveness lies in Jake Jarvi’s deep understanding of genre. With Scream as one of his most important films, the filmmaker takes cues from the 1996 classic but carves out something just as special. Fitting snuggling next to other haunt horror movies like Hell Fest and Haunt, Haunt Season more than earns its place as one of the best modern slashers.

Haunt Season enjoys a limited theatrical run starting October 4 in LA and then hits digital on October 8.