Principal photography has wrapped on What Are You Afraid Of?, a feature documentary from Silver Compass Studios that spends a season inside a haunted house to ask why so many of us go looking for fear on purpose.
Filming concluded October 30 after months embedded with the volunteer crew behind the Boo Crew Haunted House in Rochester, Illinois, following them as they planned, built, rehearsed and ultimately staged their 2026 Halloween attraction. Alongside that footage, the film weaves in interviews with psychologists, historians and other creators working in the fear as entertainment business, using their perspectives to dig into the history and psychology behind our attraction to being scared.
“Finishing principal photography is a huge milestone, but what excites me most is how much the story grew while we were filming,” director Ben Harl said in a statement. “We started out exploring why people are drawn to fear, but spending time with the Boo Crew revealed another story. These are people who have found friendships, a creative outlet, and a place where they fit in. That human element has become an important part of the film.”
Harl, whose horror short MARA and segment in the anthology Final Days: Tales from the End Times preceded his 2024 documentary Afterlife, frames the new project as a study of fear’s stranger uses. “Fear as entertainment is one of the strangest and most revealing things humans do,” he added. “We write stories about it, make movies about it, build entire environments around it, and then buy tickets to experience it. Understanding what draws people into that world, both as creators and audiences, is really at the heart of this film.”
Silver Compass Studios, founded in 2019 and based in Decatur, Illinois, is targeting an October 2027 release, timed, fittingly enough, for another Halloween season.
