By SHAWN MACOMBER

Starring Sarah Elizabeth, Janet Jurado and Adam Hinkle
Written and directed by Jake Jarvi
Epic Pictures Group/DREAD

The fairground haunted house attraction is a perennially tempting setting for genre filmmakers. Horror grandmaster Tobe Hooper took us there between the Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist with 1981’s The Funhouse. Legendary low-budget maestro Charles Band’s dad, Albert, punched our ticket (and another hole in one-sheet plumbing) six years later at the gate of Ghoulies II. And 2015’s Hell House LLC earned hella buzz for imbuing the premise with deadly, satanic vibes.    

It’s not difficult to see the appeal; You can instantly plunge your characters into a grand guignol pastiche brimming with the psychotic killer’s tools of the trade and never have to worry about pesky little details like, say, exposition and suspension of disbelief. Your characters and audience go willingly like Dayglo plastic bracelet-wearing sheep to the good-time slaughter. Maybe not what Neil Postman had in mind when he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, but if the title fits…

Into this sub-subgenre fray careens writer-director Jake Jarvi’s HAUNT SEASON, a fun, nasty, pitch-perfect variation on the theme, in which the final two days of, well, haunt season become a bloodbath for a gang of theatre nerds moonlighting as killers, monsters, and victims – unaware until it’s too late that a real killer is on the loose, and some of the deaths are attributable to something more sinister than an amateur take on the Stanislavsky method. 

The vibe behind the scenes of the haunt feels very Empire Records/Can’t Hardly Wait-y, ’90s indie comedy. We have a gaggle of young, somewhat adrift twenty-something characters trying to balance sarcastic and sexual impulses with post-teenage angst and figuring out what might come next in life when the last temp-job screams fade. 

The entilre cast is great at channeling this – especially lead Sarah Elizabeth as Matilda, a laid-back, last-minute replacement actress who offers the audience an outside-inside perspective on the ensuing chaos, personal and professional. 

Happily, HAUNT SEASON never loses sight of its heart, both metaphorically and, in at least one instance, literally, as we watch the beating organ hacked out of a jovial actor with an axe –Which is to say, you don’t have to wait more than three minutes for the action to start. Though there is some cool backstory, eventually, the focus is on creative, over-the-top kills, not exposition. I like “elevated horror” as much as the next guy, but the “short fuses, big blood-splattered bangs” approach here is a nice palate cleanser in our current moment. 

Actually, in this way, HAUNT SEASON mirrors its real-life setting as effectively as its best predecessors: No one would want to attend a haunted house in which the first crazed clown, escaped mental patient, chainsaw, or prosthetic wound didn’t show up until 45 minutes into the tour. HAUNT SEASON gets on with the damn spectacle, delivering scares and brief comic relief along the way.

Go on, now. Take my money.

HAUNT SEASON begins a limited theatrical run on October 4. The film debuts on VOD on October 8.