4 Haunted House Horror Movies to Watch Before Your Next Haunt Visit

Hell House, LLC tells the story of a group of friends who run a traveling haunted house in upstate New York, when tragically, their 2009 attraction meets a mysterious and fatal end on opening night.

Hell House, LLC is a found footage meets mockumentary-style film that follows a filmmaker through an interview with the lone surviving member of the group, who also happens to have a cache of old recordings of what really went down at that year’s location, the Abaddon Hotel.

What’s special about Hell House, LLC is that we get to see the making of a haunted attraction and how constantly being immersed in this kind of work can play tricks on the mind. And when things take a turn for the supernatural, we also see how the team crumbles and turns against each other.

What balances out the supernatural elements in the film is the footage from the night everything goes awry. One of the scariest parts, and something that could happen in real life, is when people are crushed in a claustrophobic stairway, trying to escape the climax of the experience, the basement. 

All of the occult is tethered to real-life danger, which makes Hell House, LLC a standout in this horror subgenre. 

The Houses October Built is another found-footage film that follows a group of friends as they pile into an RV and tour the country in search of the most extreme haunted houses, something not uncommon for the most loyal of haunted attraction goers. (I, myself, am guilty of making an annual pilgrimage with my husband to check off all the most extreme East Coast Haunts for our wedding anniversary each October).

But things go wrong when Brandy, Zack, Jeff, Bobby, and Mikey forget that, for as much as they enjoy being scared, some people like doing the scaring even more, so much that it blurs the lines of consent and entertainment.

The workers of the haunts where they park their RV to sleep begin tormenting them overnight, however, some of the group believe these acts are both a test and an invitation to see if they’re cut out for the most extreme and most elusive attraction on their list, another traveling haunt called Blue Skeleton.

But by the time the group determines whether or not this is the case, it just might be too late.

In a world of real-life extreme haunts like McKamey Manor and Blackout, who’ve had the ethics of their operations dissected on a national level, it’s entirely conceivable.

And what makes The Houses October Built especially unique is the way it investigates homegrown haunts in the backwoods of Louisiana—ones that aren’t highly publicized and marketed, and thus, not regulated to the same degree as the more mainstream. And when the show is on the road each year, who knows how much its workers can get away with?

Haunt follows a group of college kids on Halloween night as they leave a party and stumble across a backyard haunt. Eager to keep the night going, they sign their weavers, surrender their cell phones, and head right in.

But what they find out is that the actors behind the haunt are extremely committed to their characters, so committed that they have collectively had their real faces modified and tattooed to permanently look like their masks. 

What makes Haunt particularly terrifying is how willing the kids are to sign their lives away, but that’s only so terrifying because it’s something most viewers would probably do too. We enter haunted houses and hayrides and theme parks without a second thought, and it’s this easily extended trust, trust that I’ve extended myself, that gets the group in big trouble.

It’s this trust that allows for a girl to be murdered in front of the group and for them to clap, chalking it up to great special effects.

What sets this apart from the rest of the films in this subgenre is the character development. Harper, the protagonist, is a young woman who has endured abuse of power through domestic violence, both watching it in her parents’ relationship and enduring it firsthand from her boyfriend, Sam.

Once she realizes that haunt workers are also attempting to abuse their power and the trust her friends have extended, she becomes hellbent on revenge—a mission that teaches her she has more than enough strength to walk away from her abuser in real life. 

Hell Fest follows another group of college kids on a trip to Hell Fest, the spookiest theme park you’ve ever seen, full of haunted attractions. Sounds like a dream, right?

Well, what follows happens to be my biggest nightmare when it comes to attending haunted attractions: what would happen if one of the audience members inserted themselves into the haunt without the rest of the cast or staff knowing?

It's more likely than you think. If you’ve ever worked at a haunt, you know this. Haunts offer a mere two months of employment, and each year local attractions struggle to hire enough workers to execute all their scares.

There’s high turnover. Faces come and go, and most of the time they are painted up.

In Hell Fest, things go very wrong very fast when a serial killer sneaks into Hell Fest and inserts himself into the haunts. 

And let me just say this, it’s not his first time doing it. At the last haunt he terrorized, the killer hung the bodies of two of his victims among the other props. It took days before the smell made staff members realize the bodies weren’t a part of the installation.

Think of all the haunts you’ve been to, what’s stopping someone else from doing the same?

No matter which way you slice it, these four films are essential viewing before you visit another haunted house: either they’ll heighten the fear of the experience, or you’ll have a little warning of all the ways things can go south.

Happy haunting.