Haunters: The Art of the Scare Review (Film, 2017)
Haunters: The Art of the Scare poster, featuring a silhouette figure of a man with a chainsaw inside an old-fashioned open mouth haunted house entrance.
Haunters: The Art of the Scare is about my people. This is a documentary from director Jon Schnitzer about home haunts and the haunted house industry. If you’re not familiar, a home haunt is an elaborate series of yard and/or home decorations designed to recreate the experience of a Halloween haunted house at home. We put up these displays for anyone to walk through, usually free of charge, and do it because we love Halloween, horror, haunted houses, and being scared. I spend a couple hundred dollars a year building a new haunt from the ground up; the people featured in this documentary spend a lot more. For some (like me), it’s a hobby; for others, it’s an attempt to prove their skills and move up to working professionally in the industry.
Haunters: The Art of the Scare is about home haunters. They’re just a very different kind of home haunter. Schnitzer puts his focus largely on the infamous McKamey Manor haunt. This was arguably the first extreme haunted house in America. For the price of a few cans of dog food, owner Russ McKamey would put you through a hellish night where the scare actors can touch you and you face everything from being force fed disgusting food to being water boarded. The other participants in the documentary all comment on the rise of extreme haunts—McKamey is not alone—while also discussing their own roles in amateur and professional haunted houses.
Insight into the McKamey Manor is the reason to watch this documentary. I’m not going to lie. I don’t like the extreme haunted house trend. McKamey Manor is (was? the documentary was filmed a few years ago, so others might exist now) the only extreme haunt to not have a safe word—a phrase you say in a haunted house to stop the experience, be checked on by staff, and be escorted out of the building. Even the extreme haunts like Blackout (also covered in the documentary) have a way to stop the horror. My thoughts are echoed by quite a few people in the documentary. Though people choose to enter these haunts (McKamey Manor now has a 20 page waiver and pre-screening to make sure people are physically and mentally okay to go through the experience), they are still being subjected to arguably abusive behavior in the name of being scared. It feels like anything goes and safety is not a consideration, though if they actually posed a genuine safety risk, they wouldn’t survive once they choose to collect entry fees.
This is what’s great about Haunters: The Art of the Scare. I actually found myself starting to understand why people like Russ McKamey choose to do an extreme haunt. I don’t want to spoil anything about his story and his journey with this haunt. The documentary does a great job of presenting people like Russ for who they are and letting them explain themselves. The extreme haunt discussion is a connecting thread and not meant as a critique of the industry.
I get it. Building a giant walk-in grim reaper structure is not your average Halloween decoration. It’s not extreme to me because it is ultimately static. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t grab you. It doesn’t confront you with nudity or simulated gunfire to scare you.
There’s nuance in the extreme haunt discussion that’s made pretty explicit in the film. For me, all but one of the haunts featured in the film is an extreme haunt. I wish we got to spend more time with Eric Lowther, the haunter who built a gigantic walk-in grim reaper figure somewhere on his property for Halloween. I understand, objectively, that building a haunted house structure roughly the size of a small house is extreme, but the presentation of the haunt is closer to what I do and what I’m comfortable with. There’s music. There’s moody lighting. There are creepy but not terrifying decorations. There’s fog. You might have to walk through an archway. From what we saw, the home haunt does not feature live actors, animatronics, or hosing people down with water.
I, personally, am not comfortable taking on the liability of including live actors or major animatronics and moving elements in a home haunt. I give credit to people like Donald Jolson, creator of Nightmare on Loganberry, for taking the time to learn how to build their own haunt structures. What Jolson, specifically, is doing is a professional quality haunted house in his parent’s front yard, complete with dummy chainsaws and drop panels for scare actors to pop out of. He’s creating a free and accessible haunted house experience for the people in his neighborhood at a significant financial loss. In the documentary, you see the strain that building the haunt puts on his relationships and the struggles he faces to get everything done. Despite having a very different style of haunt from me, his experiences in the documentary feel relatable and all too real.
I give Jon Schnitzer major credit for one angle I was not expecting in a documentary about home haunters. One of the biggest recurring interview subjects commenting on haunt trends and haunters is Shar Mayer. Mayer is a veteran scare actor with a story to tell. I mentioned all haunts being extreme haunts to some extent. Even working the Knott’s Scary Farm Halloween event, one of the most prestigious in the entire haunted house industry, Mayer’s safety as an actor was not guaranteed and the experience working one haunt significantly changed her life. What she has to say about safety, guest interaction, and the dangers of extreme haunts is heartbreaking. I could have watched an entire documentary about her life as a haunter and been thrilled with her insights and experiences.
Herein lies the main problem of Haunters: The Art of the Scare. Schnitzer has a lot of great things in this documentary. The film is really well shot. The interviews he manages to get with some of the most famous people in and around the industry—filmmakers and hosts of the haunted house gameshow Hellevator Jenn and Sylvia Soska, the creative director of Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights John Murdy, co-creator of Blackout haunt Josh Randall, founder and CEO of Bluhmouse Productions Jason Blum—are incredible. There’s just so much great content that he has to include that the documentary loses structure and narrative clarity. Topics switch with no transitions only to be dropped entirely for the rest of the documentary. The stories and discussions about home haunts and extreme haunts are fascinating; they’re just not as clear as they could be. It’s impressive for the amount of information Schnitzer fits into the film. A more experienced editor would have shaped the film is a more logical way.
Haunters: The Art of the Scare is still fascinating to watch. If you ever wanted insight into haunted houses and the people who make them, I suggest you give it a try. If you’re a haunter like me and want to put faces and voices to names you’ve read about (or maybe even interacted with in the online haunt community), click play as soon as you can. Ultimately, the documentary is a celebration of the people who invest their time, energy, and resources into making a memorable Halloween experience for anyone looking for a scare. You, like me, might not relate to what they want to build, but you’ll relate to passionate people doing what they can to make other people happy. That’s worth celebrating.
Haunters: The Art of the Scare is currently streaming on Netflix.
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