The Houses October Built (2015)
Starring: Brandy Schaefer, Zack Andrews, Bobby Roe, Mikey Roe, Jeff Larson
Directed by: Bobby Roe
Rating: 
Oh lordy, here we go again: found footage. Grainy, wobbly shots of feet and lights and bushes, banal conversation, beer swilling and beer bellies. Except that the found footage in The Houses October Built is a little different, in that a lot of it's real.
Hallowe'en is almost here, and five friends embark on a road trip to discover the scariest haunted houses in America. But these aren't haunted houses as we know them over here: National Trust properties with tastefully told tales of martyrdom and torture, grey ladies and headless knights. Neither are they anything like our fairground ghost trains, where the biggest risk you run is being felt up by a sixteen-year-old dressed as a werewolf while fake cobwebs and slashed bin bags tangle in your hair. Nor do they offer the slick thrills of Alton Towers' disclaimer shrouded Haunted House or Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors or Dungeon franchises.
No, these are bloodsoaked, visceral, ramshackle affairs housed in corrugated iron shacks on the backroads of the Deep South, run by... well, the kind of folk you'd expect to be attracted by a career that involves dressing as a killer clown or lurking behind a wall that drips blood, spending nights chained up in a basement or hanging from the rafters. To a Brit, even a horror- loving Brit, the scenes shot in these schlock-shock bargain-basement palaces of fear seem utterly deranged – and that's before we get to hear from the real participants and learn just how lawless the Haunt business is, each attraction struggling to outdo the others, pushing the boundaries of the horror experience with scant regard to health and safety – of staff or customers.
And as our ghosthunters delve into this strange world more deeply, searching for a mysterious itinerant 'extreme haunt', they uncover much more than they bargained for. If ever there were a case of 'careful what you wish for' this is it...
It's a shame, then, that after an enthralling first hour, in which authentic bat-sh*t craziness is so skilfully blended with plot-driven spooky goings on that it's hard to say where the former ends and the latter begin, that the film's finale is something of a let down. True, our heroes get to experience their ultimate scare, but compared to the genuine off-the-cuff madness that's gone before, the scripted nightmare falls a little flat.
Nevertheless, this is a bold attempt to do something new with an already tired genre format, mixing classic rural gothic tropes with 21st century technology. So hats off to director Bobby Roe for so nearly pulling it off with this twisted love letter to a macabre, bizarre slice of Americana. And for warning me that I never want to visit a Haunt...