The Gore Connoisseurs

With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the safest way to get your fix of Halloween haunt attractions is on the small screen. Luckily, movies set in Halloween scare mazes are a surprisingly interesting subgenre. Haunt attractions provide an enviroment where it can be difficult to tell if something has gone wrong, as evidenced by several times haunt actors have accidentally hanged themselves , with patrons passively watching them die in the belief it's part of the show. With the growing popularity of extreme haunts like Blackout and McKamey Manor - some have begun to question the motivations of scare actors who inflict such no-holds-barred terror. With the absense of a safe word at McKamey Manor and punters only being allowed out when Russ McKamey lets them, the boundary between paid-for scares and real-life psychological torture is deliberately thin. The following five films explore the idea of what can happen when the brakes come off and safe scares become frightening real. The House...

The danger with meta horror is that any genuine scares are suffocated with a deluge of nods and winks. The movie can end up looking just a bit too self-satisfied by its discovery that the horror genre is kind of silly and full of clichés. Yes, we have noticed. Films like Scream and Friday the 13th: Jason Lives are outrageously entertaining, but nobody can accuse them of being that scary. You're meant to view everything from an ironic distance and actively enjoy the characters' gruesome deaths. Even Cabin in the Woods , Drew Goddard's mega-ambitious meta horror, isn't that scary. It's very clever and it tries to explore why we love horror so much rather than just poking fun at the genre, but you're unlikely to be screaming in fright. The Cabin in the Woods aka the more successful Evil Dead reboot Ruin Me, Preston DeFrancis's debut film which premiered at the 2017 Screamfest and has recently come to Shudder , may have upped the meta horror ant...