Vague Visages’ Hell Fest essay contains spoilers. Gregory Plotkin’s 2018 movie on Amazon and Apple TV features Amy Forsyth, Reign Edwards and Bex Taylor-Klaus. Check out more VV film essays at the home page.

Halloween haunts are big business, with the super popular seasonal attractions slated to generate record-breaking profits in 2026, thanks to an overall rise in spooky spending. But October can be a chilly, even miserable time of year, and for those too cold or lazy to venture outside to actually visit their local haunt, there’s Hell Fest. Gregory Plotkin’s criminally underrated 2018 gem is set at a big haunt attraction, kind of like Halloween Horror Nights or Knott’s Scary Farm. Crucially, it was shot on location at Six Flags in Georgia, which immediately lends more credibility to the whole exercise than the risible Blood Fest (2018), which was released the same year and appears to have been shot in a cheaply decorated warehouse. Hell Fest follows a group of twenty-something friends who reconnect after several years apart as they prepare for a night of spooky fun. Led by Natalie (Amy Forsyth), who’s dealing with some kind of undisclosed trauma, the idea is to forget their problems for the night while enjoying some (safe) scares. The only problem is that a masked killer, who took out another haunt just a few years prior, stalks the premises and waits to spot his next victims.

There are tons of similarly themed movies out there, but Hell Fest is the only truly great one aside from Haunt, which released in 2019 and caused more of a splash. While Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ film is terrific in its own way, it’s set at a slapdash roadside attraction rather than a proper establishment. Hell Fest gives the feeling of attending a Halloween haunt, with all the excitement and electricity that entails, alongside a classic slasher story with a real sting in its tail. Chainsaws, cackling ghouls, screaming patrons — all the sounds you’d expect to hear are included in the soundscapes, which also incorporate creepy nursery rhymes. The masked killer, who hums “Pop Goes the Weasel” throughout, is gifted his own theme too — an eerie, string-led little ditty that blends in perfectly. Otherwise, the pounding dance music and strobe lights further ground viewers in the experience of strolling around Hell Fest itself.

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Each attraction is cooler than the last, and it’s easy to imagine the actors’ reactions to the various jump scares are genuine. The geography is purposely confusing, making it feel like a gigantic, sprawling maze of stuff. As a theme park, Hell Fest is packed with extras and scare actors, which is kind of a lost art. Only recently, viewers complained that the Prom sequence in Mike Flanagan’s divisive Amazon Carrie series (2026-) looks like it was attended by about 10 people. Again, shooting Hell Fest at a real, functioning theme park adds so much lovely tactility to an otherwise straightforward premise, and the film’s biggest strength — aside from making viewers feel like they’re there there — is that general audiences probably won’t wonder why the protagonists don’t just search for the nearest exit. Suspension of disbelief is notoriously difficult in horror movies, especially nowadays when so many self-identifying fans of the genre are obnoxious Cinema Sins-esque cynics.

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Hell Fest keeps things moving at such a rapid clip that there’s no time to take a step back and argue the particulars. By putting viewers in the shoes of its protagonists, the movie emulates the feeling of running through a haunted attraction with your friends, hopped up on sugar and giddy over being scared to the extent you’re not really recognizing the very real danger until it’s too late. It’s chilling when Final Girl Natalie processes a murder taking place right in front of her, chiefly because everything in the charm school haunt is so effective. Plotkin gets plenty of mileage out of the many different mazes, rides and scare attractions, which are typically bathed in fluorescent lights. He plays with shadows and spatial awareness, so another dead end is always right around the corner. Forsyth plays it well, oscillating between arrogance and fear, though the performances are strong across the board. Still, as the cheeky Taylor, Bex Taylor-Klaus walks (or rather struts) away with the movie. It’s heartbreaking when she finally perishes.

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Each character’s death hits hard because these people feel like real friends, with shared histories, in-jokes and — in the case of Taylor and Natalie — barely concealed resentments. Plus, the dialogue is realistic — droll rather than snarky. “I have a very specific phobia of demon clowns” Natalie’s love interest, Gavin (Roby Attal), deadpans at one point. Their fledgling romance is sensitively handled (the duo doesn’t make out constantly like the rest of their group), and never threatens to overpower the narrative, as Gavin surprisingly exits the film quickly. The kills are nicely vicious too, inventive and gnarly, with a syringe to the eye looking especially convincing. Hell Fest boasts wall-to-wall great set-pieces, and it genuinely feels like the end for Natalie when she is left as a sitting duck on a broken-down ghost train. Anybody could go at any time, which is refreshing in a low-stakes slasher like this.

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Hell Fest’s killer is also amusingly drawn. Funnily enough, Taylor describes his exact M.O. when they first arrive at the theme park, as the villain blends into the crowd and essentially hides in plain sight, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. The attraction has a very strict no weapons policy, so he has to improvise. There are several impressive shots of him standing still or strolling slowly in heavy mist while everyone around him enjoys their night in blissful ignorance. Although Hell Fest ends on a relatively silly note, there’s an undeniable subversion to following the killer home rather than Natalie. The camera wends its way through a typical suburban neighborhood, following a minivan, until an unseen man moves inside a house covered in Halloween decorations, puts his mask and mementos away, and enters a living room where a sleeping little girl, all tuckered out from a night of trick-or-treating, suddenly awakens and greets him, happily shouting “Daddy!” Instead of ensuring Natalie gets her comeuppance, Hell Fest culminates with its villain living to ruin another haunt.

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Akela Cooper, who co-wrote the beloved and wonderfully loopy 2021 film Malignant, is credited as a screenwriter on Hell Fest alongside Seth M. Sherwood and Blair Butler, making this the rare horror movie co-written by two women, whose influence is keenly felt in the sweet friendship between Natalie and Brooke (Reign Edwards). When the two fantasize about going to Spain someday, it’s hard not to hope that they survive the night just so they can finally have some fun together. It’s tough to make viewers care about a bunch of kids running for their lives in a 90-minute movie, but Hell Fest benefits massively from the fact that the central group doesn’t do anything “wrong,” like venturing into an abandoned mine or having premarital sex instead of looking after their young campers. Plus, the late, great Tony Todd appears as both the spooky voice of Hell Fest itself and in a campy extended cameo, just to give the movie some additional horror cred. Hell Fest is the perfect watch for Halloween — equal parts scary, funny and fun — and it’s ideal for anybody who doesn’t mind leaving their house for a haunt.

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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