The Houses October Built
This year has proven there’s still room for good entries in the found footage genre. The Conspiracy, Affliction, Willow Creek and The Den might not have pushed the envelope, but they didn’t need to, because they were smart.
The Houses October Built is not.
I have a handful of movies I watch every Halloween, stuff like Trick ‘r Treat and the original Halloween, and when I went into this, I did so with in the hopes that I would be leaving it with another film to add to that list. That didn’t happen, and this is mostly because this may be one of the most predictable horror films I’ve ever seen.
When I was in middle school, a friend and I turned his family’s garage into a haunted house. We used black sheets for walls, played spooky sounds from a hidden stereo, and after a few hours of work we had a makeshift haunted maze complete with a budget fog machine that died a slow death that night, sputterring a pitiful stream of smoke for about an hour before it died on us. It took maybe three hours to build, and that fact was obvious to anyone who saw it.
The Houses October Built is not unlike my shoddy first attempt at running a haunted house. Both are lame, unscary messes best left relegated to the memories of the poor saps who were tricked — or harassed by two kids — into enduring.
