FINAL DESTINATION

The 2000s were a rocky decade for horror. On the mainstream front, it was an uneven transition from Scream and Saw knock-offs to the Blumhouse era, beginning in earnest with 2009’s Paranormal Activity. There are plenty of standalone movies that would’ve made beautiful, bizarre houses - Thirteen Ghosts and 30 Days of Night come to mind, reception aside - but the popularity either came and went or never arrived in the first place.

Saw and House of 1000 Corpses are two recent exceptions, kept respectively relevant by ongoing sequels and plain infamy. It would take a similar appeal to warrant another New Millennium massacre coming to HHN now.

It would take something like Final Destination.

Hands down, this is the tallest order on the list. There is no monster, no mask, no tangible threat at all beyond the looming specter of grisly, garish death. But the design philosophy for a Final Destination haunted house is as old as the medium. 

Since the halcyon days of boardwalk Laffs In The Dark, two headlights and a honk have been startling satisfied customers. The environment is the enemy, instead of the bad folks with butcher knives occupying it. There may be only so many times somebody will flinch at an oncoming fender, but it’s a start.

Final Destination already has five films of elaborate murder to pull from, with a sixth in the works according to series creator Jeffrey Reddick. Franchise fans have their preferred prophetic disasters - the log truck accident in Final Destination 2 and the roller coaster derailment from Final Destination 3 are especially sacred - but there’s no reason the designers couldn’t pick and choose. A falling pane of glass from the second movie might make use of Universal’s trusty spritz-for-shards trick in conjunction with a falling prop. The runaway subway car from the third movie, complete with hapless riders getting scraped away out the windows, could recycle the train set from Dead Exposure: Patient Zero with faceless survivors lying in wait instead of zombies. This is to say nothing of Rube Goldberg massacres invented wholecloth for the house.

The last Saw house, The Games of Jigsaw from HHN 27, provides another possible blueprint. While that benefited from a handful of killers in the mix, it was still structured around complicated death vignettes. Victim scares like these are contentious among event veterans as an easy gag to overuse, but Final Destination could also make inventive and expanded use of the “Fake Guest” trick last seen in The Purge at HHN 25. It’s one thing to watch a teetering truck flatten some poor soul. It’s another thing to watch it flatten the poor soul behind you after they stumble out of the conga line.

Considering its obvious limitations and accommodations, a Final Destination house would be the dark horse of any line-up. It’s not hard to imagine the reviews docking it for more startles than actual scares. But in fairness, the franchise itself delivers more of a graphically goofy good time than bone-chilling terror, and the one-of-a-kind execution would make it an immediate must-see. You just can’t beat Final Destination for morbid curiosity.

YOU’RE NEXT

It’s hard to call any shots from the 2010s. A lot of movies that would make great houses are now gestating in the limbo between timeliness and the cult immortality of something like Trick r’ Treat. The long-awaited adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was a repeated request, if never quite a rumor last year. The Conjuring already has one near-miss on the record, but its legacy-in-progress as a benchmark for modern horror means it’s still not out of the question.On a smaller scale, if Shudder appreciated the way Creepshow was handled out west, that opens the door to a budding catalog of material, none of it better suited than 2019’s Haunt. It’s got the goods - takes place in a lavishly demented roadside attraction - and it’s got the heat - from the writers behind A Quiet Place - but it doesn’t quite have the reach yet.

You’re Next makes sense as the gift that keeps on getting stolen.

If you’ve recently seen a horror film that features killers in animal masks, somebody involved probably owes a check to writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard. Its protracted release - reaching theaters two years after a 2011 festival premiere - only gave the imitators a head start. If you’ve never seen the movie, you know the masks: a tiger, a fox, and a lamb, all pale as ghosts.

And unlike so many knockoffs, You’re Next actually puts them to good use.

An estranged family reunites in their tony vacation home, only for an arrow through the window to interrupt dinner. Cue the masked killers picking them off one by one. This first half is enough to scratch any Horror Nights fan’s slasher itch. The tiger, the fox, and the lamb skulk around the windows and hide under beds and leave unpleasant messages in the nearest available bodily fluid. The setting even hits that distinct HHN sweet spot of Victorian splendor in quiet decline.

The second half of the film is where it gets interesting, though. If you haven’t seen You’re Next, keep an eye out for whichever streaming service has it this Halloween season and read the following paragraph at your own risk.

When the masked invaders learn the hard way that one of the guests may be a more capable killer than they are, the predator-prey relationship gets awful blurry. The standard hack-and-slash is soon replaced by Home Alone-grade booby traps. The hunters become the hunted. In an adapted sense, the victims and the maniacs would trade places halfway through the house. If the end of the film is anything to go on, it’s not like the guests would be any safer one way or the other. Mix in a synthwave score as catchy as recent parkwide loops and you’ve got a crackerjack recipe for mayhem.

You’re Next remains a bit of a longshot for the time being. It does find more fans every year. The director has worked his way up to Godzilla vs. Kong, so it’ll only get more attention. Like some of the older films on this list, it earned a boutique line of shirts, socks, and enamel pins. But for now it’s still aging gracefully on the cult end of limbo. 

A 10th anniversary in 2023 may be its best chance in the near future. Fortunately those masks are never going out of style.