The Fright Stuff (FrightFest 2026)

One thing that distinguishes horror fans from other genre fandoms is this; they have a healthy curiosity about why their chosen genre works for them. You cannot watch movies where people are chased, stabbed, tortured and dismembered without encountering at least one person who wrinkles their nose and asks “Why would anyone want to watch that?”. As a result, horror fans like to make sure they have a ready-to-launch answer for that question. The Fright Stuff, which had its UK premiere at FrightFest, isn’t about horror fiction but it is about horror culture, and that might be more relevant to answering your co-worker’s eternal question about why all of this appeals to you.

Directed by Mike Meyer – not to be confused with Michael Myers, or indeed Mike Myers – it’s a look at what for many people will be their childhood initiation into the joy of the scare: haunted house attractions. Meyers previously directed Feeding the Beast: 25 Years of Statesville Haunted Prison, a look at the titular Chicago haunted house. The Fright Stuff widens its view to look at the entire field of haunted houses, ghost trains and more, positioning them as (to quote one early interviewee) “an iconic Americana thing”.

Actually, that’s not quite true. One of the most fascinating revelations to me was that the first haunted house attraction in the world was in Liphook, East Hampshire. Of course, you can go back much further. You could say that the mediums and mesmerists of the Victorian age has something to do with it, except The Fright Stuff points up a very telling difference: seances and mesmeric demonstrations were implicitly for a respectable audience. Spiritualists and mesmerists were hopeful that their practice was on the verge of being legitimate science, and as such they had to attract an educated, influential audience. Haunted houses were, from the start, a working-class entertainment.

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Freed from the British curse of classism, it’s no wonder the haunted house found an understanding audience in America. Perhaps an American audience had been primed for some ghoulish entertainment at their carnivals by P.T. Barnum and his Feejee mermaids, but again there are crucial differences. Unlike a freak show, a horror attraction should be safely fictional, and it shouldn’t exploit either the performers or the crowd. And it’s here that The Fright Stuff becomes, at least subtextually, a reflection on the entire meaning of horror as an art form.

The great American horror films of the 1970s are often praised for their refusal to reassure the audience. Back before Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper were recognised names, you could sit down and watch something like Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and genuinely believe you were watching some psychopath’s home movies. The haunted houses, in the verdict of one interviewee here, have a similar appeal. You don’t know who these masked people are, and it becomes deliciously easy to suspend disbelief and convince yourself that skeleton is really after you. Equally, though, another interviewee argues that the experience can’t be too nasty or it’s a turn-off. The 2000s trend for ‘torture porn’ only made a minor impact on the nation’s haunted houses, which largely concentrate on a more innocent age of monsters, slashers and jump-scares.

Truth be told, The Fright Stuff could stand to have more of this kind of analysis. As I noted above, it’s not like horror fans can’t handle a bit of critical attention – most of them welcome it. There’s some interesting looks at what it takes to build (and tear down, and rebuild somewhere else) these structures, and the history segment is genuinely revelatory. There’s also an awful lot of people talking about how nice everyone is, and how it feels like one big family, over the kind of continual music bed that a lot of modern documentaries seem to think is essential. Yes, the experience can’t be too nasty, but it’s less enlightening when it’s this nice. Still, it remains an entertaining look at what you might call the community outreach team of horror, taking scares off the page and screen and into your neighbourhood.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – THE FRIGHT STUFF