Back in the mid-2010s, when I worked at Monster Mountain Haunted Attraction, I had what I still think is a genuinely solid horror-movie idea. Picture an outdoor haunted house tucked deep into the woods, fog machines humming, actors screaming on cue and customers filing through, expecting the usual controlled creeps.
Now, introduce a wrinkle: a real serial killer or maybe an escaped mental patient wanders in from the surrounding forest. Early on, the killer murders one of the actors inside a scene and strings the body up like a prop. Guests walk past it, admire the “details,” maybe even compliment the haunt on how realistic it looks. The night goes on. The killer blends in. At some point, the actors start disappearing. Then customers do, too.
And no one realizes what’s happening because the entire environment is designed to make violence feel fake.
Haunted attractions are basically a cheat code for horror films, and The Haunted Forest (2025), by writer-director Keith Boynton, understands that perfectly. The film follows Zach (Grayson Gwaze), a high-school senior just looking to make some extra cash when he lands a seasonal job at Markoff’s Haunted Forest. At first, it is exactly what you would expect.
Late nights, cheap scares and a tight knit group of actors and crew who treat the haunt like their own little family. Zach quickly bonds with fellow workers like Jacko (Keith Boynton) and Mark (Cedric Gegel), settling into the rhythm of the Halloween season. As the nights wear on, however, those friendships begin to fracture — sometimes permanently — as members of the cast start dying under increasingly tragic and suspicious circumstances.
With something far more sinister than fake chainsaws lurking in the woods, Zach is forced to dig into the haunt’s secrets before he ends up just another victim, himself.
As someone who spent almost two decades in the haunted-attraction world, The Haunted Forest does a solid job capturing the familial bonds that form between cast and crew. Zach’s interactions with the other workers immediately took me back to my own early days in the business, when long nights, shared exhaustion and mutual trust turned strangers into a strange little family.
The film is especially effective when it pulls back the curtain and shows the behind-the-scenes side of haunted houses, from the downtime between scares to the unspoken rules that keep everything running. It also helps that Markoff’s Haunted Forest is a real-life attraction in Dickerson, Maryland. That authenticity comes through on screen, and it is easy to believe the real crew had a hand in shaping the atmosphere, giving the film a sense of place that feels earned rather than manufactured.
Unfortunately, this is also where The Haunted Forest begins to lose its footing.
The story quickly becomes muddled, with plot threads that never fully connect or build toward anything meaningful. The underlying explanation revealed in the final act feels less like a carefully seeded payoff and more like a last-minute solution, as if the film did not quite know where it was heading until it needed to stop. That uncertainty carries over into the dialogue, which is often flat and underwritten, leaving the performances feeling stiff and overly direct, with little room for inflection or emotional weight.
Even the kills suffer as a result. Most of them happen off screen, draining moments that should feel shocking or visceral of their impact and leaving the horror more implied than felt.
In the end, The Haunted Forest earns two out of five stars. It is frustrating, not because the idea is bad, but because it is so close to something that could have worked. As someone who once stood in a real haunted attraction and imagined how easily the line between performance and reality could blur, I wanted this film to fully embrace that nightmare. Instead, it settles for hints and half-formed ideas, never quite committing to the terror hiding just beyond the fog machines.
There is an authentic foundation here and moments that feel pulled straight from haunt life are buried under a story that never finds its footing. Like a scare actor jumping out too early, The Haunted Forest reminds you what could have been, then moves on before it ever truly lands.