10 Horror Movies That Brutally Punish Your Curiosities

4. The Houses October Built

The Houses October Built
Image Entertainment

These days, Halloween season finds haunted house attractions popping up across the globe. While to some of us (see: the sane ones), visiting such an 'attraction' is the absolute worst idea imaginable, others lap up the chance to be scared to death at such locales.

Putting these venues centre-stage, we have Bobby Roe's The Houses October Built and its 2017 follow-up.

In that first film, five friends embark on a road trip to explore the trend of haunted house attractions.

The Houses October Built hits its audience hard from the get-go, opening with one of the group - Brandy Schaefer's bloodied, traumatised Brandy - stuffed into the back of a trunk. From there, the film recounts the events leading up to this moment.

Those events involve our protagonists recording their trip and interviewing those involved in putting such spooky venues together. This all starts well.. until the realisation that real corpses are used in one of these attractions and that criminals and demented individuals are used as performers.

As The Houses October Built enters its final act, a creepy clown and masked woman resurface after speaking to the group over 100 miles earlier. In their quest to find the holy grail of haunted house attractions, the Blue Skeleton, our core characters end up kidnapped, tortured, some killed, and the rest buried alive.

Senior Writer
Senior Writer

Once described as the Swiss Army Knife of WhatCulture, Andrew can usually be found writing, editing, or presenting on a wide range of topics. As a lifelong wrestling fan, horror obsessive, and comic book nerd, he's been covering those topics professionally as far back as 2010. In addition to his current WhatCulture role of Senior Content Producer, Andrew previously spent nearly a decade as Online Editor and Lead Writer for the world's longest-running genre publication, Starburst Magazine, and his work has also been featured on BBC, TechRadar, Tom's Guide, WhatToWatch, Sportkskeeda, and various other outlets, in addition to being a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic. Between his main dayjob, his role as the lead panel host of Wales Comic Con, and his gig as a pre-match host for Wrexham AFC games, Andrew has also carried out a hugely varied amount of interviews, from the likes of Robert Englund, Kane Hodder, Adrienne Barbeau, Rob Zombie, Katharine Isabelle, Leigh Whannell, Bruce Campbell, and Tony Todd, to Kevin Smith, Ron Perlman, Elijah Wood, Giancarlo Esposito, Simon Pegg, Charlie Cox, the Russo Brothers, and Brian Blessed, to Kevin Conroy, Paul Dini, Tara Strong, Will Friedle, Burt Ward, Andrea Romano, Frank Miller, and Rob Liefeld, to Bret Hart, Sting, Mick Foley, Ricky Starks, Jamie Hayer, Britt Baker, Eric Bischoff, and William Regal, to Mickey Thomas, Joey Jones, Phil Parkinson, Brian Flynn, Denis Smith, Gary Bennett, Karl Connolly, and Bryan Robson - and that's just the tip of an ever-expanding iceberg.