It’s finally October, which means it is the prime time for the Halloween movies of the year to come out. One of the movies that came out in late September was Hell Fest.

Hell Fest is about a group of young adults who go to a horror festival. While there, they get stalked by a man who sneaks into the park and pretends to be one of the haunters.

He terrorizes the people there by hurting them, and making the rest of the festival think he is merely conducting a performance.

The idea of it is great, but it wasn’t portrayed in the scariest way. Throughout the movie, it’s mostly laughs with maybe a few small jump scares throughout. The movie didn’t actually start getting scary until about the last twenty minutes. They stuffed all the jump scares in the end, making them seem not as good as they would have been if they were spread out throughout the entire movie. However, that ending did a great job of creating a suspenseful and heart pounding couple of scenes.

The movie portrayed couples a little more intimately than most couples actually are in real life, but the characters themselves were fairly relatable. Of course they made some dumb decisions, but there were scenes where the audience felt content with how the characters handled the killer. It was a nice change from the stereotypical dense slasher movie characters. Some of the scenes throughout the movie are more gory than I was expecting. Horror movies that are rated R for scariness, this one has a more proper rating.

The movie is not for the faint of heart. In the very last scene of the movie, the writers turned this stereotypical slasher into a darker look in the psychological minds of serial killers. Watching the scene made me slightly uncomfortable, but it was also very important to have in this movie.