The Funhouse (1981)
HORROR-THON 2022 • HOUSE PARTY
6/10
DIRECTOR: Tobe Hooper
STARRING: Elizabeth Berridge, Shawn Carson, Jeanne Austin
RELEASED: 1981
RUNTIME: 1 hour, 36 minutes
WATCH ON: Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Shudder
SCARE LEVEL: Medium
CLOWNS: No.
There’s a jar at the carnival freak show with something in it you’ll never unsee. A barker is yelling at you to step right up. The clowns are watching. The carnival was already scary before anyone got murdered.
Amy goes on a double date to a traveling carnival that just rolled into town. Her parents told her not to go. Of course, she goes.
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The four teens get a little drunk, hit the freak show and the fortune teller, and then decide it would be fun to hide inside the funhouse overnight. From their hiding spot they watch something terrible happen to a carnival worker. Then they realize the people who run this carnival know they’re inside.
The rest of the night is a chase through animatronic skeletons, trapdoors, and machinery, with someone in a Frankenstein mask hunting them down.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
It’s a typical slasher film. The setup is the same: teens make dumb choices, and then the body count starts. What sets it apart is the location. The carnival oddities make everything creepier: the jarred specimens, the animal attractions, the animatronics laughing in the dark.
The minus is a big one for me: CLOWNS. Clown faces painted on the rides, clown dolls staring at you, clown everything. No, thank you.
Tobe Hooper directed this a year before Poltergeist, and you can see him working out his thing for fairground nightmares and things that are supposed to be fun, turning on you. Poltergeist had the clown doll. The Funhouse has an entire carnival of them.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
One of the rides carrying passengers was accidentally left on for around twenty minutes to half an hour. The ride had several octopus arms that spun around in rotating carriages and normally only ran for four minutes. Once passengers were able to get off the ride, they weren’t able to walk and had twisted muscles, but no one was seriously injured.