Twin Films, but make it horror
A bit about Hell Fest and Blood Fest
As many people know, there’s this phenomenon called “Twin Films.” They are films, produced by different studios, that come out the same year (either actual year, or general span of time) and have very similar plots. You can play pretty fast and loose with how close the plots actually are, but if you could elevator pitch them both with the same logline, then they’re considered Twin Films.
Within my lifetime there have been a few notable examples that people always bring up when talking about Twin Films—1997’s Dante’s Peak and Volcano, 1998’s A Bug’s Life and Antz, 1998’s Armageddon and Deep Impact, 1999’s The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill, 2006’s The Prestige and The Illusionist, 2011’s Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached, and (because it even happens with documentaries) 2019’s Fyre Fraud and Fyre.
However, one set of Twin Films has been haunting me, and my husband Pierce, since they were both released in 2018: Blood Fest and Hell Fest. We had been dating for a little bit at the time and he got me back into Rooster Teeth, a (largely) video game YouTube company. They were bought by Warner Bros. at some point, but recently announced the full death of the company, so they are no more. However, during their heyday they moved into scripted content—which included a few feature length films. One such film was Blood Fest, which ended up being the main reason I knew anything about it. Hell Fest was the follow up film by Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension director, Gregory Plotkin, who was largely a working editor on most of the previous Paranormal Activity films, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Game Night, and (more recently) A Quiet Place: Day One. There was some hype around it, but I would say both of these are fairly unknown films.
The elevator pitch for both films is that a group of young adults go to a Halloween fest where people start actually dying. Both concepts are events clearly modeled after things like Halloween Horror Nights and Knott’s Scary Farm. Obviously, there are lots of other more non-specific things that it’s also pulling from, but in Hell Fest, in particular, it’s largely mazes—which is, other than the outside scare actors, the major element of both the Universal and Knott’s horror festivals. Which is to say: it’s clear where the inspiration came from, but I don’t think either film does anything all that interesting with it.
Similarly, the single haunted house as a plot device is also not very well used within indie and low budget horror films. Take Haunt for example. Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote the original script for A Quiet Place. I reviewed Haunt for MovieJawn, where I even mentioned our Twin Films in question. My conclusion, at the time, was that it was fine, sometimes even fun, but an underwritten lead gave the film few stakes and left me not caring deeply about our Final Girl.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that often plagues low budget horror movies. Hell Fest and Blood Fest are no different, though at least the latter is a bit more fun and wild (I would also note that it’s the only one of the three films that has a male lead… so maybe his being a bit more written is more a reflection of that). Pierce and I decided to finally watch both films over the last few days, since we’ve been talking about doing it since 2018. We started with Hell Fest, which we thought might have come first, but I discovered that Blood Fest fully premiered at a festival while they were still shooting the other film. Wild!
Hell Fest is a film that has no interest in explaining itself, which is fine, where the killer is seemingly picking girls at random to kill at the park (considering someone got killed last year by stabbing, I do think it’s wild that everybody decided to go back). However, the film is truly like being at Knott’s Scary Farm. There are scare actors with the things on their shoes that spark outside of the attractions and the attractions, themselves, are literally just mazes. Some of them have actors and some of them are just triggered scares by motion. What that means is, while the killer has an air of scare to him, we’re mostly just watching this (kind of deeply annoying) group of friends walk around a theme park. Which, as you might guess, is not very dynamic. Especially, when they go to the part of the park that they sign a waiver, so the actors can touch them, and the “final” maze is all motion sensors? The final showdown happens in there and we just kept being like, “why aren’t there actors in here?” If you were actually going to this park and the biggest, scariest maze was all motion sensors and fake jump scares, without any performers, that would be the lamest thing possible! Plus, it could have made the final scene a bit more interesting.
Blood Fest, on the other hand, is obsessed with explaining its lore. Why things are happening, who’s doing them, and how everything works. This film is a bit more specific than Hell Fest, where the whole park is a death setup for all involved—rather than just a killer haunting a single character. Dax’s mom was killed when he was a child and his dad decided that all horror is bad and that… well this is kind of the problem. A horror director is the mastermind in the tower on this one, filming everything and trying to make “the ultimate horror movie.” Dax’s dad is a psychiatrist and he’s been helping the director break patients' brains so they can be used as the killers in the park. But, like, to what end? It’s convoluted, to say the least. He hates horror movies because he blames the media for his wife’s death, but he’s also helping produce a big horror movie where real people are dying?
However, the biggest difference between the two films is that Blood Fest is more fun. It’s funnier, the gore is cooler, and it was just a better time overall. Was it a “good” time? No, but it was a better time. I think it’s usually pretty easy to say which of the two Twin Films had more cultural impact, but these are two films I feel like are largely forgotten in the rise of streaming and the inundation of low budget horror in the 2010s. (Obviously, there’s low budget horror all the time, but it feels, at least anecdotally, like there was a rise in it because of streaming platforms giving those films a home.)
I do think that there will be a movie with this elevator pitch that eventually rules, but we haven’t gotten there yet. I blame, at least partially, how irony poisoned everything currently is and how people do meta commentary because of that. However, I think the comic Dark Ride is a pretty fun exploration of a similar concept, but with supernatural elements. It rules!
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