Relax, this won’t be one of those reviews. Anytime I read a review for a specific type of horror movie, a certain erroneous line pops up right away. Most recently I saw it in a review for a lousy Korean horror called The Park in an old reader copy of Fangoria (yes, I’m that lame).

It goes something like this: “you wouldn’t think of a carnival as being a likely setting for a horror movie."

Wait … what? What the Fuck?

I wouldn’t think of a carnival as anything but a source of horror with a few intermittent thrills and some greasy food. Check it: scary, nausea-inducing rides, questionable curly-fries, carnies fleecing you, porta-potties, trying to impress some girl/ guy, the ever-present threat of some drunken hick picking a fight with you, and funhouses. It’s more of a wonder that there aren’t more movies like Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse or the legendary Carnival Of Souls by Herk Harvey. Hooper’s an interesting director. After bursting out the gates with Saw (you know, the real Saw) he’s floundered, only occasionally matching some of the highs from his first effort.

The Funhouse almost makes it, a near classic that blends Frankenstein-style pathos with freak-show fear.

After a faux Halloween-style opener, four high-school stereotypes and the ‘final girl’s’ younger brother spend the first 45-minutes or so mucking around the carnival at night, recalling too many other early-‘80s teen comedies - only suffused with the genuine seediness of an actual carnival that Hooper moved from Ohio to Florida to film.

Various creepy barkers lure the teens and we viewers into gritty old tents to ogle flabby burlesque dancers and freaks before succumbing to the charms of the titular attraction. There lurks uneasy familial terror, reactionary fear of the ‘other’ (handicapped, deformed, what-have-you) and a genuine, iconic latex-n-slime monster.

Hooper squeezes just enough out of his stock characters for us to feel their fear while trapped in the funhouse, while delivering potent jolts to balance the more subtle (albeit screaming-monster-filled) joys of the final act.

So what if the ultimate special effect is about as limp as they come, The Funhouse is still a stylish, solid ‘80s artifact with a few good scares and a great Rick Baker designed creature. Just stay away from those midway hotdogs.

A mixture of unease and compulsion stemming from these weird occurrences culminates in a terrifying encounter at the abandoned carnival.

A few scenes of stilted exposition and some gee-whiz, bowery boy performances gently mar Carnival, but hey, this was ’62! Overall, it pours on the style with long, quiet scenes of meditative dread, freaky imagery and chiaroscuro photography that puts Carnival in a class far beyond its low-cost station, and the eerie feeling will stick with you. 

If the idea of warding off drunken farm-boys while you discreetly puke up a wad of cotton candy out of sight of your date doesn’t appeal, here’s a better idea. Open all the windows to cool down the house, and cue up The Funhouse followed by Carnival Of Souls. The former ‘80s teens-in-peril classic deserves a deluxe DVD treatment, while the latter all-time chiller is well deserving of its Criterion Collection two-disc edition.