Blood Fest is one of my favorite concepts: horror fans are caught in a deadly live action haunt where the actors are trying to kill the attendees. The set-up for this horror comedy does so much right. I even enjoyed it the first time I watched it. So how does a movie with so much love for the genre go so wrong on a repeat viewing?

• Directed By: Owen Egerton
• Written By: Owen Egerton
• Starring: Robbie Kay Jacob Batalon. Seychelle Gabriel

There is a lot going on in Blood Fest, thematically and plot wise. They have a lot to say about the state of the horror industry, the behavior of professionals in the industry, tropes in movies, and how horror fans are viewed in society. Those are just the themes touched on in the first thirty minutes of the movie. There’s also commentary on gaming culture and the treatment of the mentally ill. Having all these elements isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the movie almost needs them to support the absolutely bat-shit crazy plot and characters.

The Good

It’s the kind of movie then when it works, it’s fun, campy, and kind of great. The “Arborist” section with Zachary Levi very briefly playing himself in a cameo is one of the better parts.  Yes, I’m biased; it’s a great send-up of slashers and the burden of legacy.  It’s also one of the less complicated sections and as such doesn’t need as much exposition. 

There are no electronically resurrected corpses masquerading as zombies or human trafficked “Eastern European” girls medically made into vampires, as shown in the other sections.  These are things that need to be explained to the characters, and the viewer. While the explanation for the vampires is done hilariously, it’s still more exposition, more conversation, and more complications.

The Weird

The filmmakers kicked off the action in their movie complaining about how horror has become common, a commodity instead of a dangerous art form.  This is a valid complaint; just look at the amount of Art the Clown plushies and merch out there. (The Ghoul will not comment on if she is wearing her Clown Café T-shirt at the time of writing.) However, in doing this, they were delivering that message to the same audience who is driving this commodification.

It’s important to note that the character that gives this speech is the antagonist.  We just don’t know it quite yet. He’s there to get the crowd hyped up for “real” horror. So, he rails against modern horror, referencing Twilight and other easy targets. Twilight came out in 2008. Blood Fest was made in 2018.  Watching this in 2025, it already feels outdated.  I have other issues with this speech, but I’m going to save that for a longer, separate entry. Stay tuned.

Killer Setting

At any rate, the crowd eats it up, until the scare actors turn out to have real chainsaws and start carving up the crowd to make “the best horror movie ever”.  From here, the movie follows a set pattern of the main cast exploring haunts themed after recognizable franchise stand-ins. Because they are die-hard horror fans, they know the tropes needed to survive. Only that doesn’t really factor in, other than the “Arborist” section.

It should have mattered in the “Saw” section. They’re face a trap that feels beatable, or at the least survivable. Sadly, the movie is about half-over, so it’s time to thin out the cast. So, people start dying needlessly.  The rest of the movie kind of just unwinds from there.  Twists occur, but they come off as implausible or uninteresting, and someone shoots the best character with a handgun. Yes, it’s a punchline bit. I don’t care. In a movie that’s full of vampires, killer clowns, and zombies, doing away with one of your antagonists with just a bullet is not great.

The Not So Good SPOILERS AHEAD

The true villain, who ends up being the Final Boy Dax’s dad, has a master plan to kill horror. He blames horror for the death of his wife.  The backstory here is while the Final Boy and his mom were watching old scary movies, a masked intruder killed the mother.  The boy’s love of horror is very much a tribute to the memory of his mom. His sister and father go the other direction, spending their time crusading against the evils of horror. The complication is the intruder was a patient of the father, a psychiatrist. His position gives him a platform to rail against “evil influences” like scary movies.

Herein lies my frustration with Blood Fest. There are so many interesting elements present, but to me, they focused on the wrong ones. Dax being conflicted over his love of dark, gruesome themes, and its connection to his past trauma, would have been a much more compelling character arc. Even expanding out the “Arborist” story to parallel his own broken father/son relationship would have been more meaningful.  Instead, that time goes toward showing just how deeply he knows horror movies, like, obsessively so.  There are some great scenes in there, but they don’t always move the plot or challenge the characters in meaningful ways. Look, I’m not expecting Shakespeare, just a clear and coherent character arc. I’ve talked in the past about smart writing in filmmaking; this is not it.

The End?

The other major frustration is the end. To sum up quickly with minimal spoilers: the first villain dies, and it turns out the dad is the true mastermind. His plan is to ruin Blood Fest with a massacre and show the world how bad horror is, ending it forever. Okay, sure.  The wristbands that everyone but the Final Boy is wearing have chip that sends out an electric pulse that turns the wearer into rage zombies that attack everything. Also, they planted explosives everywhere.  With me so far? Cool.

The pulse activates, and Dax’s girlfriend becomes a rage zombie. Chaos ensues. People die. The dad is killed to stop him from blowing up everyone. The girlfriend is about to kill Final Boy, when a bad guy does a face-turn and tells him to just remove the wristband. Girlfriend returns to normal. Everyone lives happily ever after, and the credits roll.

Except. Right before this, the crew has stated how many Blood Fest attendees were still roaming around, having not been killed by vampires, zombies, clowns or whatever. It was about 247.   Those 247 are still rage zombies.  They don’t fix this. To make matters worse, there is a mid-credit scene that shows the explosives going off, and the two survivors admitting that there are likely no other survivors.

So, what did our heroes accomplish? They killed Dax’s dad, so he won’t get credit for ending horror, which was pretty unlikely to begin with. But in the end all the attendees of a horror event died.  The next convention is probably going to have some issues securing insurance. It feels like I watched people go through a lot for no result.

Why Do I Have a Problem with This?

The villain’s master plan is grounded in real human behavior and real-world circumstances. As such the entire outcome of the plot doesn’t hold up. Whatever massacre or mayhem that occurred at Blood Fest would not have effected. “horror”. Hell, someone probably would have made a movie about it. We’ve seen the Satanic Panic play out and have real-world examples to hold up next to this as a comparison.  It’s far easier to judge realism of that than fictional monsters. If they had stuck with the first villain’s plan to create the world’s biggest snuff film, that would’ve worked so much better than what they ended up with.

Final Thoughts

I want to like Blood Fest. I’ve watched it more than once, trying to get something else out of it. The cast is fun and does a great job with the parts they are given.  I’ll admit, I overthink movies. This is a perfectly fine lazy Sunday popcorn movie if you’re looking for a fun tribute to beloved genre tropes.  It’s not deep, but it’s got some great kills.

Blood Fest is available on streaming

Check out other streaming reviews here:

• Fear Street Trilogy
• The Blob
• Werewolves: How Bad Could It be