Shock Labyrinth 3D (cert. 15) will be released on DVD by Chelsea Films on 31st January 2011.

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There’s something uniquely creepy about abandoned fairgrounds, rusty rides and tumbledown attractions so this week’s Shock Labyrinth blog looks at horror films that use such settings to chill the bones of eager viewers. Considering the potential for childhood mental scars that a trip to the fair can cause, it’s a surprise to me that more films aren’t made for lovers of Ferris Wheels and Ghost Trains. The travelling fair is the ideal place for a five year old to get a nice dose of separation anxiety, lose a ballon or bump into a ride operator with a facial tattoo and certainly, that slightly sinister edge is what makes them so attractive.

At the bottom of the post, you’ll find a playlist of horror movies (Suggested by friends and members of Cult Labs)  that use fairgrounds, boardwalks, pavillions, carnies and clowns to strike fear into the audience, but first here’s some thought on three favourites…

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All of which leads me onto my first film choice. Carnival of Souls. You’ll be wanting Herk Harvey’s influential original, not the woefully dull ‘Wes Craven Presents’ remake travesty. Herk Harvey, in similar vein to Romero, was a maker of industrial films and adverts who made the altogether sensible decision to make a horror picture as they were almost guaranteed to make a profit. Undead fans will see the obvious influence that the film had on Night of the Living Dead but it is in it’s choice of location that the films parallels with the upcoming Shock Labyrinth become clear.

Harvey regularly drove past the Saltair Pavillion, a kind of Mormon holiday resort on the great salt lake in Utah. This recently closed piece of grandiosity had a look that sends gothic chills up the spine. In other words, the power of an existing location fired the filmmaking. Shock Labyrinth is filmed within the theme park ride that inspired it and it’s location dictates the plot. In Carnival of Souls, the whole film has been arranged to eventually drag the central character to the pavillion. In Shock Labyrinth, the imaginitive world created by the attraction designers helps to create the story.

In the 80s, The Lost Boys scored massively with teen audiences thanks to it’s young cast, who looked like the kind of post-apocalyptic punks that were showing up in cheap movies everywhere, albeit with fangs and much better cheekbones. Set on a Boardwalk full of arcades and fairground rides, it’s location mirrored the feeling of displacement and unreality that typify the vampire existentence. The carnival is a place for fantasy and escape and for the bloodsuckers in The Lost Boys, the vampire’s life is one of escapism, living for kicks and staying in a state of permanent childhood. Again, location is everything. The hustle and bustle of the undersupervised boardwalk which attracts the dispossessed is the ideal hunting ground for a hungry vamp and the rides and flashing lights of a fairground at night have a nervy edginess where anything can happen.

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Finally, we move onto Funhouse, Tobe Hooper’s 1981 fairground Stalk ‘n’ Slash movie that troubled the UK enough in the early 80s to see a ban on what is essentially a nice little slasher flick rather than the all out assault on a nations moral values that a ban might suggest. Funhouse is the closest film in terms of plot to the Shock Labyrinth, in so far as this is a movie that takes place in an fairground attraction. while this has none of the abstractions of Shock Labyrinth and is pretty much a straight ahead exercise in chasing some kids around a ghost train for an hour, the fact that the location creates the horror as much as the murderer stalking the cast is the important thing. Shock Labyrinth is scary before anyone opens their mouths, because long corridors without end in a location specifically built to engender fear work that way. In Funhouse Hooper uses the unsettling location to raise neck hairs before the real business of slashing up identikit teens really begins.

Now Enjoy more trailers for movies that show you what’s lurking at the carnival when the last punter leaves…

CULT LABS CREDITS. Thanks for suggesting film titles: Simon James Constable, Ben ‘Hacksaw’ Mather, Richard Neal, Josh Upstart, Steve Jordan, Aya Graves, James Merchant, Stephanie J Brehm.