Haunted

The Ghosts We Keep (And the Ones We Invent)

I’ll admit it: I went into Haunted expecting to hate it. Not in the way you brace for a bad movie—popcorn in hand, ready to mock—but in the way you steel yourself for a haunted house attraction you know will be cheap and unconvincing. The kind where the jump scares are telegraphed by a teenager in a rubber mask, and the "paranormal activity" is just a fog machine and a flickering lightbulb.

Netflix’s 2018 pseudo-documentary series, which presents itself as a collection of "true" supernatural encounters, had all the warning signs: a premise that smelled of late-night cable TV, a format that promised more reenactments than revelations, and a reception so uniformly negative it felt like a dare. Watch this, the internet seemed to say. It’s so bad it’s almost good.

Almost.

The first episode doesn’t waste time. A woman named Abigail Rice sits in a sterile, fluorescent-lit room, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, and recounts a childhood memory: the night she woke up to find a shadowy figure standing at the foot of her bed. The camera lingers on her face, her voice steady but strained, as she describes the way the figure moved—not like a person, but like something wearing a person.

Then, the screen cuts to a reenactment: a young girl in a nightgown, her bedroom bathed in the sickly yellow glow of a nightlight, staring in horror as a dark shape detaches itself from the wall. The effect is immediate, and immediately cheap. The figure is clearly a man in a hoodie, his movements stiff and unnatural, like a marionette with its strings tangled.

The tension evaporates. What should have been unsettling becomes unintentionally funny, the kind of moment that makes you snort-laugh into your popcorn.

And yet.

There’s something oddly compelling about the way Haunted fails. It’s not just that it’s bad—it’s that it’s bad in a way that feels intentional. Or at least, that’s what I told myself as I kept watching.

The series leans so hard into its low-budget aesthetic that it starts to feel like a parody of itself, a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched into six hours of content. The reenactments are shot with the kind of static, flat lighting you’d expect from a local news segment about a haunted library. The "scares" are telegraphed with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: a door creaks open, a figure looms in the background, a character gasps and points.

The sound design is a masterclass in overcompensation, with sudden stings of violins and the kind of ominous dun-dun-DUN you’d hear in a 1950s B-movie. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a haunted house where the actors jump out from behind a curtain every thirty seconds. You know it’s coming.

You still flinch.