A full Free Movie of the Day is posted on the JoBlo Movies YouTube channel every day of the week – but on Fridays things get a little freakier and a little more fun. Get your weekend started the right way by indulging in Friday Fright Nights! Every Friday, we’ll be taking a look at another genre movie you can watch in its entirety, free of charge, either on the YouTube channel linked above or in the video embed here.
Every Halloween season, thousands of haunted house attractions of various kinds open up across the United States… and yet we still have very few great horror movies that are set at haunted house attractions. So here’s a suggestion-slash-plea that goes out to every aspiring filmmaker: if you have access to a haunted attraction, make a movie there! That’s what writer/director Jon Binkowski did back in the day, and the result was this week’s Friday Fright Night feature, the slasher called Scare Zone.
Scare Zone was filmed at a maze that had been built for the Halloween Horror Nights event at the Universal Orlando Resort. Halloween came and went, but the owners wanted to keep the maze intact so they could show it off at a theme park convention in late November, so it was just going to be sitting empty for a few weeks. And that’s when Binkowski swooped in. He had always been unnerved when walking through haunted house attractions, and not just because of the haunt actors jumping out at him at every turn. He was uneasy because he always had the thought in the back of his mind, wondering what if there was really an axe-wielding killer hiding among the haunt’s employees, ready to strike down the paying guests. So he put that fear down on the page and rushed Scare Zone into production.
The synopsis for Scare Zone is short and simple:
A crazed killer unleashes bloody terror at a haunted-house attraction.
That’s pretty much all there is to it, but Binkowski did attempt to give some of the characters depth, spending some time to develop a friendship between one haunt employee and his troubled co-worker. Those characters are played by Arian Waring Ash and Chris Burns, who were joined in the cast by Simon Needham, Neil Brown Jr., Michaela Stamm, Michele Feren, Jordan Woods-Robinson, Patty Bender, Justin Bowen, Amber Freeman, Jillian Kinsman, Peyton Lee, Jesse Malinowski, Pat Mccahon, Jim H. Miranda, Emily Onimus, Juan Santos, Howard Winn, and Leigh Anne Wolfe.
Scare Zone is set during Halloween, of course, but this is one Halloween-set movie that has an unexpected fascination with Christmas… and it even kind of feels like those Christmas romance movies that fill the airwaves every year. It has a similar look and atmosphere, and even some of the same over-the-top comedic acting you often find in a Christmas romance. Binkowski certainly took a unique approach to this slasher movie.
So check out Scare Zone – after all, it’s free! Take a look at what Binkowski was able to do while he had access to a haunted house attraction, and if you’re an aspiring filmmaker who also has access to such a place, start imagining what you could make in there.
