Is it just me, or…?
Is it just me, or does the way the Ghost's (Mitch's) face looks somehow connected to the fact that he rips the faces off his victims? As far as we can tell, the Ghost is missing lips (at least the upper one), nose, eyelids, and even some of the hair on his head. His facial skin also has a rather unusual texture. It looks… as if his entire face is one big scar. It's as if the Ghost's face was ripped off, but he didn't die from it, and then his skin healed, and someone seemed to try to "decorate" it, adding tattoos and perhaps a little "correction". At the same time, in the film, we were shown a moment where the Ghost rips the face off Evan, whom he killed, starting by using a hammer to pry his… upper lip, and then pulling upward, tearing off the skin. We can also notice that during the fight with Nathan, the Ghost also thrusts a hammer into his mouth, as if directly stating his intention to rip his face off as well.
Watching the film, one gets the impression that one of the killer group's rituals is "masking," that is, ripping off the faces of their victims, as the Devil tells Harper he wants to remove her "pretty mask", meaning her face (we don't know exactly what he means, but I'll write about that in another post). But are we sure that all killers actually rip off their victims' faces (remove their masks)?...
The Witch stabbed Mallory in the head with a red-hot poker, after which the curtain fell, and we weren't shown what she did to the girl's body next. She also burned the girl in the fairy costume's face with the same red-hot poker, which I think makes the ripping off pointless, but either way, we're never shown what she did next. The Devil impaled Angela's head with his pitchfork, then abandoned her body and began pursuing Harper. The Clown crushed Sam's head with his sledgehammer, hard enough to rip his face off, I think, but we weren't shown him ripping the corpse's face off afterward. So, are we really sure that all the killers in the group rip the faces off their victims? Or is this a habit unique to the Ghost, whose face is mutilated in this way? I think "Haunt" is deliberately misleading us about the face-ripping theme. Just like it is about many other things in it. Perhaps the Ghost disfigured his face voluntarily, to resemble a monster and scare and kill people who entered the deadly attraction. Or perhaps he himself was once the victim of some sadistic killer but survived. And this event traumatized him not only physically but also mentally, giving him a craving for violence and driving him to join the group of killers to satisfy his need for this. Be that as it may, it was brilliant of the screenwriters not to tell the audience anything outright and not reveal the background of the killer characters. Because of this, we now have so much room for theories, even though the story is over and all the killers have been killed. That's why this film resonated with me so deeply, and I want to talk about it more and more and more. There's truly a lot in it that needs to be addressed. Yeah. That's awesome.
