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(Tribeca 2026) The Haunted House That Never Closes: Addiction, Family Secrets, and the Horror of Coming Home in CAITY

By. Professor Horror

 

The haunted house attraction has long understood that fear is most effective when it feels personal...when the darkness you walk into mirrors something you already carry. Lindsay Calleran's debut feature CAITY, premiering at the Tribeca Festival on June 7th, takes that premise in a much different direction. Set against the backdrop of a family-run scare attraction in upstate New York, it is a film about a sixteen-year-old girl who has spent her entire childhood mastering the mechanics of fear, but discovers (in one shattering moment) that the house she built and loved has been hiding a horror she had no tools to anticipate. The haunted house is not a metaphor here, but actually houses addiction, family secrets, and the inheritance of self-destruction. So, the home that was supposed to be safe, is now the space that will never mean the same thing again.

The haunted house attraction has been put to striking use across a range of horror projects, and it's worth considering what company CAITY keeps. The Hell House LLC franchise uses the working haunted house as the perfect setting for a found footage series: a space where the chaos of live performance becomes indistinguishable from genuine supernatural dread, and where the horror emerges from the machinery of the attraction turning against its operators. Florian Habicht's documentary Spookers (2017) takes the opposite approach, going behind the scenes at New Zealand's largest scare park (itself housed in a former psychiatric hospital) and finding warmth and chosen family among the performers, people who process their own fears by giving shape to the fears of others. Then there is Hulu's Monster Inside: America's Most Extreme Haunted House (2023), which documents McKamey Manor and arrives at a conclusion that darkens everything Spookers suggested: that the language of manufactured terror can be weaponized, that the architecture of consensual fear can be stripped of its consent. CAITY understands that both possibilities can exist at once. Like Spookers, it reveals a haunt built on community, acceptance, and a sense of family among its performers. Yet, like Monster Inside and even the fictional Hell House LLC, it recognizes that the same spaces that promise belonging can conceal exploitation, deception, and very real horrors behind the mask of entertainment. What emerges is a portrait of the haunted house not as a place of ghosts, but as a place where trust itself becomes frighteningly fragile.

Interested in how horror spaces conceal deeper emotional wounds? Read our review of THE HAUNTING OF PENNHURST another Tribeca title where the past refuses to stay buried.

Caity (Chiara Aurelia, Cruel Summer) has grown up inside the family haunt the way most kids grow up inside a living room. She knows every corridor, every fog machine, every beat of the scripted scares. She knows where the scare actors hide, how long the strobe runs before a jump scare, which section of the maze reliably makes grown men flinch. This is her domain! Built season by season alongside her father Paul (Morgan Spector, The Gilded Age), a man she idolizes and who is (unbeknowst to Caity) newly and tentatively sober. The haunt is this father and daughters shared language, their tradition, and their livelihood. For Caity, it is also proof of something: that she understands this world completely, that nothing in these walls can surprise her. She has spent her childhood scaring others, and in doing so, has come to believe that she is beyond being scared herself. However, that belief is the film's central irony. When Paul relapses and Caity finds him mid-overdose inside the attraction, the scene does something quietly devastating to the haunted house as a concept. The fog, the dark, the fabricated story...all of it remains exactly as she designed it, and none of it protects her. The expertise she has accumulated over a lifetime of Halloween seasons turns out to be entirely useless against this particular horror, because this horror did not come from outside. It came from the person she trusted most and the entire time he was wearing a mask. Caity now realizes the haunt always housed a monster and everyone knew about it...but her. 

In CAITY, what Caity is willing to endure becomes increasingly difficult to separate from what she has been trained to endure. Calleran (who lost their own father shortly before production began) is deeply interested in the emotional cost to Caity. The tension reaches its most painful expression as Caity begins to seek refuge in alcohol herself. Calleran is not interested in addiction as a supernatural curse or an inevitable inheritance passed neatly from parent to child. Instead, they examine what happens when a teenager discovers that the adults she trusted have built their lives on omissions, half-truths, and carefully maintained performances. Much of the film is structured around revelations that force Caity to reconsider the people around her, and each revelation leaves her more isolated, more convinced that everyone in her life is either lying to her or failing her. Her growing anger is not directed at a single person so much as an entire network of relationships that suddenly feels unstable. What makes these scenes so devastating is that alcohol arrives not as a mystery but as a solution that appears readily available when every other source of comfort has collapsed.

Caity does not turn to drinking because she understands addiction, but she turns to it because she doesn't. She sees only temporary relief from the frustration, disappointment, and betrayal that have come to define her world. In this sense, the film's horror lies less in addiction itself than in the realization that destructive behaviors often emerge from the same desire that drives people toward family, friendship, and community: the need to feel secure when everything else feels uncertain. The haunted house has taught Caity how to manage fear, how to perform confidence, and how to keep a show running when things go wrong, but those skills offer little guidance when the people she depends on become the source of her disillusionment. Calleran gives the film one more structural blow. Caity returns to the haunted house later and encounters another trauma within its walls...a second horror in the same space, as if the building itself has become a site of accumulation. It lands not as repetition but as confirmation: the place will keep doing this to her. The gravity of a trauma site is one of horror's most reliable mechanics, from the haunted houses of Shirley Jackson to the corridors of the Overlook. What Calleran adds to that tradition is the specificity of a child who helped build the trap she keeps walking back into.

Chiara Aurelia carries most of the film's weight, rendering Caity's relentless suppression as something almost physical as you can see the cost of it accumulating across her face. But Spector aslmost does something harder because he makes Paul genuinely lovable as his character refuses the easy exit of villain-coding an addict. Instead he insists as showing us a man whose love for his daughter is real, but whose sickness is also very real and whose tragedy is that those two facts offer each other no relief whatsoever. The dynamic between Aurelia and Spector is what makes the film, and both performances are precise enough to sustain the full weight Calleran loads onto it.

CAITY is a film that will inevitably prompt the familiar debate about whether it qualifies as horror, but that debate feels beside the point. What Calleran has made is a film about performance. Not the performance that takes place inside a haunted house, but the performance required to hold together families, friendships, and communities that are far more fragile than they appear. The film understands that the most unsettling discoveries are not hidden in dark corridors or behind masks, but in the realization that the people we trust are often struggling to maintain their own illusions. By placing that realization inside the world of a haunted attraction, CAITY finds something genuinely compelling: a story where the line between staged fear and lived experience becomes increasingly difficult to locate, until the distinction no longer matters.

The haunted house in CAITY becomes a space where family secrets and hidden realities slowly surface. For a very different Tribeca film concerned with belonging, belief, and the consequences of misplaced faith, read our review of Michael Gallagher's THE LEADER.