Abattoir doesn't have a jaw-dropping...shock scene, but the ending does pack an emotional punch, of a type so few and far between in the annals of horror cinema.

While Bousman's climax is a not terribly original effects-laden haunted house, the house's builder, and his motives, have enough of their own flavor to please a hardened horror fan.

Abattoir gets past its clunky storytelling with a great look - dark, shadowed, with a 1940s hardboiled feel - along with some well-staged shocks and scares.

Though it’s handsome enough to look at, Abattoir can’t quite seem to decide just how supernatural it wants to be or how meta its horror content should play

Thankfully Bousman’s endgame does deliver the supernatural slaughterhouse of the title to great effect with inspired spectral victims looped in suspended animation. It’s so memorably jarring that you wonder if the whole was just sloppily reverse engineered from this massive undertaking.