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Compared to Hooper's other work, the The Funhouse has a decidedly flatter affect devoid of the filmmaker's typical optical distortions and psychedelic editing. In place of the usually unsettling aesthetics the viewer gets a work which plays with the layers of horror in funhouse fashion (the killer dons a Frankenstein mask to disguise an even more hideous face beneath, etc). The Funhouse's visual language is clean and direct, lending the film a curiously realist take on the artifice of horror.

A winning mix of broad comedy and genuine shocks, Funhouse finds Hooper at his most playful, switching tone when you least expect and executing plenty of baroque camera movements that were his stylistic signature. In fact one might describe Hooper as the Max Ophüls of horror—camera movement is constant in his work, and you delight at the showmanship as much as the scares.

One of the carnies loses his rubber Frankenstein mask to reveal a cleft-palated homicidal abomination beneath, and suddenly the movie loses the tired trappings of the classic horror and becomes a horror film in the Tobe Hooper mould, which is to say an excruciating ordeal, a predator-versus-prey fight for survival that is totally, terribly absorbed in the adrenaline-fuelled, propulsive panic of the moment.