THE FUNHOUSE

In small-town Iowa, a masked intruder attacks teenager Amy as she showers. The attacker turns out to be her younger brother Joey, a horror film fan, and his weapon is a fake rubber prop knife.

Against her father's wishes, Amy visits a sleazy traveling carnival with her new boyfriend Buzz, her best friend Liz, and Liz's irresponsible boyfriend Richie. At the carnival, the four teens smoke marijuana, peep into a 21-and-over strip show, heckle fortune teller Madame Zena, visit the freaks-of-nature exhibit, and view a magic show.

Richie dares the group to spend the night in "The Funhouse," which is a dark ride. After the carnival closes, the teenagers settle down inside the funhouse. Through a grate to a room below the attraction, the teenagers witness the ride assistant, a silent man in a Frankenstein's Monster mask, engaging Zena as a prostitute. He experiences premature ejaculation, but despite his request, Zena will not return her $100 fee; he then murders her in a violent rage.

The teenagers try to leave but find themselves locked inside the funhouse. As they attempt to escape, Richie secretly steals the money from the safe from which the masked assistant took Zena's fee. The funhouse's barker, Conrad Straker, discovers what his son Gunther Twibunt (the masked assistant) has done to Zena. Conrad also realizes that the money is missing. Thinking Gunther took it, he attacks him. Gunther's face is revealed to be gruesomely deformed via albinism and frontonasal dysplasia with sharp protruding teeth, long white thinning hair, red eyes, and a cleft running up the bridge of his nose.

The teens see this, and Conrad realizes someone is watching when Richie's lighter falls from the ceiling where he and the others were hiding onto the floor. Buzz concludes that Richie has the money. Richie insists that he would have split the money with the others. Despite Liz wanting to return the money, Buzz knows it is too late since they are now in danger. Conrad stalks the funhouse to eliminate any witnesses and heckles Gunther into a murderous rage. The teens arm themselves with the various funhouse props as weapons.

Richie is hanged with a rope by Conrad, and the remaining three witness his corpse being carried through on a cart. Liz, hysterical, falls through a trapdoor and is confronted by Gunther. She stabs him with a dagger before he kills her by pushing her head through an industrial exhaust fan. Buzz stabs Conrad to death when he confronts him and Amy, but is then killed by Gunther. During a showdown between final girl Amy and Gunther in the funhouse's maintenance area, Gunther is electrocuted and crushed to death between two spinning gears.

As dawn breaks, the traumatized sole survivor Amy emerges from the funhouse and heads home as the animatronic fat lady perched atop the entrance laughs mockingly at her.

Amy is the sole survivor after defeating the deformed killer in the funhouse, emerging traumatized at dawn as the carnival continues on.

The funhouse becomes a death trap, with each teen falling victim to the carnival's deadly secrets. Amy's survival cements her as the 'final girl,' a staple of the slasher genre, while her emergence at dawn underlines the ordeal's lasting psychological impact. The mocking laughter of the animatronic fat lady serves as a cruel reminder that the horrors of the night are not easily left behind.