A Horror Film about Care: Review of The Haunting of Pennhurst

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The Haunting of Pennhurst, which recently premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival, is a remarkable new film about disability, horror, care, and the ghosts of history.^[1] It is the collaborative brainchild of three directors – Nathan R. Stenberg, Mike Attie, and Katarina Poljak – each of whom brought their own distinct perspective to this project. At once a verité ethnography, historical documentary, and deeply moving work of public scholarship shot in the style of an old Hollywood horror noir movie, the film blends different genres to interrogate the fraught history, legacy, and future of Pennhurst, a former disability institution turned haunted house, in Spring City, Pennsylvania.

The film raises deeply uncomfortable questions about the public history of disability in the United States. We live in an era in which private investors are turning former disability institutions that have not been demolished into entertainment venues that commodify disability as horror and monstrosity or seek to redevelop them into new sites of extractive capitalism such as data centers. In these contexts, how can people, especially those claiming disability status, reclaim power and agency? Why does the preservation of such sites depend on spectacles of unfounded fear? The absence of clear answers to these questions is meant to force viewers to confront, as Stenberg puts it, “how little public value has been placed on disability history and disabled people.”

The film begins at “Pennhurst Asylum,” the present-day haunted house attraction, giving the viewer a behind-the-scenes tour of the social world of the haunt actors. However, as the film immediately points out, Pennhurst had never been a mental asylum. It opened in 1908 as the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic before being renamed Pennhurst State School and Hospital. It became a permanent home for the state’s disabled children, who, throughout the twentieth century, were called deeply offensive and dehumanizing eugenicist terms, from “defective” and “feeble-minded” to “mentally retarded.”^[2]

By the 1970s, Pennhurst became a notorious example of overcrowding, understaffing, neglect, and abuse that characterized institutional custodial “care” in America. Often admitted as children, most people confined at Pennhurst lived out their entire lives without ever leaving its grounds. As deinstitutionalization and self-advocacy movements gained momentum during the 1970s and 1980s, many institutions were shut down. When Pennhurst finally closed in 1987, the site was effectively abandoned for almost two decades. Purchased by private investors in 2008, the former administration building was transformed into “Pennhurst Asylum,” the seasonal haunted house attraction, in 2010.^[3]

As a historian of mental health, I expected the film to address the now-familiar story of institutional neglect of people with disabilities and the commodification of disability as entertainment. Indeed, as Sarah Handley Cousins reminded us in 2015, “Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not.” However, the people who operate the attraction, their reasons for wanting to be there, and how they go about their work immediately complicates this interpretation. Many of the haunt actors are themselves people who claim disability status. For them, performing monstrosity and horror has become both a source of seasonal employment and a way to reclaim power and agency on Pennhurst’s stage.

These actors deeply understand the difficulty of navigating the difference between perpetuating ableist tropes and personal empowerment. As a result, they have adopted strict rules about how to do their work. Depictions of medical staff doing violence to patients is forbidden, while depictions of violence against doctors, nurses, or orderlies are encouraged. One of the staff trainers, Emily Wunder, explains, “Our general rule is if you don’t have a disability, you really shouldn’t portray it….If you do have it, that’s fair game….reclaim that shit.” Using slurs like the “R-word” is grounds for immediate dismissal.

Hearing the actors’ personal stories and watching them work leaves the distinct impression that they want their act to do – not just show – something to the audience. It is almost as if their performances are meant to inflict monstrosity and horror on the visitors. Autumn Werner, a trainer and manager at the attraction who uses her joint disorder as a contortionist, finds “power” amid the “oppression…Like, yeah, I get called a cripple while I’m crawling, but who’s the one that just pissed their pants?” Scaring the customers, who represent a thrill-seeking public that still sees disability as monstrous, is a source of cathartic empowerment for people who have been marginalized their whole lives.

At the same time, The Haunting of Pennhurst is also a documentary about the deeply problematic history of Pennhurst as a specific institution, which in turn becomes a lens through which viewers learn about the history of custodial abuse and deinstitutionalization in the United States. The filmmakers stitch together the film’s present-day narrative with historical materials. Institutional marketing, blueprints, photographs, and film reveal glimpses of what life was like for people incarcerated at Pennhurst. Using footage from historical documentaries about Pennhurst, the film offers a jarring visual juxtaposition of an operational institution with a now mostly abandoned site that operates as a seasonal entertainment venue.^[4]

The film also features the voice of disability rights advocate Roland Johnson, who recorded an oral history interview about his thirteen-year confinement at Pennhurst in the 1990s.^[5] Johnson’s powerful testimony connects the viewer viscerally to the lived experiences of the people who were forced to call Pennhurst home. What archival traces of Pennhurst still exist hint ominously at the medical experiments that once took place without consent within its walls, the exact nature of which remains a mystery because detailed records have not survived.

The filmmakers deliberately present the film’s ethnography and documentary content in the style of a Hollywood horror noir film, or, in Stenberg’s words, a “horror film about care.” Attie, the on-location cinematographer, immersed himself in “low-budget horror (1940s Val Lewton films) to develop an aesthetic” that plays “with light and shadow,” while Poljak “did location sound.” The original musical score by Dan Deacon is at once startling, dissonant, and unsettling, leaving the viewer with an uneasy feeling that, like the film’s core questions, never gets resolved. Even as The Haunting of Pennhurst educates, it also makes the viewer feel the horror of how the site was used and, perhaps, continues to be used.

Finally, the film confronts the viewer with the confounding reality that the preservation of Pennhurst is wholly dependent on extractive capitalism and dark tourism that continues to commodify disability as monstrosity and horror. Pennhurst Asylum, the attraction, generates revenue not only as a seasonal haunted house but also as a venue for ghost hunters and other paranormal investigators, many of whom sensationally exploit the memory of the people forced to live at Pennhurst for their own economic gain and online clout.

Some of the haunt actors volunteer their time and labor to help preserve the site while operating a small museum. Stenberg explains, “Pennhurst is the only operating museum of disability history and culture inside a former custodial institution in the United States,” the “only place documenting horror on the grounds of that horror.” The historian of disability Katrina N. Jirik argues that “it is critical to have someone with lived experience participate in the curation to make sure it is accurate.”^[6] Autumn and the other volunteers care so deeply about preserving Pennhurst and its material culture precisely because many of them claim disability status.

In their care, the site and its artifacts invert popular conceptions of who the monsters at Pennhurst really are. Artifacts such as bite guards, muzzles, and restraints are evidence that “There’s monstrosity there,” but one that was exhibited by the staff and the systems in which they worked, not people with disabilities. The volunteers lead site tours, guiding students and other visitors through the museum to educate rather than entertain. Yet despite their best efforts, much of the site has still been or is slated for demolition. Even the weather seemingly cooperated with the filmmakers – the cloudy skies were dark and gloomy in scenes of museum volunteers watching as buildings were razed.

The film purposely leaves the viewer with unanswered questions and profound ambivalence about what the answers might be. According to Stenberg, the “preservation of Pennhurst’s history” is fundamentally “precarious” because it is “tied to dark tourism, and there’s no clean way to talk about that” and that “should make people uncomfortable.” Had private investors not purchased the site as an entertainment venue, it would have probably been demolished and redeveloped, the fate met by most of America’s mental asylums, hospitals, and other disability institutions that existed before deinstitutionalization. Even now, there are plans to redevelop large portions of the site into a data center. Poljak adds, “Our goal is to invite audiences to sit with that discomfort, not to offer moral resolution,” pushing all of us to question “why preserving this history required spectacle in the first place.”

Even though The Haunting of Pennhurst defies genre conventions, it never sacrifices narrative cohesion or clarity of purpose. That the film accomplishes so much is the result of the filmmakers’ deliberately collaborative approach. According to Stenberg, each filmmaker’s unique background, experience, and skillset “press[ed] against each other” as they worked together to tell a difficult but “honest” story. They also credit editor Sarah Garrahan and producer Daniel Chalfen with helping the team keep the story on track as they worked to weave seemingly disparate narratives together in post-production.

By the end of the film, I developed the distinct impression that the verité approach represents not only the viewer’s own gaze as a spectator but also the memories, ghosts, and, perhaps, history itself, looking back at us through the camera’s lens. The Haunting of Pennhurst depicts a site where, in Poljak’s words, the “past continues to watch the present.” Disability studies scholars and their students will undoubtedly find this film relevant, compelling, and provocative because the profoundly uncomfortable questions it raises have no clean or easy answers.

Notes

1. I am grateful to the directors of The Haunting of Pennhurst for providing access to a screener of the film so that I could produce this detailed review Nursing Clio editors Cornelia Lambert and Courtney Thompson for offering critical feedback that greatly strengthened my analysis. I am also grateful to director Nathan R. Stenberg – a scholar of disability, performance, and care policy studies – for providing minor feedback about terminology describing disabled people and disability institutions as well as fact-checking the dates associated with Pennhurst’s institutional history. ↑
2. James Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2016). ↑
3. Diana Muller Katovich, Jess Gallagher, and James W. Conroy, “Fear and Loathing at Abandoned Institutions: Is There Any Redemptive Value?” Impact Feature Issue on Disability Rights, Disability Justice 36, no. 3 (Winter 2023-2024); Anne E. Parsons, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022); Lauren Wissot, “Shock Value: The Filmmakers Behind ‘The Haunting of Pennhurst’ Talk Horror, Disability, and Care,” Documentary Magazine, June 16th, 2026. ↑
4. The filmmakers leveraged historical footage of Pennhurst from Somebody Touched Me (1967), which was narrated by Henry Fonda, and NBC coverage of Pennhurst in its multipart expose, Suffer the Little Children (1968). Somebody Touched Me presented Pennhurst in a favorable light while Suffer the Little Children exposed abuses. These differences highlight competing depictions of Pennhurst during the mid-twentieth-century naissance of the deinstitutionalization movement. ↑
5. Roland Johnson’s oral history interview became the basis of his autobiography, Lost in a Desert World (1999). ↑
6. Katrina Jirik, “Disability, Archives, and Museums,” in Do Less Harm: Ethical Questions for Health Historians, Courtney E. Thompson and Kylie M. Smith, eds. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), 121. ↑

 

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Featured image caption: A still from The Haunting of Pennhurst. (Courtesy Tribeca Film Festival)