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(Tribeca 2026) THE HAUNTING OF PENNHURST: A Haunted Attraction Built on Disability History Deserves More Than Atmosphere

By. Professor Horror 

 

There is a particular kind of documentary that mistakes bearing witness for doing the work. It arrives at a site of historical violence, catalogs the horrors with care and solemnity, generates the appropriate emotional response in its audience, and then withdraws, leaving viewers shaken but unequipped to understand how that history continues to shape the present. As someone who researches disability representation in horror media, I arrived at THE HAUNTING OF PENNHURST with a particular set of questions about how cinema renders disabled lives, disabled suffering, and disabled history. Directed by Nathan R. Stenberg, Mike Attie, and Katarina Poljak and premiering at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival, the film unfolds within the long shadow of the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, an institution that opened in 1908 in Spring City, Pennsylvania for people with physical and developmental disabilities and, over nearly eighty years, became synonymous with overcrowding, neglect, and abuse. A 1968 television exposé, Suffer the Little Children, finally brought national attention to conditions inside the facility, where residents were routinely denied basic care, children were restrained for hours at a time, and more than half of the institution's population ultimately died within its walls. Pennhurst closed in 1987 after years of litigation, but its buildings remain, repurposed as Pennhurst Asylum, one of the country's most prominent commercial haunted attractions. THE HAUNTING OF PENNHURST succeeds in conveying the enormity of that history and the suffering embedded within the site. What it struggles to do is interrogate the complicated relationship between that history and the attraction that now occupies the same ground.

The film opens with a genuinely intriguing provocation. Before it turns to Pennhurst's history, it introduces a group of disabled performers, several of whom identify as neurodivergent, who explain that the attraction is one of the few places where they feel entirely accepted. Many of them mention that in the outside world they are often treated as strange, frightening, or othered, but inside the haunt, those same qualities become an asset, and the attraction becomes a kind of home. It is a fascinating tension and one that immediately raises difficult questions about disability, horror, performance, and belonging. What does it mean when a former site of institutional abuse is transformed into a space where disabled people now find community and empowerment? Can horror reclaim a history that once dehumanized them, or does the attraction inevitably reproduce parts of that history? For a time, THE HAUNTING OF PENNHURST appears prepared to wrestle with these questions. The archival material is deployed with considerable skill, and the film's reconstruction of life inside Pennhurst is genuinely unsettling. When the documentary examines the institution's governing logic, including the explicit goal of segregating all deficient, it becomes clear that what occurred there was not simply the result of neglect or individual cruelty but a system built around exclusion and confinement.

Haunted attractions often occupy an uneasy space between entertainment and reality. For a very different Tribeca film set inside a working haunt, read our review of CAITY, where the machinery of fear becomes intertwined with addiction, family secrets, and the realization that some horrors are not staged at all.

Yet the interrogation that the opening promises never fully arrives. The film pivots relatively quickly from historical documentation to an extended portrait of the haunt itself as it follows the performers through a season and largely accepts their participation as a form of reclamation. Their stories are compelling, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of their attachment to the space. The problem is that the documentary rarely pushes beyond that sincerity to ask harder questions. If disabled performers feel at home in a former institution that once confined, neglected, and dehumanized people like them, is that evidence of successful reclamation, or is it evidence of how few genuinely welcoming spaces exist elsewhere? Those possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and the distinction matters enormously. By refusing to sit with that tension for very long, the film bypasses what could have been its most challenging and illuminating line of inquiry, settling instead for a far more comfortable narrative about healing, community, and belonging. This is where the documentary's structural problem becomes most visible. The disabled performers are introduced not as historical subjects but as evidence for the film's thesis. Once that thesis has been established, the documentary spends surprisingly little time exploring how they themselves understand the contradictions of the space they inhabit. We see characters developed, costumes assembled, and visitors terrified. What we do not see is any sustained engagement with how these individuals navigate the ethical complexity of the work they are doing. Rather than exploring that contradiction, the film largely resolves it in advance. The performers' presence is treated as evidence that reclamation has already occurred, when the more interesting question is whether reclamation and exploitation might be operating simultaneously.

The inclusion of the merchandise table and the straight jacket photo opportunities is also a weird choice. At one point we see two women posing and doing "crazy hair" as a bit of fun. The documentary notices the object but never pauses long enough to consider what it means that a tool historically associated with institutional control has become a souvenir or a photo op. Its appearance as entertainment infrastructure, available for purchase and photography, is an ethical crisis that a serious documentary about this place would be obligated to address. However, PENNHURST includes it as atmosphere.

Perhaps most troubling is the attraction's practice of summoning the spirits of deceased residents as part of the haunted experience. The children who died at Pennhurst were not horror archetypes. They were real people whose deaths were the direct consequence of systemic neglect and state-sanctioned abuse and people who had no agency over their institutionalization and no recourse within it. Using their deaths as the affective engine of a ticketed entertainment event is not preservation and it is not reclamation. The film's reluctance to interrogate this practice reflects a broader discomfort with discussing sites of disability-related violence, particularly when that violence has been transformed into entertainment. We have spent years building an understanding of why Indigenous boarding schools and former plantation sites should not be haunted attractions, why the aestheticization of specific racialized and colonial trauma is not a neutral act regardless of who is doing the aestheticizing. Pennhurst deserves the same rigorous framework, and the film never applies it.

The film begins by asking what it means for disabled people to find community inside a former institution that once sought to erase people like them. That question is compelling enough to sustain an entire documentary. Unfortunately, it is also the question THE HAUNTING OF PENNHURST seems least interested in pursuing. Documentation is not advocacy. The horror of Pennhurst's history is real, and the film renders it with enough fidelity that audiences will leave disturbed. But disturbing an audience and equipping them are different projects, and a documentary about a site of disability violence in 2026 has an obligation to do the latter. The people who were warehoused, neglected, and killed at Pennhurst deserve more than to be the backstory for a haunted house, and they deserve more from a documentary bearing their institution's name than to be the source of its atmosphere. They deserve a film that follows their history all the way to the present, that names what is still happening, and that tells its audience where to go from here.

THE HAUNTING OF PENNHURST asks what happens when a site of historical suffering becomes a place of community, entertainment, and contested memory. For another Tribeca film concerned with belonging, vulnerability, and the consequences of misplaced trust, read our review of Michael Gallagher's THE LEADER.