Movie Review: The ‘Hell House LLC’ Series

During a recent bout of COVID, we decided to dig into a horror franchise that we were previously unfamiliar with. Initially mistaking this for the haunted house movie featuring a bunch of body modification enthusiasts, we found ourselves working through Stephen Cognetti’s tetralogy of found footage haunted house occultism films Hell House LLC. These movies follow a series of deaths and disappearances that become the centre of public conjecture surrounding the abandoned Abaddon Hotel.

Initially we don’t get a great deal of closure on the what happened and how it came about, whether or not there is something truly supernatural involved. A group of creatives under the banner ‘Hell House’ have moved their operation out of the city and into the aforementioned Abaddon Hotel. With the company in economic straits, there’s a great deal of stress in ensuring that everything goes smoothly. We learn right off the bat that on opening night some terrible malfunction occurred leading several people dead, with only snippets of customer footage showing the chaos playing out in the basement. In order to gain insight, this found footage documentary pulls together all the images they can and the lost ‘Hell House’ company tapes to reveal the series of unusual events surrounding the set-up and the carnage that resulted on the night.

What we get is back story into the hotel, which involves missing people and a suicidal satanist, strange sounds and movements within the hotel, mannequins dressed like clowns moving around to jump scare people and other shenanigans. The big twist comes in the reveal that the one surviving member of Hell House, who provided the footage, is already dead and this spirit or demon is using the documentary film-makers to lure more victims to the hotel.

In the sequel, Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel is bookended by a morning ‘unexplained mystery’ TV show featuring a psychic, a city official fed-up with deflecting people nosing into this hotel massacre and the surviving member of the documentary crew who wants to find out what happened to his peers who were last seen heading to the hotel. We get some expansion on the lore of behaviour of the hotel, focusing more on missing or deceased people reappearing in our world and bringing others to their doom. Eventually a group of our new characters head into the hotel and moving clowns, spooky people standing behind people, moving geography and the same old spins.

We follow this up with Hell House LLC III: Lake of Fire. Previously mentioned tech mogul Russell Wynn wants to use the Hotel Abaddon to stage his interactive theatre production based on Faust. This premise is quite a stretch, consider it’s public knowledge at this point that dumbasses using this location for their multi-media projects always results in everyone being dead. Having so many people agree to get involved feels like we’re banging our heads against the wall, but the series needs to keep rolling, so more people turn up and get spooked at again. Then there’s a portal to hell and the place burns down.

Finally, there’s the most recent entry Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor. With the name ‘origins’ being in the title, we were expecting a prequel of sorts, showing us the occultists that left all the supernatural stuff in the hotel. Instead, it takes place after the hotel burns down and we’re in a different house that is tangentially connected to the hotel. For some reason this is filled with the same basic spooks, right down to the clown mannequins popping up around corners. This one is so specific you’d start to wonder why so many people had these things, but they have to pointlessly explain why there are spooky clowns in the first place (not just because the Hell House crew put them there as part of their scare house, there has to be a needless explanation).

On its own, Hell House LLC manages the premise and leaves enough answered and unanswered questions to be a fun, spooky adventure. A mix of classic mockumentary and modern horror trends like Halloween Haunts. The acting is unconvincing for what is presented as reality, but we won’t hold this against the movie because that’s a big ask for a group of inexperienced film actors. Unfortunately, the longer the series goes on the less scary it gets because everything has to be ‘explained’ and the scares do not evolve in any way. It’s one of the most repetitive experiences we’ve ever had with a horror franchise.

Narratively you have a group of obnoxious characters, maybe a complete creep on the camera, and they’ve got a contrived reason for staying in an obviously haunted locale. They see something weird happening, and then they stand or sit in a room and have a meeting about, deciding to just keep pushing ahead. The acting becomes less convincing and story thinner the longer we keep watching. It isn’t helped that the characters tend to be incredibly shallow and stereotypical. Our favourite is the gay character in the second film who’s entire backstory and characterisation comes in one sentence where they complain about the ‘fashion show’ they were just coming from.

The one thing that we should be coming back for are the scares. Saw movies are repetitive, but the variation in the traps make for good return adventures. Hell House LLC only has a small handful of tricks and keeps playing them out, which is made all the worse for Cognetti’s tendency to wash down each scare to the point that it winds up looking silly.

You see, Mike Flanagan and Ari Aster are both fans of trick of putting something in the background that you don’t initially notice until it moves. Cognetti has the first part down, but gets anxious that you may not have noticed. So a shadowy figure is lurking behind our selfie-taking camera operator…maybe you caught it…but if you didn’t the footage will play again in slow motion with a zoom in on the shadowy figure. Then the footage will freeze so you can get a look at it. Maybe it’s a ghost of a missing person, so now we have a freeze frame of the shadowy figure in a split screen with the missing person. As a viewer, the process tends to be a ‘oh, what was that?!’ reaction followed by a ‘oh, ok, I got it…right, that’s very clear’. You don’t have to do this every, single time. Any suspense and mystery is immediately diffused.

Our favourite recurring choice was one with the editing. I think we first saw this is Cloverfield, that when the main characters were facing their death the video glitches and splices in a moment of them during happier times. It’s a way of linking the beginning and the end of the experience and adding a pinch of tragedy. The Hell House LLC movies will do this with every…single…time a character dies. The moments someone gets killed by a ghost we cut to a second or two from the start of the movie where they’re smiling at the camera. It happened so often and with such reliability that it becomes comedic.

As we work further into these films, the director does a good job of layering the stories and lore over the top of each other. Props and footage from the previous movies will turn up, they’ll be links to the characters who have gone missing, people mentioned in passing will have a larger role in the next film. They problem is that more and more frequently we see past footage getting recycled. Honestly, this franchise continues long enough we’re going to see an entry made entirely out of old footage.

Hell House LLC starts out fun with some scary visuals (that’s a pretty scary clown) but feels as though it’s trying to shoot itself in the foot over and over again. The more you explain, the more backstory you add in, the more you show us of the scary moments the less they work. Cognetti may have benefitted from trying something different rather than returning to this spooky well and doling out more buckets. The series doesn’t evolve – it just keeps happening.