“This isn’t part of the show!”
Haunted houses are such a part of the horror firmament that they date back to the very first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. It’s not something that’s ever going to go away. There’s something existentially terrifying about a living set of walls, a building with its own sense of right and wrong. This is why we gravitate to stories like The Shining, Poltergeist, and The Haunting of Hill House. It also explains the recent rise in intense haunted house experiences like Blackout and McKamey Manor. We want to experience the terror first-hand, but more than that, we want to build it. It’s fertile ground for a horror movie. The question that Stephen Cognetti’s Hell House LLC asks – “What if you built a haunted house in a place that was actually haunted?” – isn’t the most unique approach to horror, but it’s nevertheless effective.
This is a found-footage movie, but only up to a point. I’ve always maintained that found footage is the hardest gimmick to justify, not only because the film needs to continuously justify why the characters won’t just turn the camera off, but it requires an extremely high level of investment on the part of the viewer. Hell House LLC gives itself a bit of a break by employing a documentary format. This is partly a found-footage movie, yes, but it’s also a compiled movie. There’s a sense of narrative that helps streamline the events. It helps that the documentary footage actually looks and feels like a documentary, and that the documentarian, Diane Graves (Alice Bahlke) is largely off-screen. Most movies would want the filmmaker to serve as an audience surrogate, but Diane is just as in the dark as we are.
The central mystery is “What happened in Hell House in 2009?” We get some talking heads – a photographer, a journalist – chiming in, but the thrust of it is: no one knows. Moreoever, no one is allowed to know, as there is a gag order on everyone related to the case. Diane’s film is spinning its wheels until the arrival of Sara Havel (Ryan Jennifer), the sole surviving member of the original Hell House team. She hands Diane a wealth of behind-the-scenes footage, and says where she can be reached.
One misstep that Hell House LLC makes is the length of the actual found footage. Long stretches of time are dedicate to unbroken replays of these tapes, which is fine for the most part, but the mystery surrounding the tragedy at Hell House is compelling enough that one wishes more screen time were devoted to it. The longer the footage goes on, the more the specter looms, that question that plagues every found footage movie: Who in their right mind would film this?
Sure, watching the crew walk through the abandoned Abaddon Hotel for the first time is fascinating, but their road trip is less important. It does do a good job, however, of establishing the characters. Beyond Sara, there is Alex (Danny Bellini), Sara’s boyfriend and the director; Mac (Adam Schneider), the producer; Tony (Jared Hacker), the electrician; and Paul (Gore Abrams), a kind of factotum who spends most of his time manning the camera. It’s arguably not necessary for us to know that Paul has a crush on Sara, or that Mac and Alex are constantly butting heads, but it deepens this world, and shows that Hell House is looking for more than just cheap scares.
One of the baser impulses of horror film is to have such unlikable protagonists that the audience has no choice but to revel in their inevitable deaths (2009’s Friday the 13th is a great example of this). But, for the most part, these characters are likable, a ragtag group of horror dorks who want to spend their time and money constructing elaborate ways to scare. One of the funniest things in the movie, whether or not it’s intentional, is that Hell House actually looks pretty tacky. The scares come courtesy of clowns, spiders, and witches, and while most intense haunted houses make people walk through alone, Hell House is absolutely filled.
Even though the attraction might be subpar, the scares the team experiences are pretty solid. Kudos is due to director Cognetti, who eschews jump scares and settles into a good groove of creeping dread. Is it stacking the deck a bit to have creepy clowns as the main threat? Yeah, probably. But damned if it isn’t effective to see them switch places and positions. One of the film’s best scares comes courtesy of Paul, who records himself talking to the camera when he can’t sleep. Behind him, we see a tall silhouette with wispy hair. It’s a great visual summary of what attracts us to haunted house movies: what if we’re never alone as we think we are?
It’s Paul, too, who defies convention by not dying a typical death. He disappears for two days, and returns comatose and unresponsive. Everything that makes a person has been taken from him, leaving him an empty vessel: a house, in a manner of speaking. The most frightening thing is the depths of the human imagination, and Hell House LLC plays into this by withholding any easy answers. Unfortunately, that sometimes works against the film. We never get a satisfactory answer about what really happened that night, nor the nature of the haunting. In a frantic 911 call, we can what sounds like growling in the background, and that’s one of many tantalizing threads that are left to dangle. The ending is strong enough that a sequel was inevitable (and was released in September of 2018). Diane tries to reach Sara at her hotel room, only to find that the hotel doesn’t have a room 2C. But the Abaddon does.
At its best, Hell House LLC replicates what it’s like to be in an actual haunted house. The dangerous unknown lurks around every corner, and there is some foul power at play that we can neither understand nor combat. Stephen Cognetti has crafted a slick slice of terror here, and while it doesn’t always work, when it does, it just makes you want to see more from him.
10/1: Hellraiser / The Invitation
10/2: Splice / Banshee Chapter
10/3: Jennifer’s Body / Raw
10/4: Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist / Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
10/5: Kill List / A Field in England
10/6: Halloween II / Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/7: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge / A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
10/8: Ginger Snaps / Creep
10/9: Cube / Creep 2
10/10: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) / The Ritual
10/11: Hell House LLC / The Taking of Deborah Logan
10/12: Re-Animator / From Beyond
10/13: Beetlejuice / Sleepy Hollow
10/14: Idle Hands / The Lords of Salem
10/15: The Ring / Noroi: The Curse
10/16: I Know What You Did Last Summer / The Monster
10/17: Night of the Living Dead / Train to Busan
10/18: The Devil’s Backbone / Southbound
10/19: Event Horizon / Dreamcatcher
10/20: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari / The Bad Seed
10/21: Eyes Without a Face / Goodnight Mommy
10/22: The Strangers / The Strangers: Prey at Night
10/23: In the Mouth of Madness / The Void
10/24: The Amityville Horror / Honeymoon
10/25: Gerald’s Game / Emelie
10/26: The Monster Squad / Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
10/27: Veronica / Jacob’s Ladder
10/28: High Tension / You’re Next
10/29: The Innkeepers / Bug
10/30: The People Under the Stairs / Vampires
10/31: Saw / Saw II
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