Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (2023)

Margot (Bridget Rose Perrotta) and her girlfriend Rebecca (Destiny Leilani Brown) spend much of their free time visiting the – mostly supposedly haunted – sites of mysterious and unsolved murder cases for Margot’s YouTube channel. Rebecca’s only there for Margot, who tends to get a bit obsessive about “her cases”, whereas Rebecca takes care of the more real business of things like actually earning money when Margot isn’t dragging her around the creepiest parts of America.

For their newest case, Margot has also invited her brother Chase (James Liddell) to join in on the fun – perhaps not the best idea if one keeps in mind he’s just had some kind of mental breakdown.

Particularly since Margot has rented the Carmichael Manor for their newest excursion, the scene of unexplained murder/disappearances, and supposedly so haunted, nobody actually wants to stay there for longer than a night. As it turns out, the place and what happened there is connected to the Abaddon Hotel as known from the other Hell House LLC movies, and comes complete with a set of creepy clown costumes on mannikins that look rather a lot like those creeping around some viewers’ brains since the earlier films in the series. Margot and company will indeed figure out what happened at the Manor, and find it – or something very much like it - happening to themselves to.

I really liked the first Hell House LLC by director/writer Stephen Cognetti a lot, with its mix of genuinely interesting characterisation and creative shocks that made great use of the POV horror format. My interest in the sequels flagged rather heavily – there was so much explaining of the horror’s background myth, I felt myself exposited into disinterest.

That’s not a problem with this fourth Hell House LLC film. Cognetti’s still interested in worldbuilding, but here, he again hits the spot where explanations are hinted at and connections shown instead of explained out loud, leaving the space wide open to create an actual sense of dread.

Which the film does very well indeed. There’s some perfect creepy mood building throughout its first act that creates a delightful feeling of dread which very effectively underpins all of the nice little shocks to come. And Cognetti is truly great at creating little horror set pieces, jump scares and moments of outright creepiness of a type that’s perfect for the POV horror format. There’s nothing of the coyness of not showing anything here that can haunt POV horror/found footage. The direction uses deliberation and intelligence to decide what to show and what to insinuate, combined with an excellent sense of timing to create some memorable moments. The basic creepiness of the clown suits may even detract from how good Cognetti is at this sort of thing.

Which – along with the effective if not deep characterisation – makes Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor a wonderful outing in the series.

Three Films Make A Post: Secrets kept hidden for 100 years are now revealed.

Incidente aka Incident (2010): On paper, this piece of POV horror by Argentinian director Mariano Cattaneo sounds pretty awful: a couple of documentarians (whose camera wielding half apparently can’t frame a shot decently to save his life) examining the occult connections of a spree killing of years past and some occultist academics awaken a rather possessive evil; lots of running around of people in various states of possession through a dilapidated industrial building ensues. In practice, and despite the much too shaky camera work, Cattaneo somehow turns this thin bit of plot into an entertaining 80 minutes of film, by what I can only imagine to be sheer willpower. The make-up effects are rather impressive for the film’s budget league, but what really makes this work as decently as it does is a proper sense of mood and pacing, I just wish it had been put to use on a more interesting story, though I do give the film some extra bonus points for its use of actual occult concepts in its backstory.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018): While I enjoyed the first film in what is now apparently a franchise more than this sequel, Stephen Cognetti’s attempt at broadening his haunted house tale towards a more concrete mythology of its own still ends up being a perfectly entertaining little movie featuring some actually thoughtful retconning of elements of the first film, and quite a few scenes that are effectively creepy. Like Cattaneo, Cognetti also understands the importance of mood and pacing for this sort of low budget affair, so there’s none of the feet dragging that can mar indie horror, and a clear sense of purpose to everything we see and hear.

Heilstätten (2018): And here’s yet another POV horror film, this time around from my native Germany, directed by Michael David Pate. Bottom feeding Youtube “personalities” break into a former hospital complex with a very bad past (this is Germany after all). The expected mixture of romantic travails and supernatural and/or slasheriffic violence ensues, as does a double plot twist that doesn’t work terribly well but certainly isn’t boring.


And really, while there’s nothing terribly exciting about Heilstätten apart from it being yet another horror movie from Germany that isn’t just amateur gore hour (though it features some pretty well done bits of the icky stuff as well) or an arthouse flick, it works well throughout, keeps its pace up, takes care to make its characters less loathsome than you’d expect, and seems generally made by people who care about entertaining their audience. I certainly felt moved accordingly for most of the film’s 90 minutes.

Hell House LLC (2015)

Some years ago, a commercial haunted house attraction in a small US town an hour’s drive away from New York ended with various unexplained deaths. The local authorities have done their utmost to cover up whatever actually happened, blaming the undisclosed number of deaths on some vague sort of technical problem. Hell House LLC – as is tradition – purports to be a documentary on the case. Rather untraditionally, it doesn’t exclusively consist of footage of a documentary crew traipsing through an old dark house and ending badly, though we’ll get to that eventually.

Between various talking heads and enticingly ambiguous footage made by visitors to the attraction, the documentary makers are contacted by Sara (Ryan Jennifer), apparently the sole survivor of the operators of the house. Sara doesn’t just give an interview, but also comes with a bag full of camera footage: security camera tapes from inside the attraction as well as much behind the scenes material shot by her and her friends. Much of the rest of the film does of course consist of Sara’s gift to documentary filmmaking and the story it tells.

A close-knit company of friends come to the not at all suspiciously named run-down old Abaddon Hotel to open their newest commercial Haunted House for the best month of the year. They don’t know about the building’s chequered past of mysterious deaths, nor do they come in expecting anything but a bit of hard work creating a spook show. Alas, there is something dwelling in the house that starts a series of strange and frightening events which will end with the wholesale slaughter of the opening night.

I’m always happy when a POV horror film takes its documentary conceit a bit more seriously, and while Stephen Cognetti’s Hell House LLC doesn’t quite parse as an actual documentary film – there are scenes in here nobody would ever use in an actual documentary for reasons of simple human decency and/or the fear of being sued penniless by various relatives – it certainly puts enough effort into this approach to buy into it. While he’s at it, Cognetti (who also wrote the film) does use the opportunities provided by the mock documentary format to tell his story a little differently than is POV standard.

Of course, we still witness the adventures of a bunch of doomed young people, but the slightly different narrative framing allows another kind of scares and a structure that can easier deviate from some POV horror standards. If you’re one of those people, you’ll probably still ask yourself why the characters keep filming even when the really horrible stuff starts happening; to me, that’s a bit like asking “who is filming this?” of a non-POV movie, but tastes and the ability to just go with things do vary. I found myself rather happy with the way Hell House LLC avoids some typical POV horror problems: there’s a pleasant lack of pointless scenes of the characters just farting around, shaky cam only happens in sequences where characters get rather excited, and the film’s general narrative structure clearly aims to use the fake authenticity and subjectivity POV horror has to offer without losing some of the opportunities a more standard style of film has to offer.

So this is not one of those POV horror films where actually interesting or creepy stuff is only happening during the last ten minutes or so. Scares and creepy things (clown manikins anyone?) are sprinkled throughout the running time, and the film makes effective use of the opportunities actual horrors happening in a place of fake horrors offer to make an audience nervous.

Hell House LLC does stay in the spirit of the haunted house attractions it is co-inspired by, though: this is a film built to provide ninety minutes of fun scares without terribly much subtext or deep thematic explorations of anything. In fact – and this is again something some viewers will loathe yet I appreciate when it is done as well as it is here – the film seems so focused on the scare show part of the business of being a horror film, it doesn’t explain anything it doesn’t need to explain for sake of the plot, not so much to be ambiguous but because it seems utterly disinterested in anything not having a direct effect on the audience’s horror glands.

That, mind you, doesn’t make the film any less fun to watch – it’s just a very specific kind of fun.