Hell House LLC: A Hit Wrapped In A Miss

Since I’ve returned to writing this thing on a regular basis, I’ve become very conscious of trying to mix things up a little. I tend to be discerning, insofar as I usually stick to films with premises or pedigrees that interest me, and I do have certain types of films that I like and dislike. I don’t make a point of watching and writing about stuff I am pretty sure I won’t like, because that isn’t fun for me and there are plenty of other outlets enthusiastic about those films. But a review of my most recent output reveals a lot of artsy, brainy, highbrow type stuff. Which I like, but I also kind of want to resist this becoming a space where I just write about the newest release from A24 every goddamn week.

I bring this up because the kind of films I like or don’t like was on my mind a lot while watching Hell House LLC. On paper, this is not something I’d be enthused about going into - it’s a found-footage film set in a haunted house attraction, and the last time I watched that particular intersection of subject matter, it fucking sucked. Plus, I’m just so tired of found-footage films. They’re so easy to make, and so difficult to make well.

But, I gotta say, even though this film’s writing is shaky in places, and it blows its ending in terms of narrative integrity, this is by and large a smartly executed film that honest-to-god scared me more than the overwhelming majority of stuff I write about here.

We open on the obligatory title card about how what we’re about to see is a documentary “about the mysterious events surrounding the 2009 Halloween haunted house tour tragedy.” Which is just…so clunky and vague. Which one? Was there only one “haunted house tour tragedy” in 2009? Not off to a good start. There’s some archival news footage, describing the opening night for Hell House, a haunted house run in an abandoned hotel in Abaddon (really?), New York. It isn’t clear from the footage shot by attendees what happened, but something awful apparently occurred in the basement of the hotel, only one of the cast and crew survived, and local law enforcement refused to say anything about it. And so now, sometime later, a documentary crew has come to Abaddon (sigh) New York, to speak to the only surviving member of the cast and crew and try to get to the bottom of it.

None of this is especially fresh or compelling or well-executed, and it’s exacerbated by being a found-footage narrative. Found-footage is supposed to feel raw and immediate and naturalistic, and so when the artifice is apparent - in how people talk or act, or in the quality of its special effects, or in the provenance of the footage - it becomes much more difficult to suspend disbelief than it might for other narrative approaches. As soon as it stops feeling like something someone actually captured on video, it loses its power. And this opening is supposed to feel like we’re watching a professionally assembled documentary and actual news footage from the time, but none of it does. The writing and dialogue don’t capture a journalist or documentarian’s voice well at all. I don’t believe this is an actual documentary or actual news footage. It’s a shaky start.

But once we get past the table-setting, once we get to the footage captured by the cast and crew in the weeks they spent setting up the location, it starts getting much, much better.

Here, we’re introduced to Paul, Alex, Tony, Andrew, and Sara. They’re in the business of setting up haunted houses, the kind that take over an entire building, through which paying guests are ushered. They’ve come out to Rockland County, New York - about 40 minutes outside of NYC - to set up this seasons’ event at the abandoned Abaddon Hotel. It’s more rustic than their usual location, but that’s part of the appeal - it’s got an authenticity you can’t fake. It’s going to be a bit of a challenge - they need to restore power to the place, and housing’s in short supply so once they’ve got electricity, they’ll be bunking in the hotel. The place has been abandoned for a very long time - a guest and her daughter went missing in the 1950s, and though the hotel was held blameless, the resulting bad press killed business, and then the disgraced owner killed himself. Everything’s pretty much where it was left when the place was shuttered. Lots of dust, lots of cobwebs, lots of genuine neglect.

Numbers scrawled on the walls, and a basement with symbols drawn all over the walls, stacks of Bibles.

The remains of a ritual.

The majority of the film is the footage shot by the team setting up the haunted house, documenting their stay in the hotel leading up to opening night, nested within a documentary context. And even if the expository writing is wooden and fake-sounding, the way the footage is handled feels much more realistic. Things aren’t always perfectly in frame, there’s lots of whipping the camera around…it looks like raw camera footage. The crew themselves aren’t especially developed as characters, nor do we get much of a sense of their personalities - mostly they’re variations on a theme of Bro. Alex is the head guy, Paul is the really obnoxious guy, Andrew and Tony are largely indistinguishable from each other, and Sara is a woman. They’re not especially abrasive (except for Paul, who is, true to form, a pig) though - they act pretty much like you’d expect a bunch of city folk to act having come out to the country to set up a haunted house. There’s a steady undertone of condescension toward the locale, but it doesn’t overwhelm their professionalism. They’ve got a job to do, one they’ve done before, and they don’t let horseplay get the better of them. There’s fighting at points, but it all feels pretty natural, and though they aren’t especially developed as people, neither do they tip over into caricature. It doesn’t really feel like acting.

What this film does well, it does by making a lot out of very little. The setting does a lot of the heavy lifting - it doesn’t look like a set made up to look like an abandoned hotel, it looks like an actually abandoned hotel in small-town New York. It’s not clean with artfully arranged bits of decay. It’s close, cramped. and you can feel the dirt and dust on everything. The power isn’t running, so a good chunk of it is lit with hanging work lights and flashlights, and since it’s all found-footage, it gets a lot of mileage out of shots that rely on a single perspective - look at something, then look away, and then look back, and the uneasiness inherent in walking around a dark corner with nothing but a flashlight. What this means is that it doesn’t take much to get under our skin, and making it a haunted house full of their props provides many opportunities for genuinely scary moments that don’t stretch plausibility. This film gets a lot of mileage out of putting mannequins where they shouldn’t be, and though that might sound reductive, in practice it really isn’t.

On top of this, the filmmakers show a good sense of restraint. Things that shouldn’t move do, and we get glimpses of figures where nobody should be, and things aren't over-explained - the hotel’s history is touched upon, but it’s not especially lurid, so the crew don’t really pay it much mind. There’s evidence of something more sinister in the basement, but again, the crew just remarks that it’s creepy and keeps going. Why would they look more into it? They’re there to set up a haunted house. People by and large act like people in this film - once things start getting really strange, someone points out that maybe they should leave, cancel the haunted house, but of course they can’t. This is one of the toughest narrative nuts to crack in found-footage films - there should come a time when it doesn’t make any sense to stick around, let alone keep filming. To the film’s credit, it’s handled pretty realistically here. They’re filming everything so they have a reference document for their next event, and so they have some bonus behind-the-scene footage for their website. That makes good sense within the world the film has created, and when the moment comes when they can’t leave, it actually feels natural  in that it isn't handled on-camera. We’re left to speculate why exactly they can’t call it off - apparently there’s some information Alex has been withholding from the rest of the crew, possibly about their finances -and that feels more natural to me than someone having a complete “we’ve come too far to turn back now” freak-out on camera. When it all goes to hell, we get glimpses, but only that - something went very wrong down in the basement, but we never get a clear shot through the crush of panicked people trying to get out. The recovered footage - the people, the setting, the presentation - has an authenticity that the framing material lacks, and is very effective.

It does fall down in other places, though. Apart from the wooden news story and documentary stuff and painfully on-the-nose town and hotel name, the spooky occult stuff in the basement looks more like the work of edgy teenagers than it does an actual ritual site, there’s some confusion as to who is where when at the climax (though that may be down to me being unable to tell some of the cast and crew apart) and the end, while providing a nicely spooky final beat, also disrupts the framing conceit of the documentary pretty seriously, enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth. Which is too bad, because it did a lot of things right - not everything, but a lot.

More than anything. this film reminds me of The Poughkeepsie Tapes, in that it’s set in semi-rural New York and surrounds supremely unsettling found footage with an equally unconvincing framing narrative, but it’s not quite as uneven as that film, and trades the disturbing for good straight-up meat-and-potatoes scary. It’s been a hot second since a film actually had me on edge or make me jump, and this one accomplished it handily. That’s worth noting, I just wished they’d stuck the landing.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon