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Images courtesy of Shudder |
The Hell House LLC films have explored the allure of haunted houses and the sinister forces that lurk within them for almost a decade now. The first installment follows a group of haunted attraction creators as they set up their latest project in an abandoned hotel with a dark past. As increasingly eerie occurrences happen in the building, they capture everything on camera, amplifying the terror for both themselves and the audience. This found footage horror film became a cult favorite that inspired two sequels delving deeper into the gruesome history of the haunted hotel.
Now, filmmaker Stephen Cognetti wants to take people back to the beginning with Shudder’s Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor. The film follows Margot (Bridget Rose Perrotta), Rebecca (Destiny Leilani Brown), and Chase (James Liddell): twenty-something-year-old cold case investigators who decide to stay at the infamous Carmichael Manor, where grisly murders were committed in 1989, but remain shrouded in mystery. The Carmichaels were a wealthy family whose lives were struck by tragedy when a car accident badly injured the son and killed one of their daughters. The tragedy further intensified when the other daughter and mother were later brutally murdered, while the father and son disappeared from that day forward. The young investigators want to get to the bottom of these murders, and the more they unravel, the more strange occurrences begin happening to them at the manor. They might get what they came there for, but at what cost?
Following in the tradition of its predecessors, Hell House LLC Origins is another found footage film that shows most of the narrative through the lens of the protagonist’s camera to add an immersive quality to the scares. Via this lens, three very different characters begin to take shape, each with distinctly different motivations during their time on the estate. The film opens in a documentary style, filled with interviews from experts who have seen the footage these characters captured and also delve into more detail about the Carmichaels. It’s an approach that tackles much of the exposition in an interesting way, but that’s unfortunately one of the only unique qualities in the film’s approach.
There’s a polish about this one that wasn’t always present with the other films and the backdrop is certainly different, but that doesn’t stop Hell House LLC Origins from feeling like more of the same. Complete with overambitious main characters, shaky handheld footage, and relatively sluggish pacing that only picks up in the final 30 minutes, the film is sure to feel familiar to those who have seen the rest of the franchise at best, and bore to death those with “found footage fatigue” at worst. The iconic, nightmare-inducing clowns that pervade the other Hell House LLC films also show up in this one, and while they never cease to cast a disturbing presence, there were some missed opportunities to branch out a bit more this time around, especially considering the new location.
While Carmichael Manor has a fair share of frights for its inhabitants, in the end it feels like it’s an unnecessary renhash of what was already established at the Abaddon Hotel. Although it’s arguably better executed than some of its predecessors, that doesn’t make up for its uninspired approach. If you’re already a fan of the franchise, the familiarity of it all may feel acceptable, but to anyone who’s a more casual watcher of these films with little investment in them, you might not enjoy your stay at the manor.