Here we are, yet again, with another film I initially ignored for a while. I'd see Hell House LLC pop up on Amazon Prime, and I'd read the synopsis, but I never thought to actually watch it because I assumed it was just another low-budget found footage movie among many, and even I was starting to get a little tired by their sameness. And then I started to notice people posting about it, and the things they were saying were generally very positive. Then a sequel got released, and I figured the universe had given me enough signs and actually sat down to watch it.
And now that a day has passed and I no longer feel quite so afraid that I'm going to wake in the middle of the night and be attacked by a creepy ghost girl sitting at the foot of my bed, I can come here and gibber manically that this is a rare case of a film being worthy of the hype.
On October 8, 2009, a haunted house attraction opened in the small town of Abbadon, New York, in the town's abandoned Abbadon Hotel. During the opening night, something went terribly wrong and 15 people, including most of the staff and several patrons, died there, although no-one could discover what exactly happened, blaming it instead on an "unknown malfunction". Several years later, a documentary team decides to make a film investigation into what happened that night and the hotel's past. While making their film, they are contacted by the sole surviving staff member of Hell House LLC, Sara Havel, who agrees to be interviewed as part of their documentary and also provides them with tapes shot by the staff in the weeks leading up to the tragedy, as they set up the attraction. We watch the crew arriving and setting things up in the Abbadon Hotel, as well as seeing them start to experience eerie and disturbing goings-on that grow in intensity the closer it gets to opening night. What happened in the Abbadon Hotel that night, and how did anyone come to survive it?
There is a very small list of films that have truly managed to unnerve and/or scare me over the years. Ghostwatch. Ringu. The Last Broadcast. Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County. The Blair Witch Project (although technically there were external factors there as well). I can now add Hell House LLC to the list, because it does such an incredible job of creating tension and dread, and exploiting common fears (and I'm not even afraid of clowns!) that I had to pause the film about two-thirds of the way through and go into the other room to calm down for a bit before coming back to keep watching from behind my fingers. The atmosphere it creates really is that damn good.
Now granted, the plot is a little hackneyed. Abandoned place with a dark and sinister past, paranormal activities start happening, one person is there to "document everything" with his camera... It's Ye Olde Found Footage Checklist. There's also a bit quite early on in the "found" tapes where the crew find an old picture of a woman in the Abbadon Hotel and point out that it looks a lot like Sara, and if you know anything about horror movie plots and cliches you'll be rolling your eyes at that a little and making predictions as to how the rest of the film will turn out. Now I'm not going to say whether or not I was right in my predictions because that would spoil things, but I will say that I maybe should have given the film a little more credit. Besides, the story really takes second place to the incredibly creepy atmosphere that grows throughout the film's 83-minute runtime.
The scares/increasing creep factor are done very simply, yet effectively, through the use of things like camera framing and shadows, half-glimpsed images through strobe lighting (and later still images to clarify that what we thought we saw was actually there) and things moving about that shouldn't be moving about. And by "things" I mean a creepy clown mannequin with bleeding eye sockets that keeps moving about the hotel on its own. Coulrophobics beware - this film might not be one for you. There's also the mystery of what happened on opening night - at the start of the film we're shown footage from one of the patrons as they go through the house and start to notice some small unsettling things, but the alleged focal point of all the carnage, the basement, is never shown. Instead, for the rest of the film it gets talked about in vague yet unsettling terms, amping up the fascination and the dread that the audience feels as they imagine just what did happen. Of course, this does end up being a bit of a double-edged sword, as by the time we finally do get to see what went on in there the reality is a bit of an anti-climax as we've imagined something far different (and gorier) than what we see. At least, that's what happened with me.
There's a couple of other minor flaws to the film as well - either I missed something or we the audience are never told why Alex, the man in charge, is so hell-bent (haha) on staying in the hotel despite everything going on, even though we see the aftermath of some of the other staff being told; and there's a bit where two of the staff are running around looking for a missing friend of theirs and shouting out his name, and all my brain could do was add in Mike screaming, "Tell us where you are, Josh!" to the scene and after that it lost a lot of its gravitas. But these are very minor flaws indeed and don't really affect the finished product.
Hell House LLC, if I'd seen it in 2016, would have made my Top 5 Films of the Year. Now all I have to do is get up the courage to watch the sequel...
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