HELL HOUSE LLC
US, 2015, 93 minutes, Colour.
Ryan Jennifer Jones, Danny Bellini, Gore Abrahams, Jared Hacker.
Directed by Steve Cognetti.
“Found Footage” films were very popular in the first decades of the 21st-century with the success of the Blair Witch project. They reported to have film material of mysterious events which were then gathered together and released as feature films.
And, this is the pattern here, although the film received much more favourable reviews than many other found footage features. It was so successful that there were quite a number of sequels.
It is introduced as a documentary, some media commentators giving their opinions, an investigator going to the location of the Hell House with her crew.
The media commentators then show some footage at the Hell House and its opening, as a tourist horror attraction, 2009, crowds arriving, then some panic, chaos and people fleeing, 15 dead.
The surviving member of the staff of the original planners and workers on Hell House comes forward for an interview with the journalist, and provides a bag full of taped material from the period of finding the venue, assessing it, cleaning it out, the plans for the Hell House attraction, the hiring of local artists as characters. But, as the audience gets to know the members of the planning group and stories about the haunting of the house itself, its being changed to Abaddon, the Demon at the gates of hell, indications of some kind of supernatural intervention begin to be revealed, story of the original owner being the leader of a cult, the disappearance of a mother and child, his eventually hanging himself.
There is a lot of handheld camera work showing the various members of the planning, interviews with them, their interactions, humorous, serious, and then the beginning of strange occurrences, clowns moving, attacks, artist, gradually becoming more intense, seeming possessions, further attacks, deaths.
And, the film ends in disbelief, indications that the room for the interview with the surviving member of the staff does not exist – and she has been dead for some time.
This intrigued public interest sufficiently so that the makers moved on to a sequel.
