Hell House, LLC, or, Killer Klowns From Crawl Space

On top of trying to keep things generally positive around here, I believe it’s important to show more grace to lower-budget independent projects than you would to bigger, commercial blockbusters. And no matter the budget, it’s always an accomplishment when anything gets finished, and a filmmaker realizing their goal is something to be applauded.

But Hell House, LLC pissed me off. Not enough to make it irredeemable, or anything; it’s better than average for a lower-budget horror movie, found footage format or not, and it’s actually stronger than a lot of horror movies with much larger budgets. It’s got a couple of moments that are really well done, and just those alone are enough to make me recommend it, with a ton of qualifiers and reservations.

The premise is that a group of people who’d been doing Halloween haunts in New York City have moved their operations to a small town upstate, taking over an abandoned hotel to stage this year’s event. We know from the start that something horrible happened on the opening night of the event, resulting in fifteen deaths, including all but one of the haunt’s staff. We’re watching a documentary that is trying to piece together what happened, using interviews with experts along with a ton of never-before-seen footage delivered by the crew’s only survivor.

Most of that footage is from Paul, a camera man who’s documenting the construction of the house. We quickly learn that all of the guys on the team are pretty douchey, and Paul in particular is a cartoonishly lecherous creep. (The original title of this post was going to be “Mr Creeper’s Hotel of Horrors”). The only woman on the team is Sara, who we see in PTSD form in the present as she delivers her account for the documentary.

We also quickly learn that the Hell House, LLC team were hacks. The movie somewhat cleverly works it into the story that the team is working on a very limited budget, not just the filmmakers, which helps explain why the effects of the haunt are so limited. Extremely fake-looking dummies and mannequins are strewn about everywhere, along with fake excrement and entrails, and it all looks to be of a quality that’s lower than the lowest-budget haunted hayride in the most rural town.

I’m aware that with horror movies in particular, you have to just accept some things and move on. I was keeping in mind that I’d just been to Universal Studios’ haunts, and it’d be ludicrous to expect a small operation to have effects on that level. You can nitpick your way out of enjoying anything.

But the whole premise of a found footage movie is that what you’re watching is real, so it’s practically begging you to notice anything that doesn’t ring true. And I just couldn’t get over the idea that these people had been doing this professionally for some time, and everything in the house itself felt so cheap and lazy. As far as I could tell, they’d hired a total of three (3) scare actors, none of them assigned to actually jump out and scare anyone. So apparently, people were paying and lining up to wander through rooms filled with stationary, sub-Spirit Halloween-level dummies, until finding the climax of a basement in which a half-naked woman chained up for a sacrifice is being stared at by sitting clowns.

Even worse than that, though, was that none of it made any sense. It was all just random “scary stuff” thrown together with not even a hint of making any of it coherent. But throughout, our team reacted like they were trained professionals and they were making solid gold.

So I figured that it must be intentional. It’s common for found footage movies to have characters that are deliberately unlikeable, and sometimes it works for effect (like The Blair Witch Project) and sometimes it just makes you roll your eyes for an hour hoping for the leads to just die already (like Paranormal Activity). It was already clear that Paul was a creep, so maybe the movie was signaling to us that all of these guys were a bunch of harmless-enough dipshits who’d gotten in over their head.

With that in mind, it all flowed well enough. Better pacing than most lower-budget horror, giving us enough footage to make a point and then moving on to the next idea. The characters are abrasive, but it doesn’t ever feel as if it’s deliberately torturing the audience by making you watch them. And the eternal question of “why are they filming this?” is handled more often than not, with nothing too jarring for me to just roll with it.

Although it will always be baffling to me how the team apparently spent more money setting up security cameras throughout the house than they did on actual haunt effects, connecting all the cameras to a central control center, and yet none of it was ever used in this found footage movie, instead doing everything with camcorders or head-mounted GoPros.

And like I mentioned, there are a couple of moments that I thought worked well, where Hell House, LLC seemed to actually have its reach and its grasp in sync with each other. The first has a POV tour of the haunt with a narrator making annoyingly lame jokes at the cheesy effects’ expense, before finding a clown mannequin standing where it shouldn’t be, looking down towards the basement. The second has our camera man doing a video diary from his bed at night, unaware that he’s not alone in the room.

One of the most annoying things that’s common to horror movies with a format like this: they usually have to be an interminably slow burn, saving all the good stuff for the end. The reason is that you can only raise the stakes so far before the characters seem like idiots for not leaving right then and there, when we’re still at least an hour away from the climax. I was worried that Hell House, LLC was playing its hand too early by having things happen that were undeniably and inexplicably creepy, recorded and verifiable, right around the halfway point. But the movie actually does a fairly decent job having the characters get past their concerns… until it doesn’t. But at least it has the sense to get rid of a character once he’s experienced something that can’t be explained away.

So it all flows pretty well, and has two genuinely good scares. Definitely not enough to spawn an entire franchise, like this movie has for some bizarre reason, but enough that if I’d just walked through this as if it were a low-expectations Halloween haunt, I might shrug and give it the review, “That was all right!” If you’re expecting something that feels like a walk through a very low-budget haunted house, then you could do worse than Hell House, LLC.

If you do choose to see it, I’d recommend you watch it for free. At the time I’m writing this, it’s on Kanopy with a library card and YouTube for free (presumably with ads).

But explaining why it pissed me off so much requires spoilers, which I’ll do below.

As I mentioned, the movie starts out doing an okay job of doling out moments of creepiness that the characters are able to explain away. It builds for a while, having the character of Paul witness increasingly creepy stuff, until he reaches the breaking point, and then disappears. That’s a fine way to have a satisfyingly scary moment in a found footage movie that still has almost an hour left to go.

But then the fatal flaw for me is when Paul’s replacement camera man Tony takes over, he sees and records something that scares the hell out of him, and then he goes on a long tirade telling everyone else to f themselves, it’s too much, he quits. The character Mac catches up with him and tells him that there’s something important that he should know.

The camera then glitches out, and shows us some images suggesting they’d been recorded on the same tape or whatever, Cloverfield-style. And then Hell House, LLC has the unbelievable nerve of cutting to Tony sitting in a field delivering a confessional to the camera, saying that he gets it now, and it’s clear that he can’t leave.

And that is some unforgivably cheap and lazy “Poochie died on the way back to his home planet” bullshit.

But me being optimistic and still wanting to meet the movie halfway, I assumed, “Ah, intrigue!” I figured that by the conclusion, we’d get the reveal of something like the main guy had an incurable disease and made a pact with dark forces to sacrifice his friends and ticket-buying guests to whatever demonic entity lives in the hell mouth beneath this abandoned hotel.

But no, it’s never resolved or explained. Earlier I’d said that any movie that a filmmaker manages to finish is an accomplishment. I can’t include Hell House, LLC in that, because they didn’t even bother to finish it. There’s a whole scene they didn’t bother writing.

Not to mention that they didn’t bother coming up with a climax, either. Instead of a reveal of what actually happened that fateful night in the basement, we get multiple grainy shots of dudes in dark robes rushing the camera before it falls to the ground and goes black. It’s literally impossible to tell what happens in most of it. I read multiple synopses that describe what happens in the shots, and I can only say, “Sure, if you say so.”

I realized that I’d spent an hour and a half being generous to a movie that wasn’t even trying to meet me halfway. I’d been seeing it as a low-budget movie about a group of hacky haunted house-makers who stumbled into something that was real and far more sinister. In fact, there was no difference between the filmmakers and the characters. The haunt just lazily slapped together clowns and pentagrams because that’s all the filmmakers could think of. “Hey, just throw out some cheap spooky shit, whatever. Doesn’t matter.”

I’ve read that the writer/director of the movie has “revealed” what the big mystery was, after the fact: Hell House, LLC was having money problems! If this haunt didn’t go through, they’d be out of business! And apparently, the character of Tony heard this and was moved to stay on in a clearly dangerously haunted house, instead of saying, “Yeah, no shit!” I’ve also seen that there’s a “director’s cut” that actually shows what happened in the basement, and it was an inexcusably cheap green screen effect of a woman being pulled down into a hole in the floor that was supposed to be a portal to hell.

I left Hell House, LLC feeling like those people at the beginning of the movie must’ve felt, standing in a long line only to wander through a lazy haunted house before reaching an anticlimactic finale with some clowns, pentagrams, and dudes in cheap black robes for some reason.