HELL HOUSE LLC: LINEAGE (2025)

I’m going to start by coming clean: I’m not the ideal person to review this movie, which is reflected in my star rating. The Hell House LLC franchise is the brainchild of Pennsylvania-born writer-director Stephen Cognetti, who’s been the sole auteur behind all five films in the series, starting with the first in 2015. I watched that original film recently and got nothing from it. Maybe less than nothing. I’m reminded of Roger Ebert’s closing line for his review of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998): “When a movie begins, I imagine an empty room in my mind that is about to be filled. This movie left the room furnished only with dust and a few dead flies.”

My problem is that at no point do I feel even the remotest sense I’m witnessing real events. I’m not even saying that it’s a bad movie. There are plenty of bad movies, some of the worst ever made—The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987), say—where I still feel some of the sense of looking through a glass darkly, and witnessing events, that films are supposed to provide. Terribly crafted and presented, unbelievable events, but still. Some part of my brain buys into the idea that, yes, on a fictional narrative level, these kids from a garbage pail spaceship are making clothes in a magician’s cellar (don’t ask), even if Messy Tessie’s right eye never quite shuts properly due to shoddy animatronics, the “jokes” are profoundly inappropriate, and all of it’s shot at a warehouse with a cricket chirping.

To use an example from the horror genre, Amusement (2008) ranks as one of the most shoddily plotted films ever made. None of it makes sense, not just overall but scene-to-scene, moment-to-moment. The plot is predicated on a man seeking revenge against three women decades after they… reacted negatively to his art project for primary school. Not even making fun of it, or in front of anyone. Or even to the little boy’s displeasure. And also the project was a rat being tortured in a shoebox, so he sought out and received the response that he wanted.

I still get a greater sense of fictive reality from that than I do Hell House LLC. Looking back at some of the scenes on YouTube, it’s all just people in a house finding clown costumes standing where and when they shouldn’t be, and the suspense drawn from moving towards and around them while anticipating a sudden assault, like the proverbial Hitchcockian bomb waiting to go off under the table. It’s a found-footage film, as are all the Hell House‘s bar Lineage (and I’ll return to this point shortly), which I generally don’t have a problem with; it’s been overdone, as have most Hollywood trends that prove profitable, but it can still be done well. The sub-genre’s appeal is in how it can feel more authentic despite using worse technology; this is why horror films work oddly well on VHS, a medium that creates grainy and elusive spaces in the corner of the frame.

There’s no authenticity in Hell House LLC. If it were an actual Halloween attraction, as its plot presents it, the consumer reviews would be dire. Though, of course, this is just me. The film became popular and kick-started a franchise for a reason, and I admire it for its success. I hesitate to even describe my views above as an objective quality assessment. It was “scary” in the sense that I tensed up anticipating jump scares, although I wear earbuds to cinema screenings of horror films because of weird anxiety/noise sensitivity issues, so that’s not hard to achieve.

This might be controversial for a critic and self-proclaimed horror fan to say, but whether or not something’s “scary” is irrelevant to me, especially since “scary” is such a nebulous thing whose definition seems to change from person to person. ‘Scary’ isn’t like ‘funny’; you can judge a comedy’s quality based on how many times it inspires a spontaneous physical reaction. You can do that with horror films and jump scares, I suppose, though that’s an extremely shallow and almost asinine way to judge movies. And I hate jump scares, so never would. What I look for in a horror film (unless we’re talking about schlock, in which case I just want kills and camp), is mood, tension, atmosphere, and macabre, uncanny storytelling.

This brings me to Hell House LLC: Lineage (at last, I hear you cry), and why I’m uniquely unqualified to review it. You see, Cognetti abandons the found-footage sub-genre for this sequel, to the chagrin of fans given how it’s been the defining feature of all four previous entries. I can see why they’re nonplussed; I haven’t seen a shift in content and style so violent since Friday the 13th (1980) was churning out its sequels, each one nullifying the continuity of the last. Found footage works for this story about a haunted tourist attraction in a way that regular narrative doesn’t, I suppose, because it strips it down to a point where you can focus on the spooky bits and don’t need a lot of sophisticated plotting.

And yet, I liked this one more than Hell House LLC. (You see now why I’m unqualified, as the original’s considered a modern classic by some.) Which isn’t to say that I actually liked it, I should add. It’s a weirdly sombre and enervated piece, reliant for its “horror” on endless scenes of people walking towards and around a stationary clown figure, that was apparently the breakout star of the first movie but not intended by Cognetti to be a main antagonist.

The plot is that Vanessa Shepherd (Elizabeth Vermilyea) is a bar owner in the town of Abbadon, haunted by a trauma she experienced that’s connected with the creepy Abbadon Hotel. She’s not the only one, and her psychiatrist’s been helping another patient troubled by the legacy of both the hotel—which in Hell House LLC was bought by a team of entertainers wanting to open it up as a tourist attraction, and the Carmichael Manor. The Carmichaels were a rich family torn apart by a tragic car accident, after which a series of unexplained deaths sprawl out down the decades, as if a ghost or ghosts were seeking vengeance. Shepherd is a decent actress who conveys trauma well, but she’s not given much to do. Nobody is, really, as this is more Cognetti’s show.

What I enjoyed about Lineage, more than in Hell House LLC, was having an actual plot I could follow, which almost felt like it was from M.R James or similar horror writer from the early-20th-century. The basic idea of incorporating funhouse figures into the time-spanning ghastly events reminded me a touch of James’ masterpiece “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance”, which involved Punch & Judy shows. Cognetti’s direction is steady enough too, though as a writer he hasn’t gotten past—in this sequel at least—setting up an interesting core to the story, but not developing it into anything truly intriguing.

USA | 2025 | 108 MINUTES | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Stephen Cognetti.
starring: Elizabeth Vermilyea, Searra Sawka, Mike Sutton, Joe Bandelli, Cayla Berejikian, Victoria Andrunik, Gideon Berger, Bridget Rose & Destiny Leilani Brown.