Admittedly I had tempered expectations going into the fourth entry of the Hell House LLC series.
While I was a big fan of the first film, the follow-up The Abaddon Hotel felt a little hamfisted and thus I checked out. Billed as a prequel, this is a companion piece to the Hell House LLC lore but this time focusing on a different property – the titular Carmichael Manor.
We follow a female couple Margot and Rebecca, who set about investigating the Manor and plan to stay for five nights with Margot’s brother Chase.
As you can imagine, things start off slow, but when Margot discovers some artefacts from the Abaddon Hotel in a clock in an antique store and takes them back to the Manor, well things start to get wild.
Director Stephen Cognetti really nails what scares viewers this time around, and you guessed it; those creepy clowns are back once again.
The cult’s origins from Hell House have quite a creepy explanation and the film isn’t afraid to take things outside with some very creepy daytime scares in the woods next to the Manor.
Found footage horror is arguably, the scariest sub-genre in horror when all the elements come together, and Origins is a home run in that respect, it has good characters, effective scares and carries a real atmosphere.
I guess Hell House LLC has been resurrected from the bounds of hell and the sky is the limit if they can capture the same sort of formula again in the next instalment.
Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor is streaming now on Shudder.
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