31 Nights Review: HELL HOUSE LLC

 

Three threads of narrative are displayed and then woven as a disaster at a horror themed attraction is investigated. There's no spoiler in telling you that the showbiz gets real and the punters are running from real nasties. Oh, it's a found footage film.

Twenty-one years after The Blair Witch Project kicked the sub-genre off (yes, I'm discounting Cannibal Holocaust as it isn't the source point) the conventions for found footage are firmly in place. They have become so much a part of the manual that the requirement that characters on screen still give a reason for keeping the camera on all the time. Another is something that Blair Witch didn't include as it didn't know it had to: a real world framing device, usually in the form of interviews. 

Hell House LLC does the first more than once but shouldn't as the wishy washy answer just gets less convincing each time. Surely it has long been time (even in 2015 when this was made) for this aspect to get self-parodic. It almost does this in the logs that the otherwise unseen camera operator delivers to camera at the end of the day. The replay trope is also given more air than usual which saves a lot of time in credulity test scenes. So, that is a levelling.

It's the framing that detracts from the film as a whole as the casting of the interviewees is too uneven. The reporter and her crew hold their own but it really only takes one to break the spell (this even happens in the mostly mighty Ghost Watch). What does work is the signposted development of the team's involvement as their investigation takes them to an extended interview with one of the house's founders and thence to the house itself. 

All this works fine but I'm left with the faint praise of calling it competent rather than outstanding as the differentiation of character in the core footage can leave the action muddled, giving us less of a stake in the action than we should have. This makes some of the effective chills along the way (and there are real  ones) unsupported by the characters and allows too much control to the viewer to function well as horror. Eventually, the empathy for the people under threat on screen drains so we are left with a string of decent scare setups, much like they would have been in the attraction to one of the paying guests.

This will sound flippant but it both criticises the execution and celebrates the idea: I was less scared by the film than nightmare it engendered. I dreamed I was back in one of the shared houses of the '90s. Everyone else in the house was getting quietly bitchy with each other and I was losing motivation to deal with it. Eventually it came to the point where I realised I'd just paid the rent for everyone without thinking about it. This caused a profound sadness in me as, under the dream, I knew it was something I would never do unless desperate, something I would never do in real life but that's not the way dreams work. And it was one of those dreams where the main emotion lingers into wakefulness until reality cleans up the psychic mess.

So I wonder what the sequels are like.

Seen on Shudder.