Hell House LLC (dir. Stephen Cognetti, 2015)
An unknown disaster at a haunted house attraction in an abandoned hotel in the unfortunately named town of Abbadon, New York, claims the lives of 15 people in October 2009. Five years later a documentary team is determined to solve the mystery of these deaths. One of the survivors–a proprietor of Hell House, a limited liability company–provides the camera footage she and her fellow entrepreneurs recorded through the process of renovating the hotel and its deadly opening.
It’s fine. Effectively scary in parts, competently made on a limited budget, but like most found footage films, it just wasn’t made for me.
Part of this is no doubt my own personal neuroses. I do not understand the impulse to record everything like the characters in the film do. At least the documentarians watching the footage are trying to get in on that sweet true crime money or, I suppose, satisfying their curiosity regarding an unknown event that resulted in the deaths of over a dozen people. Team Hell House, though? I guess they just want to have some record of this fly-by-night business operation they’ve got going? Even if most of them didn’t end up dead, how often would they really go back and watch them moving scary clown equipment in some rundown property they got a bad deal on? Is it narcissism or do photogenic people just have no shame like the rest of us?
You know in your heart you will never, ever watch that concert footage you recorded on your phone ever again!
oliveresque 