Found footage movies have always had a prominent place on the horror movie circuit but haven’t been the craze of horror in 2023. That being said, indie horror is starting to get the recognition it deserves again, and it’s only helped by the found footage thriller Hell House LLC that has been doing the rounds on Amazon Prime Video and drawing fans back to the genre!
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Hell House LLC is an obscure indie horror that takes the idea of a haunted house and really takes it to the next level. The story follows a documentary crew who have travelled to Abaddon, Upstate New York, to the scene of a horrific tragedy in October of 2009. During a Halloween haunted house tour, a mysterious accident and unexplained malfunction caused the death of 15 people, some of whom were staff at the attraction and some were tour-goers.
Returning to the scene of the tragedy, the Abaddon Hotel, the documentary crew is set on unveiling the mystery that led to the accident, and their journey leads them to the small town where they gather the testimonies of witnesses, photographs and amateur video material of the area in the present day.
The crew find out that there is a sole survivor of the events of that night, Sara Havel, a member of the Hell House crew. She agrees to be interviewed by the crew and shares footage from the night itself, even though she claims to have no idea what was on the tapes. “Is the crew prepared to witness the terror first-hand?”
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Found-footage projects like The Blair Witch Project of 1999 were minorly spurred along by movies like Grave Encounters (2011) and, of course, the Paranormal Activity franchise, but Hell House LLC is far more comparable to 2013’s Devil’s Pass in the way that its fear comes from the fact that at some point you almost forget that you are watching a fictional movie because it does a great job of convincing you of its authenticity.
The found footage genre is the perfect place for unknown directors and unknown actors to make their mark and break into the film industry, and that is precisely what happened with Hell House LLC, as writer and director Stephen Cognetti cast actors and actresses like Alice Bahlke as Diane Graves, Danny Bellini as Alex Taylor, Gore Abrams as Paul O’keefe, Jared Hacker as Tony Prescott, Jeb Kreager as Martin Cliver, Lauren A. Kennedy as Melissa, Miranda Robbins as Miranda Kelly, Phil Hess as Joey, Ryan Jennifer Jones as Sara Havel, and Theodore Bouloukos as Robert Lyons.
According to Inverse, the indie horror was filmed in only ten days, whereafter the film went straight to video by popular demand in 2015. It quickly outshone many of the previous found-footage films that had populated (and arguably oversaturated) the genre before it. Despite gaining a cult following quickly, the film again fell into obscurity.
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Now, following a trend that many movies seem to be following, the film that didn’t get the love it initially deserved is getting a second life on Amazon Prime Video, where you can watch what is being lauded as one of the best found-footage movies of all time. If you watch this film and can’t get enough, don’t worry because it has a couple of sequels, like Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018), and Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (2023) for you to enjoy.
Are you going to give this found-footage thriller on Amazon Prime Video a chance to see what all the hype is about?
