Ghost Hunters Clown Around in Scary Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor

As a low-budget, streaming-exclusive horror series that has had more bold ideas than actual expertise to pull them off, Hell House LLC has continually seemed to misunderstand what worked about the film that acted as an unsuspecting franchise-starter back in 2015. Its sequels would go on to laboriously investigate the preposterous biblical lore of the haunted Abaddon Hotel—lest we forget the third film featured the subtitle “Lake of Fire,” the reveal that an angel had been sent down from above to stave off evil, and a hilariously cheap, Christian propaganda-like poster. But the original Hell House LLC found success in its reliable found-footage approach and simple premise: What if some friends put together a haunted house attraction in an actual haunted house and got Punk’d by some ghosts that moved their spooky clown mannequins around?

The series hasn’t reached those straightforward heights since, as writer/director Stephen Cognetti seemed content to allow the movies to wallow in low-rent, straight-to-video oblivion. Given his apparent insistence on this being a viable franchise, it perhaps shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that, despite his claim that Hell House was a trilogy, he’s returned with a fourth entry that’s title does little to uphold any notion that he may have learned from previous mistakes: Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor.

The title itself continues Cognetti’s insistence on unraveling some grand history of this franchise. We not only have the promise (threat?) offered by the Origins moniker, but right from the jump we’re given a name we have yet to hear throughout these movies, assuring viewers that no matter how overly elaborate we may think the series has been up to this point, Cognetti’s perplexing imagination knows no bounds. 

The biggest shock that Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor has to offer, then, is its back-to-basics approach to the material. Rest assured, it follows through on its premise and spends plenty of its runtime further complicating the mechanics of a world that doesn’t need it, but it does so within the confines of a playful, surprisingly sturdy haunted house found-footage movie, with story beats that extrapolate so far away from the original Hell House as to become merely tangentially related—and therefore able to veer off into their own, effectively eerie directions.  

This rectifies the main issue these sequels have faced by reinserting a commitment to true bump-in-the-night, cover-your-eyes sequences of suspense generated from structurally inventive jump scares. The premise is simple enough to accommodate this return to form while still opening up avenues to expand on the story: Willful, amateur true-crime sleuth Margot (Bridget Rose Perrotta), with her hesitant girlfriend Rebecca (Destiny Leilani Brown) and brother Chase (James Liddell), are to stay five nights at the supposedly haunted Carmichael murder house, the site of a brutal family slaughter, to investigate the hidden truth about the atrocities committed inside. 

That set-up is all it takes to develop this into a familiar series of tense ghostly sightings and paranormal encounters. To be sure, Cognetti doesn’t do much to stray from the typical found-footage formula—prepare for your typical early banter between characters and regular pleas to turn the camera off—but there’s a refreshing simplicity in its unmitigated desire to scare using an established formula, and a finesse in its use of its setting to craft an atmosphere of unease. It also smartly centralizes its scares on the main source of fear from the first film: Creepy clowns.

If the clowns were an incidental feature of the original, naturally incorporated as haunted house props, they’re the main event here as Cognetti shrewdly realizes their value in setting these films apart from others of a similar vein. Simply put, having scary clown mannequins move around on their own in the dead of night is prime horror movie material, reaching right into the fundamentals of crafting a decent fright. Making them the star of the show is the smartest move the series could make, going so far as to amusingly tie them into the greater narrative threads the film weaves together. The clowns are no longer just clowns—they’re part of the greater Hell House mythology.

The previous Hell House films had a similar streak of wacky, go-for-broke worldbuilding, but it was always at the expense of simply making a decent horror movie. That’s not the case here, and this jump-scare-forward film never misconstrues the purpose it’s built to serve. Put some naive young ghost hunters in a house, watch as they realize they’re in for more than they bargained for, and wait for them to meet their inevitable fates. To that end, Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor never builds to anything more than an assortment of clever setpieces, and Cognetti is consistently indebted to his genre forebears, found footage or otherwise. (The recurring motif of black-hooded demons trying to open the gates of hell has always seemed suspiciously cribbed from Prince of Darkness.) But there’s a self-awareness of that fact and a fulfillment born of making a properly frightening version of one of those films. The Carmichael Manor never needed to be much more than that, and it seems like Cognetti has finally made sense of that fact.

Directors: Stephen Cognetti
Writers: Stephen Cognetti
Starring: Bridget Rose Perrotta, Destiny Leilani Brown, James Liddell, Gideon Berger
Release Date: October 30, 2023

Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.