Is the title Hell House LLC not clunky enough for you? Good news, because that surprisingly effective 2015 found footage horror film overcame its decidedly unscary name – giving off some Monsters, Inc. vibes, guys – to gain enough of a cult following to spawn a trilogy, with diminishing returns but increasingly cumbersome titles: Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018) and Hell House LLC III: Lake of Fire (2019). Those films ineffectually expanded the lore of the abandoned hotel in which paranormal menace runs rampant, and you’d think that a subsequent film with “origins” right there in the title would follow suit. To a degree it does, but by changing venue, the preposterously titled Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (2023) largely revives a floundering franchise with an atmosphere of dread.
Much of Origins’ effectiveness hinges on it not acting as a straightforward prequel to the original Hell House LLC trilogy. The events of the film take place years after the accursed Abaddon Hotel ‒ once the site of a cult’s mass suicide and then to an inexplicable “malfunction” that massacred over a dozen people at a haunted house attraction based there on Halloween night ‒ has burned to the ground. Instead, the film is more of a companion piece that is most effective when it’s doing its own thing, with just a sprinkling of the lore from the first films. If it were truly a standalone film, it would’ve had virtually all the ingredients for a gothic-style throwback that meets modern day trends like the internet sleuthing central to its plot. Instead, it falters most in moments when it does lean too heavily on its source material.
Origins opens seemingly unrelated to the events of the original film. Following some requisite backstory about an infamous 1989 slaying in the remote Carmichael Manor, provided by a couple of overly intense talking heads (Searra Sawka and Darin F. Earl II), cold case internet investigator Margot (Bridget Rose Perrotta) and her girlfriend, Rebecca (Destiny Leilani Brown), head off to stay in the purportedly haunted mansion. They’re soon joined by Margot’s brother, Chase (James Liddell), who has a history of psychosis and is invited partially so Margot can keep an eye on him after a recent episode. Margot, who has a vivid memory of once nearly being abducted by a clown at a carnival where several other children would eventually go missing, has a passion for occupying allegedly haunted spaces and trying to catch paranormal activity on camera, but nothing has ever seemed to pan out. Needless to say, that changes here.
The grisly 1989 murders in Carmichael Manor involved the slaying of a mother and daughter and the disappearance of a father and son. No tracks were found in the snow leaving the manor, yet both the male Carmichaels were never seen again. This all occurred a short time after the family’s youngest daughter, Margaret, was killed in a car crash, and the family life in the manor began to unravel from there. When Margot and Rebecca depart to scope out an antique store that they’ve heard contains some relics from the burned-down Abaddon Hotel, Chase is asked to keep the camera rolling at the mansion and quickly encounters inexplicable sights and sounds. He hears floorboards creaking and a shadow moving in a locked room that is soon revealed to contain storage from an old carnival, most notably a pair of creepy clown dummies much like those used in the doomed Hell House attraction. A red rubber ball rolls down a hallway. A masked girl’s face silently peers around a corner, only to disappear when Chase investigates.
Meanwhile, at the antique store, Margot and Rebecca discover a hidden compartment in a grandfather clock from the hotel that contains, among other things, an old film reel of the Carmichaels that sheds light not only on the murder but the promised origins of the supernatural presence at the Abaddon Hotel. When they return, a panic-stricken Chase is anything but consoled by a viewing of the hidden footage, in which they learn the truth about the Carmichaels and their connection to the killer clowns and shrouded cult members that end up stalking the estate. After all, no one, we’re told from the outset, is going to make it out alive.
While the well-worn found footage technique is, on paper, Hell House LLC Origins’ greatest liability, Stephen Cognetti (writer-director of all four films) wrings an unnerving narrative and some compelling performances out of the format, even if nothing here is particularly original. Characters in a found footage film also finding additional footage makes for an interesting nesting doll approach, but also shoehorns in far too much contrived plot and forced, familiar imagery. The vaguely gothic setting, recalling Shirley Jackson’s remote Hill House, offers oodles of atmosphere with dim lamplight, long corridors, hardwood floors and floral-patterned wallpaper. As a result, the killer clowns, as mute and often motionless as they are, do feel somewhat out of place, just as the cloaked cult members did amid the gimmicky haunted house paraphernalia in the original film, in which the clowns, conversely, were right at home.
Cognetti clearly intends to return to this well again, as relayed through an after-credit sequence in which one of the talking heads reveals that the funfair, evidently responsible for starting it all, is set to reopen in the near future. While a 2015 low-budget flick about a haunted house really being haunted – thank goodness for the limited liability – may not seem like enough material to stretch into four or more films, Cognetti has proven with Origins that, in an allegiance to and expansion of his source material, he’s not simply beating a dead house.
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