Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor Review: A Franchise Improvement, But Is It Enough?

It is exciting to be alive in the 21st century in part because it's when the "Hell House LLC" movies started coming out. I didn't say how big a part.

Starting with 2015's "Hell House LLC" and extending now through four films, writer-director Stephen Cognetti has achieved a rare thing worth celebrating: the creation of an original film franchise that gained word-of-mouth recognition without studio support. A close peer in this space would be "Terrifier," the series of ultra-bloody killer clown films writer-director Damien Leone has been piloting into the world since the 2008 short "The 9th Circle." "Hell House" hasn't been going for quite as long and consists of haunted house films, not slashers. But it's another difference between the franchises that's most salient to raise for this discussion of "Hell House's" latest: the "Terrifier" movies have only been getting better, while the "Hell House" films have gotten worse. 

"The Carmichael Manor" is definitely an improvement over the dismal sequel "The Abaddon Hotel," and is about on par with the just fine third entry, "Lake of Fire." If you charted that quality trajectory out it'd look like a reverse bell curve, in which a depressed middle is sandwiched by two peaks. Two! Isn't that better than a steady downsloping line into ... hell? In that same sense, not really. The fact that Cognetti's had complete control over each film and none of the sequels have come close to recapturing the original's incandescent x-factor is a troubling sign of creative atrophy. In that elusive other sense, however, this very same fact means Cognetti's weaknesses as a filmmaker have been laid out and repeatedly underlined. If he insists on remaining landlord of the Hell House, "The Carmichael Manor" illustrates a clear path for him to escape the doldrums of franchise fatigue.

"The Carmichael Manor" is labeled an "Origin" story to the "Hell House" movies, but it's set in the present, after all the events they depict have taken place. It does, however, fill in some gaps in the lore around the nefarious Andrew Tully, the man who made the Abaddon Hotel a vacation destination for bad vibes tourists, as well as around black-eyed clowns that continue to give these films their best scares. 

The thing about "Hell House" lore is that it's the absolute worst part of the movies. The more effort Cognetti has put into building a world behind the unsettling events of the first film, the less scary and more convoluted each subsequent film has become. But as "The Carmichael Manor" hinges on backstory, I'll try to breezily sum it up.

In the first film, five friends buy a run-down property called The Abaddon Hotel in Rockland County, New York, and turn it into a Halloween walkthrough. But on opening night, 15 visitors die in a mysterious event called "the malfunction." A documentary crew comes to investigate after everything closes again, but the lone survivor among the five owners, who is actually dead, kills all but one of them. 

In the second film, another documentary crew, which includes that lone survivor (you can see where this is going), break into the Abaddon Hotel and learn, before dying, that an evil gentleman in an evening shirtcoat named Andrew Tully has been masterminding it all. He intends to open a portal to hell in the basement by sacrificing as many innocents as possible. In the third film, he opens that portal by killing an irritating media tycoon who purchases the Abaddon Hotel and turns it into an immersive theater. The hotel ultimately burns to the ground.

With the Abaddon Hotel reduced to a pile of smoldering ashes, Cognetti shuttles the fourth film over to another creepy house: the Carmichael Manor. This "Hell House" sequel does even more arduous plot maneuvering than the last two, as it has to both introduce a whole new cast of victims and villains and tie them to Tully and the Abaddon Hotel. 

"The Carmichael Manor" follows a team of paranormal investigators who stay four nights in the title house, where a series of tragic events took the lives of — wait for it — all the Carmichael family members but one. In the '80s, son Patrick (Gideon Berger) and daughter Margaret (Victoria Andrunik) were involved in a car accident that killed Margaret. Soon after, mother Eleanor and daughter Catherine (Cayla Berejikian) were found murdered. The prime suspect was the father, Arthur, but he showed up dead too, which leaves Patrick, who's been missing for over 30 years.

Enter Margot Bentley (Bridget Rose Perrotta), a present-day paranormal investigator and the founder of the site NetSleuths (what is this, "FearDotCom?"). Margot has arranged with the Manor's caretaker, Donald (Michael Capriloi), to stay four nights with her girlfriend Rebecca (Destiny Leilani Brown), who reluctantly agrees to come along out of concern. Margot's troubled brother Chase (James Liddell) shows up unannounced, and just before Donald leaves, he drops this question: "Are you familiar with the Abaddon Hotel" — imagine a drumroll – "a town over?" 

We know they're all (but one, most likely) going to die because we're watching a movie called "Hell House," but now we know why, and we can guess as to how.

"The Carmichael Manor" plays out like a generic, COVID-era, single-location haunted house movie, only it's wrapped so completely in "Hell House" lore that it's nearly throttled. The massive, terrifying clowns from the Abaddon basement show up in one room, a film reel containing Carmichael home movies is discovered inside an Abaddon clock at a local, "Let's Scare Jessica to Death"-esque antique shop, and you know Arthur Tully snakes his way into things. 

Margot begins the process of weaving the Carmichael story into the larger "Hell House" tapestry early on in predictably post-"Hereditary," A24-core fashion — by indicating she has a traumatic past:

Rebecca: "Have you ever been up this way before?"
Margot: "To this specific area no, but I was in Rockland County once as a kid."
Rebecca: "Oh, is that the thing with the ..."
Margot: "Yeah ..."

It turns out that Margot and Chase had a traumatizing childhood brush with Tully at a carnival — the same carnival where Tully recruited the now missing Carmichael family member to be one of his clowns — the very same clown currently standing stationary in a manor guest room.

This gets at the heart of Cognetti's major weakness as a filmmaker: his insecure compulsion to explain every detail, tie every loose end together, and bury ambiguity in backstory. The Carmichael manor and family were invented for this film. It isn't a shocking revelation to find out it's connected to the Hell House — their names are literally next to each other in the title. More than any other horror subgenre, found footage thrives on the deprivation of exposition and context. It's a raw, exposed nerve in cinematic form — no bulky cinematic apparatus getting in the way, no story baggage. In other words, it might be inimical to the very demands of franchising.

Look at that dark hallway. That is the beginning and end of found footage. A poorly lit hallway, poorly shot by some terrified 24-year-old ghost hunter. Would it make it any scarier to know this hallway's intimate, five-decade-deep connection to the hallways of another house, over on the other side of the county? Actually, in some cases, it might, like "The Conjuring" Universe, Argento's Three Mothers trilogy, and some of the "Paranormal Activity" films. 

That last series is in fact a much better complement to "Hell House" than "Terrifier." They're found footage, they were made for nothing with no big names attached, and they have a torturous relationship with their own lore. It's not as simple as the more these films pull away from backstory the better they are, because that doesn't account for "Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones," one of the best entries in the franchise, which does exactly what Cognetti is trying to do here but completely aces it. 

The issue, then, is not whether to use the lore, but how to use it. You can practically feel Cognetti's weariness over maintaining the foundations of the house he built when he makes his characters utter lines like, "There's a reason that this is happening, everything that we've seen ... it means we're getting closer to the truth!" He cares about the "truth" of the franchise because he feels he has to, not because it actually enthralls him, so it doesn't enthrall us either. 

"The Carmichael Manor" has some genuinely riveting sequences, and as always, Cognetti collages the strands of material that tell the story (recovered footage, talking heads, home movies) together deftly. His craft is fantastic. His love of shaky, handheld, bleeding-edge horror is clear — if he gets another crack at this franchise, I hope he leads with that love, not his sense of obligation to the world he created.

/Film Rating: 5 out of 10