3 From Hell

I now have all three Hell House LLC movies splayed out before me, and I couldn't be happier. I've just finished watching them all back to back, and I have to say that it's probably my favorite horror franchise, even over the likes of Scream, Insidious, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. The little indie found-footage film that could, the original Hell House LLC spawned two sequels, as well as a future streaming series called The Abaddon Tapes, based on individuals' experiences at the fictional, dreaded Abaddon Hotel.

The original Hell House LLC sees friends Alex, Sara, Tony, Mac, and Paul, otherwise collectively known as Hell House LLC, create and set up the haunted house experience for paying customers. Alex, CEO of the company, has made decent money around the boroughs of NYC, but now looks to take his frights upstate to the fictional town of Abaddon. Their trials and tribulations are told in a faux-documentary format, which doubles as a bold found-footage vehicle.

As the friends set up their house of horrors inside the abandoned, decrepit Abaddon Hotel, interviews and news footage floods in about the Hell House tragedy that occurred on October 8th, 2009, and about the checkered past of the creepy hotel. It was once bought by a man named Andrew Tully, who dabbled in the occult and stirred up some pretty nefarious elements that likely saw to some missing hotel guests. Meanwhile, friends Alex and Mac are constantly bickering back and forth about something, and it's not until the end of Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel that we find out why.

From August 23rd to October 8th, the crew rummage through the condemned hotel, staying in it every night while putting the finishing touches on its haunted tour appeal. The windows are boarded up, the walls are ramshackle, and the basement is riddled with old bibles and satanic graffiti. The company of friends takes one last toast before subjecting themselves to the scares of the abandoned hotel. They set up ghoulish mannequins of creepy women, killer clowns, and a creepy piano player Paul affectionately names Hector.

They hire actors to fill the roles of the dummies, but when one clown in particular gets up and walks on its own in the middle of the night with not an actor in sight, the friends start to get a little spooked - especially since the dummy's head doesn't move. This is when news trickles in from a new haunt actress about the hotel's past, which is also when we begin to see footage about Tully and his declining business, which subsequently led to the closing of the place.

Sara begins to randomly zone out, and Paul, who seems to be the most vulnerable to the horrors presented, experiences another paranormal dummy phenomenon that sees him run in fear and throw up all over the hallway floor. This was Paul actor's Gore Abrams' authentic reaction to the terror, and director Stephen Cognetti liked it so much that he decided to keep it for the final cut. It's a scary scene for sure, and the three scariest in the entire movie are all experienced by Paul. It's hard to blame the actor for his up-chuck reaction, but being that Paul is undoubtedly the biggest jerk of the crew, you hardly pity the character.

The scares keep coming for Paul before he up and disappears. The audience knows what happened to him, to some degree, but Alex and crew are left to wonder what has become of their cameraman. Things have already started to take a turn south, but Alex is focused primarily on the opening of haunted house, to the detriment of his friends and girlfriend. Pianos begin to play on their own, the same diddy that Paul ad libbed in the early days of the group's arrival. 

It goes downhill from here as the group ready themselves for opening night. Sara has zoning out fits, Tony threatens to quit, and Paul returns completely and totally catatonic. Hell House LLC lets their crowd of haunt-goers in, but what results is a massacre. The screams and the chaos comes plentiful, the shaky camera all but holding on as demonic forces overtake the basement of the Abaddon Hotel. The members of the group are quickly picked off one by one at the dizzying pace of the melee, and like James Wan movies, Hell House LLC gives you multiple creeps to fear throughout the duration of the indie cult hit.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel picks up the terror with a mysterious disappearance inside the hotel in the aftermath of the first film, along with a subconscious piano lick of part I's leitmotif, originally played by Paul when introducing himself to the dummy Hector. It's an otherwise benign diddy played by a child, but is made eerie by the creative wiles of Stephen Cognetti. The host of an Abaddon, New York morning talk show welcomes a panel onto her show, consisting of a town councilman Arnold Tasselman, Mitchell Cavanaugh, the documentary filmmaker who pieced together the footage from the first movie, and a psychic medium. The interview is spotted by the journalist duo of Jessica Fox and Molly Reynolds, who bank on the fact that Mitchell, the Hell House documentarian, will take them back inside the hotel. Mitchell believes that something sinister lurks in the Abaddon, though Tasselman writes it off as the result of natural malfunctions.

The town maintains that there is nothing wrong with the hotel, though police cars are kept at the exterior at all times to dissuade urban explorers and journalists alike. That doesn't stop Fox, Reynolds, Cavanaugh, and the psychic medium, Brock Davies, who invites himself into the fold. Before they make their decent, a stream of videos begin flooding in, ones of daredevils and unfortunate Samaritans tempting fate and the supposed horrors of the Abaddon to come out and play - all with dire consequences. Whether the journalists know about the videos or not, it won't stop them from gaining access to the truth about the Abaddon.

The group plans to break in through the back door, but it has been left open. The after footage is then shown, one in which an in-shock, catatonic Jessica Fox is being interviewed. Segments are spliced in here and there to keep the audience on the line, a trick Cognetti uses to his advantage. When Brock comes across the dining room, where hotel owner Andrew Tully hung himself thirty years earlier, a pair of nooses drop from the ceiling - a macabre invite to forever join the cast of Hell House LLC. They are also soon joined by an unexpected guest, one that freaks them, and the viewer, out completely.

Meanwhile, in the basement refrigerator, Jessica, Mitchell, and their cameraman retrieve the lost tapes they were looking for, but when they try to leave, the killer clown dummy, the same one that introduced its animate scares to Paul in the original film, rears its head - literally.


Making their way to an exit, any exit, proves an ominous task, especially with a former hotel guest stalking their every step. She/it also plagued Paul's existence, much like the killer clown. But the two are the least of their fears when reintroduced to the dining room and Faustian deal that's finally revealed to the audience. Alex and Mac from the first film play key roles in the completion of the second, which does well to tie the current horrors back to the original, in more ways than one. Alex and Mac are seen arguing several times in the first film, and it's the second that we finally understand what the animosity was all about. The final third of Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel sets the stage perfectly for the encore, Hell House LLC III: Lake of Fire.

A year after the events of the second film, the Abaddon Hotel is set to be demolished, or so the opening info of Hell House LLC III: Lake of Fire tells us. The movie begins by mentioning the tragic events of October 1st, 2018 at the grand opening of Insomnia, where a familiar town resident and author of The Abaddon Tapes from the first film, Robert Lyons, recounts how billionaire and host of the interactive show Insomnia, Russell Wynn, has purchased the ill-omened hotel. The show is essentially an interactive play with actors in a modern retelling of the classical tale of Faust.

To bring things full circle, the cast of Faust are interviewed while we're shown snippets of absolute horror from the first film. It's a nice reminder of the scares that led up to the carnage of October 8th, 2009, and the chaos that followed, featuring the team of journalists, documentary filmmakers, and psychic mediums. Vanessa Shepherd, the new host of the local show Morning Mysteries, films and chronicles Russell Wynn's creation of Insomnia at the Abaddon, much like the creation of the original haunted house experience that members of Hell House LLC were setting up in the original.

Unlike the original Hell House LLC, the Faust actors aren't asked by Wynn to stay the night. The original footage plays as a local legend, with one cast member, Max, likening the whole experience to "doing Julius fricking Caesar at the theater of Pompeii ruins." The newest Morning Mysteries footage takes place from September 13 to October 2, the day when the repeatedly shocking mayhem of the Abaddon comes to a head. The chaos begins when Max, who plays Mephistopheles, and Gregory, who plays Faust in the production, prompt actress Jane to go inside the Abaddon after dark - a notion that Russell has forbade the actors from doing. Moving dummies and the familiar piano dirge from the original movie welcome her in and serenade her kissing one of the killer clown dummies - to another familiarly shocking conclusion. Make-up artist Isabel also meets with some of the old spirits before too long, including Sara from the first movie. Alex, Tony, Mac, and Paul also find a way to show up, as well as journalist Jessica Fox from part II.

It's almost as if Russell knows something bad is coming on opening night, and he tells Vanessa Shepard as much in so many words. Meanwhile, he has charmed his spooked crew back into the fold with his every man essence, pulling them together one last time the night before the opening. When the Insomnia theater officially opens its doors to the public and Faust begins to make his deal before a novelty-masked live audience, all hell literally breaks loose in the bloodiest, most chaotic finale that the Hell House LLC trilogy has to offer. All bad CGI moments aside, Russell proves to play a key role in the gateway to Hell, and Stephen Cognetti comes full circle with his characters and his three-part story.

Companies make deals all the time, and while the first two films gives glimpses of the metaphor, Hell House LLC III: Lake of Fire closes the Faustian deal, bringing things to a satisfying conclusion, one that's almost a relief, but at the same time highly unsettling. The first film is a modern classic, the second features of people who have tried their amateur luck against the hotel, and third brings things full circle in a finale for the ages. Like Mickey Keating (Darling, Psychopaths, Carnage Park) and Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat's Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House), Stephen Cognetti is an indie writer/director on the rise. His next project is called 825 Forest Road, another haunted house vehicle set to begin filming in PA in the spring of 2020. With the Hell House LLC trilogy in the books, Cognetti has given me my favorite horror franchise to date, and has turned me into a devoted fan of his future projects.