Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Stephen Cognetti
Starring: Bridget Rose Perrotta, Destiny Leilani Brown, James Liddell, Gideon Berger
Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor is the fourth
instalment of writer/director Stephen Cognetti's Hell House LLC
series. The first three films dealt with the spooky goings-on at the
Abbadon Hotel in rural New York. All four movies adopt a found footage
aesthetic with the first film detailing the deaths of a group of people
who attempted to set up a haunted house attraction at the Abbadon. The
sequel sees a team of journalists terrorised as they investigate the
events of the previous film. In the third movie, disaster strikes when an
entrepreneur decides to stage an immersive theatre experience at the
Abbadon.
Serving as both a prequel and a "sidequel" to the original trilogy, this
fourth movie moves the action away from the Abbadon to a nearby mansion,
the Carmichael manor. in 1989 the manor was the scene of a double and
possibly triple homicide when two members of the Carmichael family were
brutally slaughtered and a third disappeared.
Cognetti presents his film in the guise of a true crime documentary.
Talking heads discuss the backstory of the Carmichaels and introduce us to
the footage that makes up the bulk of the film, shot by three amateur "net
sleuths" who spent five terrifying nights at the manor hoping to find
evidence of its rumoured haunting.
The trio consists of the forceful Margot (Bridget Rose Perrotta), a paranormal obsessive who dreams of capturing supernatural
shenanigans on camera; her girlfriend Rebecca (Destiny Leilani Brown), who at this point is growing tired of accompanying Margot on her
misadventures; and Margot's mentally troubled brother Chase (James Liddell).
Cognetti initially has fun with the modern phenomenon of ghosthunters who
know they're probably not going to catch anything beyond wind noises and
creaking doors on camera. In a spin on the classic horror trope of the gas
station attendant who warns our heroes against heading to the
woods/manor/abandoned asylum etc, we see a fast food clerk beam with
excitement at the idea of Margot and her friends staying at the
Carmichael. Nobody really expects to find anything spooky at the manor.
Boy are they wrong.
At this point the concept of found footage horror has grown so stale it
seems like an outdated and redundant technique. Yet Cognetti somehow
manages to make it feel fresh and innovative here. Cognetti doesn't offer
anything we haven't seen before, but you get the impression he's studied
found footage movies and made notes on what does and doesn't work with the
format. A regular complaint of such movies is that the footage looks too
slick and staged, especially those that came from mainstream Hollywood in
the wake of Paranormal Activity's surprise success. Cognetti purposely avoids this by putting two
cameras in the hands of amateurs in the case of Rebecca and Chase. Tension
and suspense are often generated by the duo's inability to keep a shot in
focus or to pay attention to what's on their screens.
Cognetti keeps his scares simple, playing on well established primal
fears. Much of the terror comes from two clown mannequins (or is it
three?) locked away in a room upstairs. This preys on two classic fears:
the almost universal fear of clowns and the always creepy idea of trying
to figure out if an inanimate object has moved. There's a deeply
unsettling shot where a character pans their camera around one of the
mannequins. The still figure's head appears to move, but it's unclear
whether it's actually physically moving or if it's an effect like moving a
camera across the canvas of the Mona Lisa and seeing her eyes appear to
follow the lens. Elsewhere terror is generated by such simple devices as
unexplained shadows, cloaked and masked figures, and in a spin on the ball
that menaces George C. Scott in The Changeling, a red clown's nose that keeps appearing where it shouldn't be.
Along with the trio's footage we're treated to the horrors documented on
a reel of film shot by one of the Carmichaels in the weeks leading up to
the murder. While it would likely make more sense for 1989 footage to have
been shot on VHS, there's something far more unsettling about grainy 8mm
and the muffled audio that accompanies the images. This backstory ties in
with the other movies in the series, but you don't need to have seen them
for The Carmichael Manor to work.
Cognetti also makes great use of the true crime doc trope of promising
more unsettling developments to come after a commercial break. His film is
broken down into the five nights and marked by one of the talking heads
telling us that if we thought things were scary already, wait till you see
what happens on the next night. It's a mark of Cognetti's confidence at
this point that his film never fails to live up to these boasts; each
successive night genuinely is scarier than the previous, and they're
pretty damn creepy to begin with. From the off, Cognetti lights a bonfire
of terror and stokes it by continually adding more nightmare fuel.
As someone who has been watching horror movies since I was far too young
to do so, at this point the genre largely serves as comforting escapism.
It's very rare for me to be able to say I was honestly unnerved by a
horror film, and I don't believe horror even needs to be scary to work, as
the genre is about far more than that. But watching
The Carmichael Manor at home alone on a stormy night with
the wind whistling down my chimney and the front door creaking, well,
congrats Cognetti...you got me.
Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor is on Shudder from October 30th.
