Hell House LLC is the definitive horror franchise for aimless streamers

If you’ve ever scrolled through the horror movies available on any given streaming platform, you’ve probably seen Hell House LLC or one of its two—soon to be three—sequels, possibly as your eyes glazed over at the generally generic cover art, the been-there-done-that plot synopsis, or the odd title (keep your Paranormal Activity or Conjuring movies, these ghosts are part of a limited liability company). The movies tend to be very available, especially for people who like to stream horror, and if they’re not on a Peacock or a Hulu or a Paramount+, then you can bet the whole series will be available on Shudder or any number of ad-supported platforms like Vudu.

They’re not quite hidden horror gems, but they’re at least hidden horror shiny stones—not life-changing, but interesting enough that you’re better off looking at Hell House LLC than a blank wall. That and their regular availability make them the perfect movies for people who want to stream something scary and aren’t too picky about what they get. Plus, with the release of the sequel/reboot Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (a great title), there are now four of these things, which means desperate horror-watchers can get a lot of meat off this bone. And, given the fact that it’s a relatively long series with fairly consistent quality, you might as well watch all of them once you’ve seen the first one.

Found-footage horror, with a twist

That kind of momentum works in the series’ favor because, in a genuinely clever twist on the tropes of horror franchises like this, each movie is some kind of narrative and/or structural twist on the previous one. The first film is a regular riff on found-footage horror, following the ill-fated members of the eponymous Hell House LLC organization as they try to set up a haunted house in an actual haunted house (or a hotel, to be specific) while filming everything … for some reason.

The second movie, partially a play on legendary BBC Halloween stunt Ghostwatch, is about another doomed documentary crew investigating the events of the first movie for a TV show about supposed supernatural events. The third movie tells the story of an enigmatic billionaire using the old hotel—because of its haunted history—as the new venue for his artsy interactive theater thing (it’s Sleep No More, but the story of Faust rather than Macbeth), and it gradually evolves into an over-the-top mythology dump that “explains” the previous movies with hyper-specific callbacks to earlier scares.

At the risk of overselling it, part of the genius of Hell House LLC is that the main location is the same in each film. It starts as the long-abandoned Abaddon Hotel (yes, this is a world where we’re supposed to accept that someone genuinely chose that name), which was closed and left to rot after a deadly fire and its original owner’s suicide, and the characters in the first movie fill it up with spooky decorations and freaky murder-clown dummies. Then, the second movie gets the advantage of taking place in an already-scary location that is now full of Halloween decorations, and if you’ve seen the first movie then you’ll recognize when scary things have inexplicably moved or changed. It’s a gimmick so smart that you can’t help but wonder why it hasn’t been done a thousand times.

A refreshing approach to horror movies

You’ll notice that there hasn’t been much talk of characters here, but that might be by design. The Hell House LLC series is full of bad found-footage archetypes, like the person who insists on filming everything and refuses to ever stop, or the person who knows that one of their friends has mysteriously disappeared but refuses to consider that there was anything unusual about it, which means it doesn’t always leave much of a mark when they start getting dragged to Hell by clowns. These aren’t “it’s a metaphor for trauma” horror movies, these are “that person is going to get killed by ghosts” horror movies, which can be refreshing.

Besides, the most important character is the Abaddon Hotel, which actually feels like a haunted house as the movies go on—as in, the kind that Hell House LLC was trying to organize, not the kind where Jack Torrance tries to kill his family with an axe. These movies are filled with scenes where someone carrying a camera runs through a dark and narrow hallway, pausing to point the lens at something unnerving, and then something will jump and the cameraman will run away and bump into something else frightening. There are rarely aggressive and manipulative music stings, and the special effects usually seem practical—which is to say that they could be accomplished by someone in a high-quality mask moving their body in a weird way, or an unseen person tugging on a string to make something move. You know, the sort of tricks they’d pull in a haunted house!

A special discovery that’s worth a try

That makes it seem like a slight misstep to make the fourth movie, Hell House LLC Origins, a reboot not set in the Abaddon Hotel (though with ties to the original mythology), but there’s something to be said about the fact that this saga sort of has an ending.

Series director Stephen Cognetti could’ve made movies just like this forever, with new foolish filmmakers and new overzealous haunted house designers getting killed by ghosts, new looping timelines, and “this person was a ghost all along” reveals, and it would’ve been cool. The fact that there is a weird ending to the story adds to the weird magic of this series, suggesting a level of planning and confidence that you might not expect from something called Hell House LLC that only seems to exist deep in the catalogs of various streaming services.

With so many streaming services available these days, and so much random stuff on them that the vast majority of users will never watch, it’s great that there’s this special thing that is at least worth a try. Dig through the archives of the average streamer, especially an ad-supported one with untold mountains of nonsense, and it’s unlikely you’d find too many more movies with names as weird as Hell House LLC that aren’t a total waste of bandwidth.