A True Sense of the Eerie, or Why I Love the Hell House Films

In Stephen Cognetti’s “Hell House” films, a character carrying the camera, and us within it, walks for what feels like an insufferably elastic length of time through a labyrinthine house or down a hallway, to ultimately come upon a life-sized mannequin dressed as a clown. 

It’s disquieting coming upon this clown, and we, alongside the character wielding the camera, start. The clown’s proportions match exactly those of a person, and we expect it to move, but it doesn’t. At least not dramatically. Sometimes the clown imperceptibly turns his head, locking its hollow eyes upon the character and us through the camera, following us. It never makes a sudden move—no lurch, brusque grab, or growling lunge—but it feels like it could, and this feeling is what prompts the characters in the films to run, it’s what gets our hearts racing. Throughout the franchise, we begin to expect to see the clown at every turn, and this expectation makes the tracking takes that make up the films squirm-inducing.  

The “Hell House” franchise, in other words, makes a meal of subtlety. This is not to say that Cognetti’s films are sparse or measured, their horror abstract or bloodless, arid or ambiguous. On the contrary, these films depict a sensuous horror, one that is immediately legible and leans toward a near pulp sensibility, which is apt for a series anchored in the Faustian bargain. That these films are subtle means that they understand the power of speculation and suspense; film after film, we find here the question mark of the eerie, as defined by philosopher Mark Fisher, perfectly and paradoxically contained within its horrific icons, those looming clowns. And despite the sequels and explanations, the story and world building that oftentimes drags near to the point of being belabored, the eerie in this franchise is never apparently or satisfactorily resolved, at least not satisfyingly enough for our reflexes or our subjectivities. And this is why these films work so well, why they frighten me—make my heart race, my skin crawl, breath hasten—no matter how many times I have seen them.  

So far as found footage movies go, the “Hell House” films—2015’s “Hell House LLC,” 2018’s “Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel,” 2019’s “Hell House LLC III: Lake of Fire,” and 2023’s “Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor”—are not particularly revolutionary. Arriving at the height of the resurgence or second wave of popularity for the found footage genre and mode, spearheaded by 2007’s “Paranormal Activity,” “Hell House LLC” and its sequels are relatively unambitious. They don’t aspire to reinvent the wheel. 

But that the “Hell House” films are unambitious does not mean that they are not good. Though they have their minor faults (rooted for the most part in clunky montages of what happened earlier in the film), as horror films, they are endlessly compelling for the ways in which they deliver a rich story through enigmatic and charming characters. Some search for the truth—like journalists Diane and sleuth Margot—while others make deals with the devil to improve their earthly situations. Most meet horrific ends at the hands of an evil no human can command. Though film after film repeats or duplicates the formula laid out by the first—a documentary, professional or amateur, being made about a person who makes a deal with the devil—the story avoids becoming flat by virtue of its unpretentiousness. As the overarching story works with a keen understanding of its ontological layers—each film, each character’s arc, is like a layer in a nesting doll or a puzzle piece in a larger image of the battle between good and evil—it also makes deft use of the Faustian dilemma, a cultural story that has fascinated us for years for the ways in which it has us reckon with the earthly and the heavenly.     

But most viscerally resonant is the series’ visual vocabulary, and its situation within an unnerving stillness. Fisher describes the eerie as having two modes: “a failure of absence” and a “failure of presence.” “The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing [failure of absence], or there is nothing present when there should be something [failure of presence],” Fisher writes in “The Weird and the Eerie.” At its core, the eerie is about agency. Fisher uses the examples of birds and architectural ruins. A bird cry is eerie if it feels as though there is more meaning behind the natural animal act, an intent or consciousness at work behind the action; this would be a case of “the failure of absence,” there is agency where there should be none. The case of Stonehenge, meanwhile, would be an instance of “failure of presence,” because we know this historical relic was created, but we don’t know by whom—there is no apparent agency where there should be one. A core and necessary aspect of the eerie is a lack of solution, or speculation and suspense: “Such speculations are intrinsic to the eerie, and once the questions and enigmas are resolved, the eerie immediately dissipates. The eerie concerns the unknown; when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears,” Fisher writes. Fisher uses two Daphne du Maurier short stories—“The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now”—as case studies for the eerie, specifically its “failure of absence” mode. 

The first “Hell House” film takes the shape of a documentary, spearheaded by a journalist named Diane Graves (Alice Bahlke), attempting to illuminate what went wrong on the opening night of a touring haunted house attraction, Hell House, that malfunctioned and led to the deaths of all staff members and a few tour-goers. 

For what turns out to be their final show, the Hell House team, led by Alex Taylor (Danny Bellini) haul their haunts over to long-abandoned Abaddon Hotel in the fictional city of Abaddon in Upstate New York. Smelling like an “old sweater,” the old hotel is a picture-perfect site for Hell House; needing very little in the way of dressing up, the place looks veritably haunted. The team records every step of their process as they bring Hell House to life in the Abaddon; their tapes are delivered to Diane by Sarah Havel (Ryan Jennifer Jones), Hell House crew and Alex’s girlfriend. As Alex and his team get nearer and nearer to opening night, they find themselves besieged by a strange haunting—the old piano plays a creepy tune at night, their own clowns move through the house as though they are alive, and team members themselves begin exhibiting strange behaviors and moods. 

As we watch Alex and his team disintegrate within the Abaddon Hotel, the documentary tells us about the hotel’s sordid past. The Abaddon used to be owned by Andrew Tully, an occultist corollary of H. H. Holmes, who built the hotel to be intentionally disorienting; he located it in Abaddon because the town shares a name with a demon believed to guard the gateway to hell. The Abaddon was struggling and Tully wanted to forge a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for material wealth. Tully was a part of a satanist cult and in 1989 he and the hotel staff committed suicide en masse. As we watch the haunting of the Hell House team, we see that Tully succeeded in opening the portal to hell. The portal is reactivated, for lack of a better word, when Alex and his team bring the hotel back to life. 

By the second “Hell House”, we learn that the first film was put together by one of Diane’s team members, Mitchell Cavanaugh (Vasile Flutur), after Diane herself disappeared into the hotel at the end of the first film. We also learn that Alex made a deal with the devil, the presence haunting the Abaddon, exchanging his soul for the success of Hell House; in a sense, Alex gets what he bargained for, Hell House becomes wildly infamous. The third Hell House film follows a millionaire putting together a production of Goethe’s Faust at the Abaddon in an attempt to re-re-activate the portal so that he can close it once and for all. The fourth film serves as a prequel to the first three: it follows an internet sleuth, Margot Bentley (Bridget Rose Perrotta), as she tries to solve a cold-case murder at the Carmichael Manor that ends up being linked to the mass suicides at the Abaddon Hotel in 1989. 

There’s another one of du Maurier’s stories that illustrates a horror of the register of the “Hell House” franchise, while containing both modes of the eerie at once. At the end of the 1936 novel Jamaica Inn, the protagonist walks into her home and is immediately struck by a sense of the eerie, and rightfully so, for a murder has just taken place and two dead bodies—her uncle’s and her aunt’s—lie within a place that is very familiar to her. As she enters the house through the kitchen, she sees the ashes of a fire whose “glow was almost gone,” and it is then that an “instinct” tells her that the kitchen has been empty for hours and that nobody is there. As she moves into and then out of the kitchen, the silence becomes oppressive, “strangely and horribly still,” she finds that a sound is lacking in the atmosphere: the once reliable ticking of the clock. She comes across her uncle’s body in the foyer. 

At the base of the stairs to the second floor she stalls, unable to climb, knowing in her bones she will not be able to, because, she says later on, she can sense that her aunt is dead. “I know she is dead,” she says, “That is why I was afraid to go upstairs. She is lying there in the darkness, on the landing above.” In the moment, she merely stares at the darkness at the top of the stairs. Entering the home, the protagonist at once senses the failure of presence, the lack of the sound of the clock and consciousness where there had always been (her aunt hardly ever left the home), and also the failure of absence in the presence of still bodies in a place that always hummed with whispers and throbbed with footsteps, with life. The bodies, though dead and lacking a consciousness, are weighty beings out of step with what is expected, they stand for the machinations or predeterminations or agency of murder. Nowhere should there be the agency of murder; it should always be absent. As she stands at the base of the stairs, her aunt is both there and not there at the top, there in body and manifestation of the intent of murder but also not there in consciousness. The sense of the eerie, the unbearabile suspense and inability to confront fact, has the protagonist run out of the house.             

In a very delicate way, both modes of the eerie strike the protagonist of “Jamaica Inn” in a manner that they also strike the characters and by extension us in the “Hell House” films. The clowns exist without much fanfare in the films—they aren’t overdetermined through loud and jarring jump scares—manifest as a practical prop or costume worn by an actor. They possess an unremarkable presence that is often revealed in a gradual, slow manner—a long walking tour through a creepy home, for example. But it is this exact unremarkable-ness that has the clowns walk the fine line of suspense, of both failure of presence and failure of absence. They balance the human with the inhuman, the mundane with the horrifying. 

It’s tough to tell, until they move, whether what we’re seeing is the prop version of the clown or an actor in costume. It is most disturbing in “Hell House LLC Origins,” in which a third clown is introduced. He wears a mask modeled so closely off a human face you can see pores in the clown paint, you can see bags under the eyes and the jowls seem just about to swell and constrict in a swallowed breath. But when a character nudges the clown, he sways with the stiffness of a mannequin. The other clown who appears in all four films, who wears a macabre grin spewing blackened blood, likewise feels just about to move, only to loll like a ragdoll when knocked over. In the stiffness of their human physiognomy and proportions, the clowns manifest a failure of the presence of consciousness. And in their movement—they do inevitably move, as if awakening from their doll-state, turning their heads or walking leisurely circles in a room—they manifest a failure of the absence of consciousness; there should not be intent or agency to such props, in the way the bird’s cry should have no intent. 

Experiencing both modes of the eerie in looking at the clowns in the Hell House movies at a cadence so slow it feels grating, I can’t help but slowly crawl into myself and away from the screen. The characters, meanwhile, endlessly and slowly move toward the clowns, as is their wont, being as they are in the predictable trajectory of the horror film. The suspense becomes thick as a fog. I want to run away in the way that the protagonist of “Jamaica Inn” does, but I can’t until the character wielding the camera does. Cognetti has us confront the eerie for a horrific duration, and what a delicious thrill it is.   

Meaning-making systems fail, flail, and flounder in the immediate confrontation of these clowns, and no matter how many sequels we get explaining the history and backstory of Andrew Tully or the Carmichaels, the clowns at the instance of their appearance, including the expectation of their appearance, prompt an unbearable tension. Many horror films undoubtedly aspire toward such a confrontation between their audience and their own horrific icons, but not many ever accomplish it in the effortless and unambitious manner that Cognetti does with the clowns. These creepy beings are both alive and not alive, and just as it disturbs to look at them, we cannot also look away, returning sequel after sequel to feel a sense involuntarily and instinctually prompted in us. In the way that people might return to religious sites to experience the sublime, I turn to the “Hell House” films to experience that rare experience of disquiet at instantaneous being and absence, to experience the sense of the truly eerie.