I love to rummage through the rubble and find some pearls, especially when that rubble is horror films belonging to the subgenre found footage, found footage or fake documentaries, also called mockumentary.
Back in 2007, director Oren Peli astonished the world with Paranormal Activity, a gimmicky film, which fulfills its mission in a more than acceptable way, with a simple appearance, with quite rudimentary effects, a very low budget film that was more than profitable. The problem came later, when many very novice directors tried to score the same goal as Peli by making films with the same budget and the same structure, but with a remarkably low quality. Many films of the found footage or mockumentary subgenre burst onto the scene with disastrous results. Moreover, Paranormal Activity became an endless saga whose quality progressively decreased.
But Oren Peli was not a pioneer in this genre. Although there had already been some titles that could be framed in these subgenres, in 1980, director Ruggero Deodato sowed controversy with his controversial and sordid Cannibal Holocaust, for which he even went to court, in which, as a mockumentary, we can see the material recorded by a group of documentary filmmakers who disappeared in the Amazon jungle. Through crude images, the Italian filmmaker shows us the savagery of a tribe of cannibals and the nefarious end the adventurers had.
Later, at the end of the 90’s, newcomers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick shocked the world with their unbeatable The Blair Witch Project, a film that goes from less to more and with an advertising campaign that unfortunately we will never see again. In it, we are shown the recordings of a group of young filmmakers who want to film a documentary about the legend of Elly Kedward, the Blair Witch, going into a labyrinthine forest from which they never came out again.
Going into the analysis of the film mentioned in the title, Hell House LLC does not innovate anything, it does not bring anything new. The film begins with a succession of archive images from different newsreels in which we are informed about an accident that took place in an abandoned hotel, restored as a house of terror, the day of its inauguration. Hell House LLC is more a mockumentary than a found footage film, in which we can listen to the statements of different journalists who investigated the strange event that took place in that fairground attraction that killed more than fifteen people. And this is one of the points that won me over about the film, how well put together it is despite the lack of experience of its director, Stephen Cognetti, creating a mockumentary with such a real appearance, narrated in such a way that it draws the viewer in and makes it so interesting, in such a way that we want to know all aspects of the terrible accident.
The problem comes later, once the documentary is over and we begin to see the recordings provided by a member of the staff of the attraction who survived the incident, in which you can see the process of assembling the house of terror and the more than two months spent together the staff locked in that abandoned hotel, Hell House LLC falls into the anodyne and we return to see the same as always: a chain of images without any transcendence, camera turns that the only thing that causes dizziness to the viewer, and a succession of clichés that makes us think that we are facing a film at the bottom of the heap. But it is not so, since the advantage of this film is its story, as through the images the director unveils the reason why such a macabre accident took place, a differentiated beginning, middle and end, which in many films of the same genre is completely blurred. In this aspect it reminds me of The Blair Witch Project: the evolution towards madness using terror as a vehicle.
Hell House LLC is a mockumentary that at first seems that it will not innovate in anything, but through its original story and how we can see the evolution of its characters, raises a film that wants to get out of the established canon for this type of previous films of very low cinematic quality and raise something fresh and shout to the four winds that within the subgenres found footage and mockumentary there are titles that are worthwhile.
