Welcome to the “Film Session” section of The Show Notes! This is where I talk about movies and TV shows. Let’s bond over our shared interests! Or not. I’ll do my best to be both entertaining and informative either way! Typos and grammatical errors are a direct reflection of my hatred of generative AI. If you like this, check out my show!

I’ve been doing a “Horror Movie of the Week” in the Screen Shots section of this site every October, because, well, I like horror movies. Good ones, bad ones, doesn’t matter. Just be entertaining! So, in an effort to be entertaining myself, I’ve decided to make this a thing and try to convince you to check out as many horror movies as possible while building my writing muscles!

How is this going to work? Well, I’m going to give you a quick synopsis while trying to avoid as many spoilers as possible. This is your warning that I’m only human, and some spoilers will be necessary. I’ll also tell you what I liked about each movie, and, most importantly, how I would have died if I were a character. Overall, each review will vary a good bit, but I’m hoping that will make it more fun for you! Let’s talk about the 2015 supernatural found-footage movie Hell House LLC!

So this movie is kind of like horror-ception. Imagine if we were watching a documentary crew investigate The Blair Witch Project footage, and got to interview one of the people involved in the whole thing. That’s what's going on here. Let’s start with the OG incident that got our documentary crew’s attention.

There’s an abandoned hotel that’s rumored to be haunted. Twenty years earlier, a mother and daughter disappeared while staying there. The guy who built and ran the hotel was the main suspect because he was a cultist. He chose this particular town to build his hotel because it shared its name with a demon who guards the gateway to Hell (Abaddon, in case you were curious). Look, hospitality is his passion, but he’s going to do it his way, okay? He was never convicted, but decided to hang himself because people didn’t really want to stay at a hotel run by a cultist who may have murdered a mother and daughter.

Naturally, a group of white folks get together and decide to turn it into a fun Halloween attraction. This horrific past doesn’t scare them. Have you seen what they’ve done to plantations? They can’t help themselves. “Let’s gentrify these evil spirits, gang! We can put a yoga studio right over there! Are there any private schools nearby?” As you may have guessed from the title, they are going to call their attraction Hell House.

As if that wasn’t white enough, weird stuff starts happening almost immediately, and they just explain it away. Mind you, one of the staff members is there solely to document the entire experience so this stuff is caught on camera, and they’re still just like, “Surely, there’s a reasonable explanation for this,” like it’s police body cam footage. You literally have instant replay footage of crazy shit, and just wave it off. How much are these employees getting paid? This is a whole thread with scare actors sharing what they make, and it’s not even a living wage. Even if they had equity in the company, that’s not enough to deal with the supernatural.

Unsurprisingly, a horrific tragedy takes place on opening night and people die. Was it a tragic accident or a supernatural something sinister? Well, this documentary crew wants to get to the bottom of it, almost certainly to produce a true crime podcast. They get their hands on the footage from the entire Hell House LLC endeavor. Even better, they snag an exclusive interview with one of the surviving employees. Can they put the pieces together and finally get to the bottom of this?

As absurd as I may have made it sound, it was actually really well done! I like found-footage horror, so that being the core of this was nice. It was also able to be just plausible enough to pull you in even with all of the supernatural stuff going on. There were also a few good jump-scare moments!

It would have been tough to get me. First of all, I once left a UPS warehouse job orientation after finding out how badly it was haunted by the realities of capitalism. An evil spirit? I’m out. For the purpose of this exercise, we’re assuming I have to stay. In that case, I’d definitely ask to work the door in case I need to make an easy escape. Eventually, lung cancer gets me decades later. The fictional town where this took place is located in upstate New York. That area is just lousy with radon. Of all the stuff they showed, I didn’t see a mitigation system at all. Eventually, the prolonged exposure would catch up to me. Tough.

Thank you for reading! Since you like to watch things, make sure you’re subscribed so you get my weekly sports watch guide, Screen Shots, every Thursday morning! See you soon!