The Hell House, LLC leaves behind the found footage format in its fifth entry, Lineage. Unfortunately, it also leaves behind tension, scares, and plot in writer-director Stephen Cognetti’s “final” entry to the franchise.
I’m a fan of the Hell House, LLC series, all written and directed by Stephen Cognetti. The found footage series delves into the histories, horrors, and hauntings surrounding a tragedy at a haunted attraction and the town that surrounds it. They’ve been a big hit and a draw for Shudder. The first, from 2015, is a simple found-footage about the lead-up and follow-through of a fire that kills 15 guests and employees at a haunted attraction built from a haunted, abandoned hotel. The first two sequels (2018 and 2019) used the hotel/attraction for further exploration and curses, and deaths in interesting ways. They don’t completely work and get a little lore-heavy, but I dig them despite the faults. The fourth, Origins: the Charmichael Manor, serves as both a sequel and a prequel to others, expanding the scope and changing the location. A solid entry, pulling back to the simpler original (while still building lore). Now, in 2025, Hell House LLC: Lineage switches the format to standard narrative, coming to the big screen for the first time, and digs so deep into the lore that it becomes a boring slog.
Hell House, LLC: Lineage commits the worst sin a movie can: it’s boring. Earlier this year, Cognetti left found footage for 825 Forest Road for a traditional narrative. That film showed his style flattens outside of found footage, though some of it works (mostly the pushed-in in found footage parts, but others do too), and I liked the movie overall. I had hoped he would take what he learned in the switch and figure out how to make it work. Sadly, no luck. Lineage drags. No tension, no builds to scares, just a lot of nothing. Yes, there are attempts. But it’s just one of the methods used in the previous films repeated ad nauseam. Do you like the creepy clown mannequins/masked-ghosts/whatever-they-are from the first four? Sure hope you do, because every single sequence is “the clown moves when no one is looking.” Those clowns, and the lore behind them, are a portion of the previous entries, mixed in with other methods. For Lineage, Cognetti puts it all on them.
It’s also dull, dull, dull because it gets bogged down in the lore, but forgets to have a plot. So many info dumps, people talking about the events and backgrounds of the other movies (many of these being “ya know, Bobs” of people telling each other what they both know). I’m lost in the lore. I’ve seen the films a few times, but Lineage was often incomprehensible. Cognetti must think all the viewers have a perfect memory of the details. Everything from the previous movies, some random number said, or piano tinkling, now has a meaning. What was a simple start has now been reverse-engineered into a mess. It’s overwhelming, like Luke and Obi-Wan stopping A New Hope to state aloud the backgrounds of all the aliens in the Mos Eisley Cantina. It’s also empty in the new details. To quote my friend Robin after watching, “It’s all lore. But it’s also no lore.” It comments on what we’ve seen before but adds nothing.
The actors are lost, flailing to make anything that slightly resembles a plot work. Vanessa, survivor of the third film, struggles with her PTSD of her time in the Abaddon Hotel, an asshole ex-husband, and an employee at her restaurant who has a past with the hotel. That’s about it, although we follow her for half the movie. Actor Elizabeth Vermilyea opts to have a whine through the whole performance, making it a grating watch. But at least that gives her something to do with the trite lines she’s given. The other half of the “plot” follows a reporter who tricks a priest into performing a half-assed exorcism on the Carmichael House (with the Hotel Abbadon burned down. Weirdly the remains are now in a grown-over field instead of downtown), which makes little sense except to revisit scenes from the last film. She’s played by Searra Sawka, looking like she’s reading from the cue cards. Mike Sutton’s Father Dutton doesn’t seem to want to be there. 
Hell House, LLC: Lineage claims to be the last entry, building everything from the previous four to something tying together. That’s a lie. It’s a film coasting from beginning to end; a dull nothing that doesn’t answer questions, or even make new ones. Hell, it doesn’t have an ending; it just stops. At least it doesn’t tell us to go to a website like The Devil Inside, but what’s here isn’t much better. Five bucks says another entry will be announced soon.
I’m sad about how awful this entry is. Cognetti has forgotten what made the original work, jumping into adding lore upon lore without backing a story or narrative to go with it. Scenes drag on aimlessly, poorly performed with no tension behind the camera. Hell House, LLC: Lineage is a sad, disappointing end to a series with promise.