Editorials
‘Hell House LLC’ – The 4 Scariest Scenes in the Franchise
Everyone’s entitled to at least one good scare on Halloween, but writer/director Stephen Cognetti’s Hell House LLC found footage franchise is filled with them. Even better is that they all take place in and around Halloween. Now four films deep, with the most recent Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor arriving on Shudder this week, the franchise’s expansive mythology is only matched by its dedication to crafting found footage terror.
Whether Cognetti is layering in subtle background gags meant to quietly induce chills or delivering more visceral jolts through direct counters, these are the four scariest moments.
Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor – Margaret Carmichael Plays Peek-A-Boo
Poor Chase’s (James Liddell) room is down the hall and isolated from his sister’s room, leaving him more vulnerable to the eerie supernatural happenings at the Carmichael Manor. That makes him the first to encounter the playful yet sinister ghosts lurking about, including Margaret Carmichael. While Chase is investigating strange happenings at night, down a dark, empty corridor, he’s greeted by a mysterious hand gripping the wall and seemingly creeping around the corner. It gives way to one creepy masked specter, playing peek-a-boo and attempting to lure him further into the dark. This scare highlights what the Hell House LLC franchise excels at, layering in subtle scares that linger, allowing them to slowly wash over the viewer until danger alarms register far too late.
Hell House LLC 2: The Abaddon Hotel – Ouija Summons
This late scare comes when Brock Davies (Kyle Ingleman) and his cameraman enter the Abaddon for a paranormal investigation, specifically seeking answers from the ghost of the hotel’s owner, Andrew Tully, who committed suicide along with his cult followers. Brock creates a makeshift Ouija to make contact with Tully and, through clever pan and scan camera work, discovers he’s summoned a captive audience. What makes this scare so effective is that, at first, Brock seems unimpressed with the sudden influx of bodies that fill the room. This pays off in a subsequent scene that sees Brock make a second attempt, only to summon a rather lively and curious ghost girl eager to get acquainted. The first scene ends with a minor scare that lulls the audience into suspecting the shock has passed. The second takes advantage by delivering a far more potent chill.
Hell House LLC – Night Visitor
A Halloween haunt crew picks the empty Abaddon Hotel for their latest seasonal attraction and moves in to get it ready in time. Naturally, they don’t realize it’s been uninhabited for a reason, and the hotel’s spooky denizens waste no time welcoming their new tenants. One of the most startling moments of this creepfest is when one of the members awakens in the middle of the night by a strange sound. He turns on the light, unaware that a ghost has been sitting in the dark, watching him. When he notices her, he turns the light off and buries himself under the covers. Not even safety blankets can ward away the entity; the ghoulish night visitor finds him anyway.
All Four Films – The Freaking Clowns, Man
There’s no shortage of compelling, spine-tingling scares in the franchise, thanks to those damn clowns. From the original to The Carmichael Manor, the familiar clown mannequins took on a life of their own. They became irrevocably intertwined with the horror and lore of the Abaddon Hotel and beyond. Cognetti smartly keeps it simple; the clowns rarely move on screen, which adds to their terrifying presence. It’s the anticipation that they’re patiently waiting to close in around their prey that instantly instills tension and dread. If stairs are involved or they’re blocking an exit? Forget it; you’re doomed. From the first time they appear in Hell House LLC, popping up in places they couldn’t have on their own, those clowns continue to hold us tight in the grip of fear. The clowns’ demonic game of “Red Light, Green Light” induces coulrophobia.
Editorials
The Lovecraftian Behemoth in ‘Underwater’ Remains One of the Coolest Modern Monster Reveals
One of the most important elements of delivering a memorable movie monster is the reveal. It’s a pivotal moment that finally sees the threat reveal itself in full to its prey, often heralding the final climactic confrontation, which can make or break a movie monster. It’s not just the creature effects and craftmanship laid bare; a monster’s reveal means the horror is no longer up to the viewer’s imagination.
When to reveal the monstrous threat is just as important as HOW, and few contemporary creature features have delivered a monster reveal as surprising or as cool as 2020’s Underwater.
The Setup
Director William Eubank’s aquatic creature feature, written by Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You) and Adam Cozad (The Legend of Tarzan), is set around a deep water research and drilling facility, Kepler 822, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, sometime in the future. Almost straight away, a seemingly strong earthquake devastates the facility, creating lethal destruction and catastrophic system failures that force a handful of survivors to trek across the sea floor to reach safety. But their harrowing survival odds get compounded when the group realizes they’re under siege by a mysterious aquatic threat.
The group is comprised of mechanical engineer Norah Price (Kristen Stewart), Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel), biologist Emily (Jessica Henwick), Emily’s engineer boyfriend Liam (John Gallagher Jr.), and crewmates Paul (T.J. Miller) and Rodrigo (Mamadou Athie).
Eubank toggles between survival horror and creature feature, with the survivors constantly facing new harrowing obstacles in their urgent bid to find an escape pod to the surface. The slow, arduous one-mile trek between Kepler 822 and Roebuck 641 comes with oxygen worries, extreme water pressure that crushes in an instant, and the startling discovery of a new aquatic humanoid species- one that happens to like feasting on human corpses. Considering the imploding research station, the Mariana Trench just opened a human buffet.
The Monster Reveal
For two-thirds of Underwater’s runtime, Eubank delivers a nonstop ticking time bomb of extreme survival horror as everything attempts to prevent the survivors from reaching their destination. That includes the increasingly pesky monster problem. Eubank shows these creatures piecemeal, borrowing a page from Alien by giving glimpses of its smaller form first, then quick flashes of its mature state in the pitch-black darkness of the deep ocean.
The third act arrives just as Norah reaches the Roebuck, but not before she must trudge through a dense tunnel of sleeping humanoids. Eubank treats this like a full monster reveal, with Stewart’s Norah facing an intense gauntlet of hungry creatures. She’s even partially swallowed and forced to channel her inner Ellen Ripley to make it through and inside to safety.
Yet, it’s not the true monster reveal here. It’s only once the potential for safety is finally in sight that Eubank pulls the curtain back to reveal the cause behind the entire nightmare: the winged Behemoth, Cthulhu. Suddenly, the tunnel of humanoid creatures moves away, revealing itself to be an appendage for a gargantuan creature. Norah sends a flare into the distance, briefly lighting the tentacled face of an ancient entity.
It’s not just the overwhelming vision of this massive, Lovecraftian entity that makes its reveal so memorable, but the retroactive story implications it creates. Cthulhu’s emerging presence, awakened by the relentless drilling at the deepest depths of the ocean, was behind the initial destruction that destroyed Kepler 822. More importantly, Eubank confirmed that the Behemoth is indeed Cthulhu, which means that the humanoid creatures stalking the survivors are Deep Ones. What makes this even more fascinating is that the choice to give the Big Bad Behemoth a Lovecraftian identity wasn’t part of the script. Eubank revealed in an older interview with Bloody Disgusting how the creature quietly evolved into Cthulhu.
The Death Toll
Just how deadly is Cthulhu? Well, that depends. Most of the on-screen deaths in Underwater are environmental, with implosions and water pressure taking out most of the characters we meet. The Deep Ones are first discovered munching on the corpse of an unidentified crew member, and soon after, kill and eat Paul in a gruesome fashion. Lucien gets dragged out into the open depths by a Deep One in a group attack but sacrifices himself via his pressurized suit to save his team from getting devoured.
The on-screen kill count at the hands of this movie monster and its minions is pretty minimal, but the news article clippings shown over the end credits do hint toward the larger impact. Two large deepsea stations were eviscerated by the emergence of Cthulhu, causing an undisclosed countless number of deaths right at the start of the film.
Norah gives her life to stop Cthulhu and save her remaining crewmates, but the Great Old One isn’t so easily vanquished. While the Behemoth may not have slaughtered many on screen here, his off-screen kill count through sheer destruction is likely impressive.
But the takeaway here is that Underwater ends in such a way that the Lovecraftian deity may only be at the start of a new reign of terror now that he’s awake.
The Impact
Neither Underwater or Cthulhu overstay their welcome here. Eubank shows just enough of his Behemoth to leave a lasting impression, without showing too much to ruin the mystery. The nonstop sense of urgency and survival complications only further the fast-paced thrills.
The result is a movie monster we’d love to see more from, and for horror fans, there’s no greater compliment than that.
Where to Watch
Underwater is currently available to stream on Tubi and FX Now.
It’s also available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital.
In television, “Monster of the Week” refers to the one-off monster antagonists featured in a single episode of a genre series. The popular trope was originally coined by the writers of 1963’s The Outer Limits and is commonly employed in The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and so much more. Pitting a series’ protagonists against featured creatures offered endless creative potential, even if it didn’t move the serialized storytelling forward in huge ways. Considering the vast sea of inventive monsters, ghouls, and creatures in horror film and TV, we’re borrowing the term to spotlight horror’s best on a weekly basis.
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