Interviews
‘Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor’ Director Stephen Cognetti on New Setting and Franchise’s Future
Writer/director Stephen Cognetti’s Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor, the fourth installment in the found footage series, leaves the Abaddon Hotel behind for new scares and terrain. And it’s streaming NOW. Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor began streaming exclusively on Shudder on October 30, 2023.
For the film’s release, Bloody Disgusting spoke to Cognetti about creating an original story away from the Abaddon and keeping the scares fresh within the found footage format.
For the filmmaker, Hell House LLC III: Lake of Fire closed the chapter on Abaddon Hotel. The Carmichael Manor explores more of the origins behind the hotel’s mythology, yet it’s set in the present at an entirely different location, though not too far from the Abaddon Hotel.
It turns out that Lake of Fire was very nearly the end of the franchise for Cognetti, except he couldn’t shake loose some unexplored corners of the story.
He explains, “I didn’t want to do anything related to the hotel because, at the end of the third one, I decided to burn it down and just end that storyline. That was always just like, ‘Okay, that’s it. I’m done with Hell House movies. Burn them all down.’ But then it always itched at me. It was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you explore a little bit more the story and write it?’ I had actually written three years ago about 120 pages of a script about what happened at the Abaddon Hotel in the eighties. And what the cult was doing. What would the effect be on the surrounding town and the people who worked there, including Patrick Carmichael?
“So, I wanted to tell a whole new story but bring some breadcrumbs into that story about what happened in the eighties. Since I already had that whole story written, it was really easy for me to write the script and just find out where I wanted to put pieces of the puzzle about what I’ve already written about what happened in the eighties into it. We never really see in the hotel; in that part, we see from a family member’s home movie what happened, how it affected another member of the family, Patrick Carmichael, so we can make inferences about what was going on his struggle, what was going on, what was he doing at the hotel, and just showing there’s a lot more there. We showed this tip of the iceberg, and we know that there’s so much more underneath that. I think that’s cool. I love doing stuff like that, just showing little pieces of something when you know there’s a lot more that’s unseen. And so that was the whole idea. I thought it would just be a cool way of making an original story, but also just having some pieces of the mythology in there as well.”
The Carmichael Manor keeps the scares feeling fresh, which is no easy task now four films deep into a found footage franchise. Cognetti breaks down how the new setting helped.
“I found that going into Hell House two and three that it was very tough to still do, found footage fresh, but do it in the exact same spot,” Cognetti reflects. “That was the biggest challenge, especially going into three. I’m like, all right, we’re back in the same hotel; how are we going to make it scary again in the same format we’ve always used? But it was a different angle. It was like a live interactive play, which I love. What we did with ‘Sleep No More’ in New York City is kind of tailored after that, which is interactive Shakespeare and everyone wears masks. So, I loved putting that into three. But you’re right; found footage is a tough medium. Whenever I’m filming found footage, I always go, ‘I hate not having coverage. I would love to see the reverse shot of this or another angle of this scare,’ but I have to justify why that camera would be there. I can’t always do that. But it also helps you in so many different ways, though. It’s why we do low budget. It’s why we can shoot the film in less than two weeks.”
It wasn’t found footage or the scares that presented the biggest hurdle for Cognetti, but rather the setting. He tells us, “I think the biggest challenge for me is when I wrote the title of the Carmichael Manor’s screenplay, I painted myself into a corner. Like now I got to find a manor.”
Yet, not only did Cognetti succeed in finding his manor, but it presented fertile ground for scare inspiration.
He explains, “This place is a beautiful mansion, and it had everything we want. When I found the mansion, I had to tweak a lot of the scares. So, the early scare with Chase [James Liddell], when he sees the shadows moving across the wall in the hallway, that was something I rewrote specifically for that hallway because the previous mansions I had scouted out didn’t have that layout, so I wrote that scare completely different. I was just adapting. I adapted some scares to fit that mansion, but I just lucked out finding that place. It was perfect for it. Just like we lucked out finding the Abaddon Hotel place back in the original Hell House as well.”
The Carmichael Manor includes a post-credits scene that all but begs for a continuation. Cognetti still has plenty of stories left to tell with the franchise’s mythology, too, and the filmmaker teases where he’d like to take it next.
“I make references to this event in a few of the movies, including this one, but also the third one as well is what happened at the Rockland County Fair, back in the day. That’s something I always talk about, this event, and never really making it. Maybe in the future, I will, but that’s another thing, just the eighties, it’s something I like to talk about. Hopefully, one day, I’ll be able to make it, but I can’t, so I just keep on referencing it,” Cognetti details.
“I would love to know what happened there at the Rockland County Fair, why it closed down. Young Margot was there as well. There’s the tie in there, but also that they’re going to bring the fair back, and they’re going to have it near, in the county of Rockland. That’s been something that’s always been building up the whole time, knowing this is going to come back, and what does that mean for the town? That’s where I would love to go with it. But once you bring in something with so many moving pieces and extras and moving parts like a fair, that’s where you get out of the low-budget found footage realm, and you’re like, you better have a budget for that, which we don’t right now.
“If I make another Hell House, especially in this timeline where we’re going with this stuff, I want to venture away from found footage, too. I want to move into narrative. And again, that’s all about budget as well.”
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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