“Hell House LLC” is finally going to a real theater

Ten years after people discovered the Abaddon Hotel from their couches, “Hell House LLC” is getting its first nationwide theatrical release.

Terror Films Releasing and Iconic Events Releasing are bringing Stephen Cognetti’s 2016 found-footage horror film to theaters beginning October 29 for a special four-night Halloween engagement. The release celebrates the film’s tenth anniversary and marks the first time the original has received a nationwide theatrical run.

That is a pretty great afterlife for a movie that built its reputation almost entirely through streaming and horror fans telling other horror fans, “Just watch the damn thing.”

“Hell House LLC” follows a documentary crew investigating the disastrous opening night of a Halloween attraction inside the fictional Abaddon Hotel. Fifteen people died there, and the recovered footage slowly shows what happened before everything went to hell.

And yes, the clown is still horrible.

Found footage has always worked best when the camera has a believable reason to keep recording. Cognetti had several. The crew is documenting the attraction. Cameras are installed throughout the building. Everyone thinks the strange things they are seeing are pranks until pretending that becomes impossible.

The film eventually grew into an entire franchise, but the first one still has its own nasty little energy. It looks cheap because it was cheap, and somehow that makes the Abaddon Hotel worse. You are not watching a polished Hollywood haunted attraction. You are watching people work in a building that should have been condemned before they ever unloaded the props.

Now audiences get to sit together in the dark and discover whether that clown standing in the hallway becomes any more pleasant when he is twelve feet tall.

I suspect not.