HELL HOUSE LLC.: LINEAGE movie poster | ©2025 Shudder/Terror Films

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Elizabeth Vermilyea, Sierra Sawka, Mike Sutton, Joe Bandelli, Nicholas Stoesser, Emily Fan, Victoria Andrunik, Kayla Berejikian
Writer: Stephen Cognetti
Director: Stephen Cognetti
Distributor: Shudder/Terror Films
Release Date: October 3, 2025 (Shudder)

There is something impressive about writer/director Stephen Cognetti’s ability to inject just enough changes into a formula to keep things lively, while maintaining the elements that make a franchise hang together. However, he presses his luck with HELL HOUSE LLC: LINEAGE, as it refers a little overmuch to its predecessors, and ends on a cliffhanger.

HELL HOUSE LLC: LINEAGE is the fifth film Cognetti has made in ten years in his HELL HOUSE LLC series. The previous entries have the peanut butter and chocolate combination of an extremely demon-ridden house being used as a Halloween “haunt” and found footage. (This reviewer hereby acknowledges that some people hate peanut butter, others hate chocolate, and still others hate both, and then there are those who like both but hate them when mixed together, which is why this analogy works.)

In the first film, released in 2015, a group of young documentarians go to the Abaddon Hotel in upstate Abaddon, New York to chronicle a disaster from 2009, when the opening night of a haunted-house attraction went seriously wrong. In the second film, another group of documentarians try to find out what happened to the first group. In the third film, a rich entrepreneur decides to stage a theatrical version of FAUST at the hotel, with the secret aim of closing its portal to Hell, while yet another documentary crew follows him.

The fourth film moved the action but not the format to the Carmichael Manor, where a crew of two young women and the brother of one of them try to document the haunting at this Abaddon-related structure.

With HELL HOUSE LLC: LINEAGE, the action incorporates the Carmichael and the Abaddon Hotel, while adding a third location, the original home of Satanist/original Abaddon Hotel owner Andrew Tully (Brian David Tracy). The new film also brings back Vanessa Shepherd (Elizabeth Vermilyea), once host of a TV paranormal show who made the mistake of covering the FAUST production back in HELL HOUSE LLC III.

Now Vanessa owns a bar in Abaddon (yes, multiple people ask her why she’s back in town), being interviewed by Alicia Cavalini (Sierra Sawka), who is looking into links between all these places, plus a carnival disaster and car crash that occurred in 1993.

At the same time, Vanessa is having both nightmares and disturbing visions that threaten to spill into reality. So are other Abaddon Hotel survivors.

Filmmaker Cognetti changes things up for LINEAGE. While there is still healthy use of video and film, this is not a “found footage” movie. This enables characters to be alone without a companion camera operator and relieves us of the question of why nobody drops their gear and runs.

There is both logic and fun in the notion of the infinite regression of an incident that causes people to attempt to examine what happened to other people attempting to examine what happened to other people attempting to examine (and so on) an inciting phenomenon.

On the other hand, the mythology has gotten so dense and self-reflective now that this is probably not the best place to jump into the HELL HOUSE LLC-verse without having seen at least some of the others.

The jump scares and creepiness are as solid as ever. Vermilyea is persuasive as someone who is attempting to recover from major trauma even while having more inflicted on her.

HELL HOUSE LLC: LINEAGE is a decent entry in the series, but with its many references to earlier installments and the what-will-we-find-out-next finale, it isn’t properly standalone.

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