It’s to Hell House franchise creator Stephen Cognetti’s credit that this fourth film in the series manages to lovingly revivify two horror tropes usually to be found mouldering at the back of the genre closet: the found-footage expedition and demonic clowns. That is partly on account of the mythology he has accrued over the last three instalments, centring on occult goings-on at the Abaddon Hotel on New York’s rural outskirts; it is embroidered and deepened by this quasi-prequel, helping fit out those cliches with an unsettlingly long shadow.
Everything in the film is framed by a group of documentary-style talking heads, discussing the tragic attempt of their friend Margot (Bridget Rose Perrotta) to make a true-crime exposé of the Carmichael Manor. This is the site of what, in 1989, appears to have been a double, perhaps triple murder, committed by either father Arthur Carmichael or his son Patrick, the latter of whom in Cognetti’s pileup of Lovecraftian lore turns out to have worked at the cursed hotel. But after the slaughter at the manor, both men disappeared, never to be seen again, into the surrounding snowy woods. Along with her estate-agent girlfriend Rebecca (Destiny Leilani Brown) and mentally ill brother Chase (James Liddell), the suicidally undaunted Margot decides to spend five nights on the supposedly haunted property, cameras at the ready.
