Abrams, keeps the "Cloverfield" monster off screen for hefty portions of the film, lingering on shots of bloodied civilians stumbling out of the rubble and achieving the film's most heart-in-mouth terrifying sequence when the characters climb one skyscraper to rescue their friend from another that's collapsed against it. What if a house wasn't just haunted, but somehow predatory, lying in wait for victims and sending out its own emissaries to lure in fresh quarry? "Hell House LLC" is so fiendishly well-executed that it fully sells this freaky premise repeat watches reveal extra scares functioning on an almost subliminal level.īut director Matt Reeves, working in tandem with producer J.J. This game of who's-spooking-who builds to a series of blood-curdling reveals in the film's third act, as the Hell House itself becomes a more active participant in the terror. As opening night approaches, "Hell House LLC" ratchets up the tension, offering one particularly novel twist on found-footage conventions: Smart-alecky team members take us behind the scenes of the scares they're staging, only to notice props that have inexplicably moved out of place. "Host" is framed as a recording of a Zoom call from Hell, and Savage's ability to follow through on the setup's promise makes for a film more clever than anyone could've expected.Īs such, Cognetti's film leaps backward in time, depicting the lead-up to the night of the tragedy as Hell House team members sort through cobwebs and creepy clown dolls to set up their attraction inside the abandoned Abbadon Hotel. When one character starts typing in the chat, and their messages come across as a garbled mash, the possible explanations for this barrage are almost as scary as the reveal. For all the time we commit to speaking with friends over an internet connection, none of them can intervene or do more than watch what's happening on our screens, however horrifying that is. What makes "Host" such an unusually clever and exciting found-footage film - not to mention a valuable encapsulation of this hyper-anxious cultural moment - is the imagination with which Savage exploits the specific anxieties of lives spent simultaneously online and alone. Lean, mean, and brutally effective, this 56-minute frightfest wastes little time before subjecting its extraordinarily expressive (and believably terrified) cast to a rapidly escalating series of demonic intrusions. "Grave Encounters" wasn't particularly well-received upon its release, but horror fans have reassessed the film positively in recent years, particularly praising the film's tongue-in-cheek critique of reality-TV hucksters whose ultimate fates will feel like just desserts to plenty of horror aficionados. What becomes clear through these distortions of time and space is that the characters have stumbled across a spirit realm, one that does not tolerate the kinds of silly provocations a reality show requires. Inexplicably, the daybreak so eagerly awaited by the characters never comes, as the crew is drawn deeper into an impossible maze of shadowy hallways and unmarked tunnels. Spectral forces torment the crew subtly at first, then less so. Suffice to say, they get what they came for. Credit Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz, together known as filmmaking duo the Vicious Brothers, with wringing genuine suspense out of their somewhat jokey premise: a production crew that voluntarily locks themselves inside an abandoned mental hospital in hopes of documenting some spooky and unexplained phenomena.
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