Hell House LLC: Lineage marks the end of an era, as Stephen Cognetti, who created the horror series back in 2015, has officially declared he’s done making Hell House LLC movies. However, there may be a new era on the horizon; Lineage is the first Hell House LLC narrative film after four found-footage entries, and Cognetti is hopeful the films will continue… just without him behind the camera.
“I am done with Hell House, but that was never to be misconstrued as the story being finished,” Cognetti clarified in a recent interview with io9. “And I think that was where a lot of confusion came in when people saw the ending of Lineage [during its theatrical run]. I think they were expecting something more wrapped up. For people that are going to see it on Shudder for the first time, just know that not everything is going to be wrapped up into a nice bow at the end.”
He continued. “I’ve had so much fun making [the Hell House LLC movies]. It is my intention to stop making them, not for the story to end.”
And he’s not turning his back on his series completely. “If it ever gets picked up in another way by someone else or in another medium of some kind, I would think I would like to have some involvement,” Cognetti said. “Because I actually know what comes next. I have outlines of what comes next, story-wise; what comes before and what comes after is written down. I’m just not going to make it. So I’d like to know that at least the framework that I had in my head was still being adhered to.”
However, he doesn’t have a successor in mind right now. “No, there’s no plan. There’s no plans at all for that,” he said.
Hell House LLC: Lineage © Shudder
Cognetti knows where the story goes after Lineage. But he also told us the endgame he’s had in mind for Hell House LLC has changed shape over time.
“I think all stories evolve. Things change over drafts. Even the script for Hell House, the original, changed over time. Who died, who lived—that changed over the rewriting process. So nothing ever is just written in stone,” he said. “That’s what I love about the rewriting process. You write the script, you rewrite, you make changes, and what you finally end up shooting is not what you originally conceived of in the first draft of the script. That’s a natural part of the process. As to where the actual end to the story goes, it’s not written out in script form, but it’s just more of a general idea structure of what the sixth, and I guess the final, segment of the trilogy would be—Lineage was originally written as the middle movie of a trilogy, and obviously the ending kind of plays that way.”
However, he reiterated, he’s ready to move on. “Going into Lineage I realized, ‘I really cannot make the sixth one so this is going to be it, unfortunately.’ And I say that with sadness, because I’ve had so much fun making these movies. So it’s not like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to be done with it.’ No, these movies mean a lot to me. So I’m sad to leave it, but I just can’t do it anymore.”
Lineage is a film that’s very dependent on having seen all the other Hell House LLC movies. It picks up story threads and builds out characters and lore mentioned in earlier entries and explores them in a fairly involved way. That’s because Cognetti was making it for a certain audience, as he explained.
“Originally this was never supposed to be a theatrical release film, so I think that’s cast a wider net of horror fans than it was truly meant to,” Cognetti said. “It was supposed to [just] be streaming on Shudder, which is where all the other films live. So I thought it’d be a better fit for such a story-entrenched film to be a streaming movie on Shudder, where you can watch all of them together and go back and forth if you need to watch some before or watch some after. But for a theatrical release, you don’t get that.”
“So I think if I had to do it all again, going into production, knowing it was going to be a theatrical release, I probably would have changed a lot of things, especially in the second act,” he said. “But not too much. I mean, there’s only so much you can do anyways, but I would definitely not have made it so plot entrenched if I knew it was going to be a wider release.”
Hell House LLC: Lineage © Shudder
Cognetti says that he never imagined Hell House LLC would take on the life that it has, becoming what’s now a five-film franchise with a devoted fan base.
“I only wanted to make one good film, the best film I could make, and hopefully it would gain an audience. That was the only desire at the time,” he said. “But what I do when I write in something like Hell House, I like to leave breadcrumbs for storylines just to show that there is more story out there … I think that just came naturally in the writing process, not [in a way that was] like, ‘Oh, I should make this film have a sequel intention or a sequel ability.’ It was more just that’s how the story kind of wrote itself naturally.”
He does have one regret in leaving Hell House LLC behind. It’s tied into the fact that there is more story to be unearthed in the fictional town of Abaddon, New York, where the movies take place.
“I would love to have dug into [the folklore of Abaddon] a lot more. The whole on-the-ground Abaddon is something that I’ve always wanted to explore,” he said, pointing to story settings with lots of in-universe history, including the Rockland County Fair, the Abaddon Hotel, and the Carmichael Manor. “But when we’re in the found footage world, we just see the hotel and that’s it, or the Carmichael Manor and that’s it.”
Lineage has a broader focus, something its narrative structure allowed and encouraged. “So going in this route, we can explore a little bit more of the town. My only regret is that we couldn’t do it more,” Cognetti said. “I think there are just so many fun stories out there in the world—especially if you’re doing it narratively, you’re not restricted to telling the story that’s contained to, ‘Why is there a camera and why is someone filming this?’ You could tell much more of the Abaddon story. So yeah, that was a lot of fun to be able to do. We only did it a little bit; I would have loved to have it done more.”
You know this guy’s gonna pop up in Hell House LLC: Lineage. © Shudder
Check back later this week for io9’s review of Hell House LLC: Lineage, which streams on Shudder starting October 30.
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