Author Archives: surgeons of horror

Chains of Creation: Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak and the Prison of the Gothic

13 Thursday Nov 2025

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By the mid-1990s, Castle Freak found Stuart Gordon at a fascinating crossroads — caught between the transgressive brilliance of his early H.P. Lovecraft adaptations (Re-Animator, From Beyond) and the low-budget constraints of Charles Band’s Full Moon Productions. The result is a lean, mean Gothic chamber piece that struggles against its limitations but ultimately bears the unmistakable fingerprints of its director: bodily horror, familial guilt, and tragedy masquerading as terror.

Working once again with his creative muse Jeffrey Combs and the always-captivating Barbara Crampton, Gordon turns what could have been a cheap European monster movie into something strangely mournful. The story — of an American family inheriting a crumbling Italian castle, only to discover a deformed, feral creature locked away in the basement — feels familiar, yet it’s given a raw, unsettling emotional core. Combs’ performance, as a guilt-ridden father trying to hold his fractured family together, brings unexpected pathos to the proceedings, while Crampton’s quiet sorrow grounds the film’s more grotesque flourishes.

What separates Castle Freak from the endless churn of Full Moon’s ‘90s horror output is Gordon’s eye for discomfort. Despite being shot on a shoestring budget and with a skeletal crew, he still finds moments of painterly dread — the cold stone corridors, the echo of chains, the creature’s mournful moans. And yet, for all its ambition, the film is tethered by its financial and creative confines. The gore lands, the atmosphere lingers, but the pacing sags. It’s a haunted house story without quite enough haunting.

In retrospect, Castle Freak stands as a minor but meaningful entry in Gordon’s canon — a film where his thematic obsessions (sexual repression, guilt, the monstrous within) are filtered through Full Moon’s direct-to-video pragmatism. The collaboration with Charles Band may have clipped his wings, but Gordon’s voice still resonates through the decay. There’s a sadness to the film’s cruelty, a sense that the freak chained in the cellar isn’t just a monster, but a metaphor for Gordon’s own creative captivity within the B-movie machine.

The Prognosis:

Castle Freak may not reach the delirious heights of Re-Animator or From Beyond, but as a bleak Gothic tragedy disguised as exploitation, it remains one of the most distinctive horrors of the Full Moon era — a mournful howl echoing through the ruins of genre cinema’s most daring mind.

  • Saul Muerte

The Outback as Gothic Frontier — 50 Years of Terry Bourke’s Uneasy Australian Horror Western

12 Wednesday Nov 2025

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In the barren, wind-bitten wilds of colonial Australia, Inn of the Damned (1975) found horror in isolation. Long before “Ozploitation” became a term of critical affection, Terry Bourke’s strange hybrid of gothic horror and western aesthetics dared to imagine the Australian bush as both a landscape of myth and madness. Half ghost story, half revenge thriller, Bourke’s film sits at the uneasy intersection of imported genre traditions and a uniquely Antipodean sensibility — a cinematic haunted house in the middle of nowhere.

At its core, Inn of the Damned is a tale of vengeance and retribution, filtered through the dusty lens of the frontier. A sheriff, played with rugged stoicism by Alex Cord, investigates the mysterious disappearances surrounding an isolated guesthouse run by the elderly von Sturm couple (Dame Judith Anderson and Joseph Furst). What he finds is not merely murder, but an eerie reflection of the Australian psyche in transition — a young nation still haunted by its colonial sins and moral wilderness.

Bourke, who had already made waves with Night of Fear (1972), one of Australia’s first true horror features, was an auteur working far ahead of his industry’s infrastructure. His style was raw, experimental, and unafraid to fuse European gothic tropes with distinctly Australian themes of isolation and brutality. If Night of Fear hinted at the emerging voice of a national horror identity, Inn of the Damned pushed it into bold new territory — a bush gothic western before the subgenre truly existed.

Where Hammer Films had their fog-drenched manors, Bourke found his decay in the vast, sun-bleached plains. The titular inn, set against the encroaching wilderness, becomes both physical and psychological prison — an emblem of trauma, repression, and a colonial past that refuses to die. The film’s atmosphere, lensed beautifully by Brian Probyn, carries an uncanny stillness, where the wind whistles like a whisper from another world.

Dame Judith Anderson, returning to Australian soil after a lifetime in Hollywood and Broadway, lends the picture a tragic gravitas. Her performance as the tormented landlady is both grand and grotesque — a figure of crumbling dignity and suppressed rage. Opposite her, Joseph Furst brings a feverish menace that toes the line between villainy and pity. Bourke’s direction draws from theatrical melodrama, but reframes it through the desolation of the Outback, where civility erodes and violence becomes a natural law.

Critically, Inn of the Damned was divisive upon release. Its tonal clashes — between horror, psychological drama, and western stylization — unsettled audiences and distributors alike. Yet, with distance, the film feels pioneering rather than confused. It laid groundwork for what would become the distinct Australian horror temperament later seen in films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977), and Razorback (1984). Bourke’s fascination with the land as both physical and metaphysical antagonist remains vital to understanding how the country’s genre cinema evolved.

Terry Bourke’s career never received the celebration it deserved. He was a filmmaker of contradictions — a tabloid provocateur with an artist’s ambition, a showman drawn to exploitation yet deeply attuned to atmosphere and theme. Inn of the Damned endures as his most ambitious statement, a film that reimagines the horror western not as frontier myth but as colonial nightmare.

The Prognosis:

Half a century later, Inn of the Damned stands as a curious but vital relic — a reminder that Australian horror was not born from imitation, but invention. In its madness, its rough edges, and its haunting sense of place, Bourke’s vision helped define the cinematic terror of the bush long before the term Ozploitation was coined.

  • Saul Muerte

Faith, Fear, and Familiar Demons — Diabolic Tests the Limits of Australia’s “Elevated Horror

11 Tuesday Nov 2025

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Australian genre cinema has been pushing at the boundaries of horror for over a decade now—restless, ambitious, and eager to prove that its terrors can hold their own on the world stage. Daniel J. Phillips’ Diabolic certainly aspires to sit within that tradition. A visually confident piece that leans into the current wave of “elevated” folk horror, it promises grand spiritual torment and supernatural vengeance but settles, unfortunately, into familiar rhythms.

Elise (Elizabeth Cullen) seeks a miracle cure for her mysterious blackouts, joining a fundamentalist healing ritual that inevitably stirs something far darker. From there, Diabolic unfolds as a study in paranoia and possession, invoking the cursed lineage of witches, faith, and the female body as battleground. Phillips, who previously demonstrated a keen eye for atmosphere, drenches his frames in shadow and ritualistic imagery—a visual style that sometimes outpaces the screenplay’s thin sense of dread.

The problem lies in pacing and predictability. The film spends its first act buried beneath exposition, taking too long to let the horror breathe. By the time the vengeful spirit emerges in earnest, much of the mystery has already withered. Its narrative beats—visions, confessions, cursed objects, and escalating hysteria—feel telegraphed, echoing better works from The Witch to The Wailing.

Still, Diabolic finds some salvation in its performances. Elizabeth Cullen anchors the chaos with a quiet, unflinching intensity, grounding the supernatural in something believably human. Her descent feels lived-in, even as the story around her becomes increasingly schematic. John Kim and Mia Challis provide competent support, though their characters are largely ornamental to the central exorcism of guilt and power.

Where Diabolic succeeds is in its texture—the way the camera lingers on faces during moments of dread, the ritualistic hum of sound design, and the sense that Phillips genuinely wants to explore faith as both salvation and curse. Yet it struggles to escape the trappings of the genre it reveres. What could have been a new cornerstone of Australian occult cinema ends up merely competent: handsomely shot, occasionally haunting, but ultimately too cautious to transcend its own formulas.

The Prognosis:

By the time the final act’s firelight fades, one is left admiring the ambition rather than fearing the outcome. Diabolic isn’t unholy—it’s just undercooked.

  • Saul Muerte

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Mind Over Murder: Revisiting Psychic Killer and the Occult Obsessions of 1970s Horror

07 Friday Nov 2025

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The mid-1970s were a time when horror cinema flirted with the unseen — the intangible spaces between science and spirituality, psychology and the paranormal. Ray Danton’s Psychic Killer (1975) is a fascinating, if uneven, artifact of that cultural moment, where the anxieties of post-Vietnam disillusionment met the popular fascination with the occult, parapsychology, and the power of the mind untethered from the body.

Based on the novel The Killer Inside by Mardi Rustam, the film follows Arnold Masters (Jim Hutton), a wrongfully institutionalised man who learns the ancient art of astral projection and proceeds to exact vengeance on those responsible for his suffering. It’s a premise steeped in the decade’s obsession with transcendental revenge — an idea that pain, repression, and injustice could manifest as supernatural liberation.

Danton, better known for his acting than his directing, crafts a film that hovers between drive-in pulp and metaphysical inquiry. The astral projection sequences, with their spectral double imagery and off-kilter editing, gesture toward something headier than the average exploitation film, though the execution never quite escapes its grindhouse trappings. Still, Psychic Killer taps into that 1970s preoccupation with unseen forces — from Carrie to The Exorcist to The Fury — suggesting that the mind itself was the new frontier of horror.

Hutton’s performance adds unexpected melancholy, his vengeance driven less by malice than by a desperate desire for release — from guilt, trauma, and the body itself. Julie Adams and Paul Burke provide sturdy genre support, though the film’s episodic structure and inconsistent tone often dilute the tension.

Yet for all its flaws, Psychic Killer endures as a strangely poignant entry in the occult horror canon. Its blend of parapsychology, revenge thriller, and low-budget surrealism makes it a spiritual cousin to Patrick (1978) and The Medusa Touch (1978), exploring how psychic phenomena became a metaphor for repressed rage and moral imbalance.

Half a century on, Psychic Killer stands as both a relic and a reflection — a film that captured the 1970s hunger to look beyond the flesh, even if what it found there was merely the echo of human cruelty.

The Prognosis:

A curious, hypnotic slice of 1970s occult cinema — not wholly successful, but undeniably of its time and temperament.

  • Saul Muerte

Possession Without Passion: The Missed Potential of An American Haunting

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

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“Possession knows no bounds,” the tagline warns, though sadly, the film’s imagination does. An American Haunting attempts to bring the notorious Bell Witch legend to cinematic life, boasting the acting pedigree of Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek, yet even their combined gravitas can’t save this otherwise weightless ghost story from dissipating into the fog.

Set in 19th-century Tennessee, the film follows the devout Bell family as they are tormented by an invisible force that grows increasingly violent. Courtney Solomon anchors the narrative in a quasi-historical framing device, flashing between the period setting and modern-day correspondences — a decision that feels more distracting than illuminating. The supposed authenticity of the haunting, drawn from one of America’s most enduring supernatural legends, is buried beneath layers of slick art direction and overwrought emotional manipulation.

There are moments where the film almost succeeds. Solomon’s use of stark winter landscapes and period detail captures a genuine sense of isolation and religious repression. The interplay between faith, guilt, and patriarchal authority hints at a deeper psychological reading — particularly in the film’s controversial subtext of abuse and repression. Yet these glimpses of ambition are undermined by generic jump scares and erratic pacing, reducing what might have been an eerie meditation on American folklore into a routine exercise in gothic excess.

Sutherland delivers a sturdy, if uninspired, performance as the tormented patriarch John Bell, while Spacek provides the emotional centre as the devout matriarch, stoic but visibly cracking under the strain. Their efforts, however, are let down by a screenplay that offers them little beyond reaction shots to unseen horrors. The younger cast members, including Rachel Hurd-Wood as daughter Betsy, fare better in the moments of pure terror — though even these are undercut by inconsistent visual effects and abrupt tonal shifts.

The film’s conclusion, which attempts to blend historical tragedy with supernatural justice, arrives with the subtlety of a hammer blow. What should feel revelatory instead plays as exploitative and confused, failing to commit to either psychological realism or full-blooded horror fantasy.

The Prognosis:

An American Haunting ultimately joins the long line of early-2000s supernatural thrillers that mistake gloss for gravitas. For all its promise of ancestral dread and spectral vengeance, what lingers isn’t fear, but fatigue — a ghost story that haunts itself with the shadow of what it could have been.

  • Saul Muerte

Drained of Dread: Abraham’s Boys Offers a Tepid Take on the Van Helsing Curse

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

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Joe Hill’s short story Abraham’s Boys offered a quietly haunting coda to the Dracula mythos — a modern Gothic in miniature, soaked in melancholy and generational trauma. Unfortunately, this Shudder-exclusive adaptation struggles to translate that restrained power to the screen. What emerges is a film that mistakes heavy exposition for emotional weight and loses the eerie ambiguity that made Hill’s prose hang in the air.

Set in the American Midwest, the film imagines Abraham Van Helsing as a broken patriarch trying to protect his sons, Max and Rudy, from the supernatural horrors he once fought. It’s a bold premise — relocating Stoker’s world from the fog of Europe to the dust and decay of small-town America — but in doing so, the film sheds the very atmosphere that defined the Gothic. The Midwest may hold its ghosts, but here it feels oddly sterile, a backdrop devoid of menace or mystique.

Even more jarring is the notion that Van Helsing, once defined by faith and obsession, would settle down with Mina Harker and start a family. The choice feels not only implausible but thematically tone-deaf, undercutting the tragic consequences of their shared history. The result is a domestic melodrama stitched awkwardly to a monster myth that deserved grander treatment.

There are flashes of something worthwhile — the strained father-son dynamic occasionally hints at the emotional brutality Hill conjured in his story, and the film’s final moments attempt to reclaim some of its literary melancholy. But it’s too little, too late. Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story is a gothic without a heart, a reimagining that leaves both the horror and the humanity of its lineage drained.

The Prognosis:

A well-intentioned expansion of Joe Hill’s world that fails to capture his haunting tone or Stoker’s legacy. The bloodline runs thin.

  • Saul Muerte

Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story will be streaming on Shudder from Thurs 6th Nov.

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge — The Scream That Wouldn’t Stay Silent

02 Sunday Nov 2025

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40 Years Later, Freddy’s Most Controversial Outing Finds Its Voice

When A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge was released in 1985, it was branded the misfit of the franchise — the sequel that neither understood nor respected Wes Craven’s original nightmare logic. It broke the rules, confused the mythology, and, for years, stood as an awkward entry that fans politely stepped around on their way from the original to Dream Warriors. Yet four decades on, this strange, feverish sequel has become something else entirely: a film reborn through reinterpretation, its queerness no longer subtext but the key to its survival.

Directed by Jack Sholder and written by David Chaskin, Freddy’s Revenge abandoned the dream-bound terror that defined Craven’s universe. Instead, it placed Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund, as gleefully unhinged as ever) in the real world, emerging from the subconscious of a high-school boy, Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton). Freddy doesn’t haunt Jesse’s dreams so much as possess his waking body — a metaphor that was once dismissed as clumsy and now reads as heartbreakingly potent.

For years, Sholder and Chaskin denied any intentional queer coding in the script, even as the evidence screamed from the screen: Jesse’s confusion, his attraction to his male friend, the locker-room glances, the visit to a leather bar, the purging of desire through literal combustion. It’s a coming-of-age horror written in the language of repression. Mark Patton, himself a closeted gay actor navigating the homophobic undercurrents of 1980s Hollywood, became the unwitting vessel for a film that mirrored his own struggle. What was once derided as camp excess has since been reclaimed as a bold, if accidental, act of visibility.

Stylistically, Sholder’s direction can’t match Craven’s dreamlike precision. The suburban sets feel overlit, the kills lack imaginative flair, and the final act collapses under a barrage of rubber and fire. Yet, there’s something raw in its awkwardness — an emotional exposure that feels more personal than any of the slick sequels that followed. Freddy’s transformation from an abstract nightmare into an embodiment of internal fear makes Freddy’s Revenge less a horror film and more a psychological exorcism.

In hindsight, the film’s flaws have become its strengths. Where Dream Warriors polished the franchise into pop spectacle, Freddy’s Revenge remains stubbornly intimate — sweaty, confused, and unafraid of its own vulnerability. It’s a film that accidentally said too much, and in doing so, became something greater than its makers intended: a queer text born out of repression, now celebrated for the same reasons it was once mocked.

Forty years later, Freddy’s second outing stands as the series’ most haunted film — not by Krueger’s knives, but by the ghosts of shame, identity, and self-discovery. It may not be the nightmare Wes Craven envisioned, but it’s one that has found its audience at last.

The Prognosis:

Flawed, fascinating, and deeply human — Freddy’s Revenge remains the bravest mistake the franchise ever made.

  • Saul Muerte

“Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street” — Reclaiming the Dream

When Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019) premiered, it reframed one of horror cinema’s most divisive sequels through a lens of personal redemption. Co-directed by Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen, the documentary follows actor Mark Patton — once dubbed “the first male scream queen” — as he confronts both the film’s legacy and the industry that nearly erased him.

For decades, Patton lived in self-imposed exile, burned by the fallout from Freddy’s Revenge. His performance, ridiculed in its time for its “unintended” homoerotic undertones, became a scapegoat for a film that studio executives and creatives refused to acknowledge as queer. The doc reveals the painful aftermath: the homophobia of the 1980s Hollywood system, the stigma surrounding the AIDS crisis, and the way Patton’s career dissolved in the shadow of a film that mirrored his inner life too closely.

What Scream, Queen! achieves — and why it remains essential viewing — is its reclamation of authorship. It positions Patton not as a victim of misinterpretation but as the heart of Freddy’s Revenge, the one who gave its confused metaphors a pulse. His confrontation with screenwriter David Chaskin, who long denied the script’s queer coding before finally conceding its intent, is one of the most cathartic moments in horror documentary history.

In essence, the film transforms Freddy’s Revenge from franchise oddity into a landmark of queer horror — not because it was perfect, but because it survived. It reminds us that horror, at its best, is a mirror for the things we’re told to fear — even, and especially, ourselves.

The Evil Dead (1981): The Birth of DIY Carnage

29 Wednesday Oct 2025

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There’s something unholy about watching The Evil Dead in 2025 — not because of its gore (though the film still bleeds like a fresh wound), but because it reminds us how much horror has changed… and how much it owes to Sam Raimi’s twisted weekend in the woods.

Before franchises, before multiverses, before horror was a business plan — there was a group of friends in Tennessee, gallons of fake blood, and a Super 8 camera that barely held together. Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and producer Robert Tapert didn’t just make a film; they conjured one from sheer madness and duct tape. Every camera move, every shriek, every ash-smeared close-up feels like it was carved from the flesh of invention itself.

The Evil Dead isn’t just about possession — it’s about obsession. You can feel Raimi’s fever in every frame, the urge to push the medium past breaking point. Long before the word “indie” became shorthand for Sundance polish, this film was truly independent: reckless, raw, and glorious in its imperfection. Its claustrophobic energy turns the forest into a sentient entity, the cabin into a cursed organism. You can smell the wood rot, the sweat, the 16mm stock tearing in the projector.

What keeps it alive isn’t nostalgia — it’s rhythm. Raimi’s kinetic camera was punk cinema incarnate, years before digital tools democratised motion. That manic momentum, that willingness to risk everything for a shot, became the DNA of countless filmmakers who came after — from Peter Jackson’s Braindead to modern found-footage auteurs chasing the same fever dream.

Yet for all its brutality, there’s an innocence to The Evil Dead. It’s a film made by people who loved horror so much, they wanted to crawl inside it. Raimi’s signature blend of cruelty and comedy — later refined in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness — starts here as an unfiltered scream. It’s clumsy, beautiful, and unforgettable.

In a cinematic age obsessed with IP and polish, The Evil Dead stands as a reminder that horror thrives on imperfection. It’s about spirit, not studio notes. It’s about throwing your friends into the mud and making something that feels like it might actually hurt you to watch.

The Prognosis:

Horror cinema has evolved in scale and sophistication, but few films still pulse with the same unhinged energy. Raimi’s debut is a masterclass in fearless filmmaking — a symphony of shrieks, sweat, and splintered wood that reminds us why terror should never feel safe.

  • Saul Muerte

THE EVIL DEAD – BUY OR RENT NOW

Toxic Avenger (2025): The Return of Filth and Fury

29 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Some monsters crawl back from the grave; others crawl from the sewer.
With The Toxic Avenger (2025), writer-director Macon Blair has achieved something bordering on alchemy — turning the sludge of 1980s exploitation cinema into a molten reflection of our contemporary world. It’s less a remake than a resurrection: a grotesque, heartfelt eulogy for a time when bad taste was an act of rebellion.

The original 1984 Toxic Avenger was pure Troma chaos — an anarchic cocktail of slime, slapstick, and splatter. It was both anti-superhero and anti-society, gleefully dismembering the Reagan-era obsession with moral cleanliness. Blair’s revival doesn’t sanitise that legacy; it weaponises it. If the first film was a punk scream from the gutter, the new one is a howl echoing from the biohazard bin of late capitalism.

Peter Dinklage’s portrayal of Winston Gooze — a meek janitor transformed into a radioactive antihero — anchors the absurdity with tragic weight. Dinklage plays the part not for camp, but for catharsis: his deformity becomes the mirror of a system that feeds on deforming its own. Kevin Bacon’s villainous corporate baron, all Botox and bile, feels like a mutant descendant of every Troma CEO caricature — but here, he’s horrifyingly real.

Blair’s vision retains Troma’s vulgar spirit while finding unexpected poetry in the putrescence. His Toxic Avenger is as much about class rage and environmental collapse as it is about geysers of green goo. Every viscera-slick punch lands with the melancholy of a generation choking on the toxins it helped create. The violence is ludicrous, yes, but the laughter catches in the throat — this is camp reimagined as ecological despair.

What’s remarkable is how The Toxic Avenger feels simultaneously nostalgic and corrosively modern. Blair pays homage to Lloyd Kaufman’s transgressive humour, but refracts it through the aesthetics of contemporary superhero fatigue. His monster isn’t an accident of nuclear waste but of bureaucracy — a man destroyed by the very infrastructures meant to protect him.
The film’s gore set-pieces are less about indulgence than excess as indictment: when the blood sprays, it sprays neon, irony, and sorrow.

There’s an undercurrent of empathy that never existed in the original. Blair, ever the humanist even amidst the carnage, treats his freaks with tenderness. The mutants, misfits, and malformed are no longer punchlines; they’re the ones inheriting the Earth — or what’s left of it. It’s as though the spirit of Troma grew up, got angry, and learned how to aim its sludge cannon.

The Prognosis:

In the landscape of 2025 horror, where clean franchises and polished dread dominate, The Toxic Avenger feels like a badly needed contamination. It reminds us that horror’s job isn’t always to terrify — sometimes, it’s to repulse, provoke, and unsettle in the service of truth. Blair’s remake drips with the very stuff most studios would rather wash away.

And that’s precisely why it matters.
Because amid the algorithmic uniformity of modern genre filmmaking, The Toxic Avenger dares to be disgusting — and in doing so, it becomes pure again.

  • Saul Muerte

THE TOXIC AVENGER – BUY OR RENT NOW

Hell House LLC: Lineage — The Ghost of a Franchise Haunted by Its Own Myth

27 Monday Oct 2025

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Across five films, Stephen Cognetti has quietly built one of the more curious mythologies in modern horror — a patchwork of haunted architecture, cursed tapes, and cyclical tragedy orbiting the ghostly epicentre of the Abaddon Hotel. Hell House LLC: Lineage seeks to close this circle, but in doing so, becomes trapped within it.

Forsaking the found-footage style that once defined the franchise, Cognetti’s latest entry opts for a more traditional, narrative form. It’s an understandable evolution — and yet one that inadvertently severs the series from its greatest source of dread: immediacy. Where Hell House LLC (2015) thrived on grainy footage and fractured perspective, Lineage feels distant, almost elegiac. Its horrors unfold with the politeness of recollection rather than the panic of experience.

At the centre is Vanessa Shepherd (Elizabeth Vermilyea), a woman tethered to Abaddon by blood and dream, her life dissolving beneath the weight of inherited trauma. Vermilyea brings a weary conviction to the role, grounding the supernatural within something painfully human — grief as a form of haunting. Around her, Cognetti threads familiar motifs: the flicker of dying light, the whisper of unseen presences, the inescapable architecture of fate. These moments remind us why the director’s early work resonated — his ability to make space itself feel sentient.

But Lineage, for all its ambition, buckles under the burden of its own mythology. The film drifts between closure and repetition, explaining away its mysteries rather than deepening them. The Abaddon myth — once an unknowable wound — becomes over-articulated, every secret illuminated until nothing remains in shadow. What was once terrifying for its ambiguity now feels embalmed by overexposure.

Cognetti’s direction still glimmers with craft — a movement in the periphery, a dissonant hum in the sound design — yet the sense of discovery is gone. Lineage isn’t so much a haunting as it is a requiem, mourning what the series once was: a small, scrappy miracle of lo-fi horror ingenuity.

The Prognosis:

Hell House LLC: Lineage closes the curtain with a sigh rather than a scream. It is a ghost story about the exhaustion of storytelling itself — beautiful in fragments, hollow in execution. The Abaddon Hotel may still echo, but the fear has long since checked out.

  • Saul Muerte