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