There is a strange feeling that follows you home after a long shift in a place that is designed to scare people. It is like the way a song gets stuck in your head after an evening at a bar where the same album plays on repeat. You turn out the light and the noise is still there. Your body is still braced for another jump scare even though you are now in your own bed. The mind keeps replaying the motions because it has been trained to expect the next jolt. That is what a good haunted attraction does. It pulls you into its rhythm until your ordinary senses feel off when you leave.
Watching the latest entry from Stephen Cognetti gave me that same ghost of a rhythm, but not in the way he might have hoped. It felt like a filmmaker who has slept too many nights inside his own creation and can no longer tell the difference between the adrenaline of a scare and the pulse of a story. Cognetti is the writer and director who gave us Hell House LLC, a microbudget creeper that became a late night favorite and grew into a small legend. It was followed by three sequels of mixed results and a side trip into another story called 825 Forest Road that did not land. With Hell House LLC: Lineage he returns to the Abaddon Hotel and Carmichael Manor and tells us this is intended to be the end.
Forgive the raised eyebrow. Horror fans have lived through a lot of promised finales that turned out to be intermissions. Friday the 13th once told us it was over and then came back for more. It is easy to hear the same promise here and quietly doubt it. Either way this series deserves a farewell that understands why people clung to the first film in the first place. The closing chapter should feel inevitable and alive, not like a tired summary or a lecture.
The most surprising choice in Lineage is also its biggest problem. Cognetti walks away from the one tool that once made him stand out. The original film used the language of found footage in a way that did not feel like a gimmick. The ordinary chaos of people building a haunted house became a source of dread. The rough edges did not hide the scares. They made them feel more possible. When a camera jitters in a hallway and catches the edge of something that should not be there, your own breath stutters a little. It is low fidelity by design and it invites your imagination to collaborate.
Lineage does not live in that space. Without the immediacy of found footage the director loses the everyday intimacy that let the earlier fear bloom. The new film leans on traditional coverage, cleaner images, and a more conventional sense of scene. That change lays bare weakness that the scrappy style once softened. Pacing becomes an issue almost immediately. Scenes are allowed to stretch without gaining tension. Transitions do not build pressure. The tale keeps cutting back to a dense web of background material and a larger mythology that is meant to enrich the world but instead weighs it down.
To be fair there are flashes of the old spark. Cognetti still knows how to use a frame so that something just outside your focus unnerves you. A figure slips out of view and your stomach remembers what this world used to do to you. A light blinks and turns the image into a stutter and you feel yourself lean forward a little, searching for shape in the dark. These moments work in isolation. They remind you of the visual instincts that launched this franchise. But they do not add up to a sustained threat. The sense of danger never fully takes hold. There is little feeling that anything could go wrong at any second. Instead the movie keeps pausing to explain itself.
That is the part that stings the most. If you are coming to a final chapter you want the lingering echoes from earlier entries to resolve. You want certain doors to close, certain faces to look back one more time, and a few old questions to find their answer. Lineage does not tidy anything. It builds new rooms. It tunnels down deeper into history and lineage and names that only the most devoted viewer will recognize at once. Much of the running time is devoted to connecting Vanessa Shepherd to the Abaddon Hotel and to the Carmichael legacy and to covering rules and events from the other movies. You can keep up if you have watched all of them recently and you are taking notes. If not you can feel a little like a student who missed a week of class and is trying to reenter the conversation. It starts to feel like you need a printed guide the way some folks used to bring a cheat sheet to David Lynch Dune.
There is a reason mystery is such a powerful ingredient in horror. The shadow in the corner of the room is always worse than the figure that steps into the light and explains how it got there. Even a good explanation risks shrinking the thing that frightened us. Over explanation takes that risk and multiplies it. Lineage keeps telling us how pieces connect instead of letting those connections click in our own heads. That makes the older films feel smaller too, as if the unknowns that once hovered over them were just items on a chart waiting to be labeled.
Even this would be forgivable if the movie was consistently frightening. It is not. The mood is gray and heavy. The characters talk about terrible things. They look exhausted and resigned. The score and the lighting and the line readings all lean in that direction. It mistakes gloom for menace. There is a difference between a film that makes you feel dread and a film that makes you feel tired. The lead performance from Elizabeth Vermilyea as Vanessa is a good example of the mismatch. She plays pain as stillness. She understates almost everything. In theory that approach can work. Here it registers as sleepiness. The issue is not just performance. The writing gives her long scenes of exposition and reflection that flatten her energy. We are told she is haunted. We seldom feel haunted with her.
Midway through the film it is as if Cognetti realizes he has made a quiet protagonist who is hard to follow into the deep end. He brings in two other figures. Seaara Sawka and Mike Sutton arrive as an investigator and a priest with a plan to purge the rot inside Carmichael Manor. As soon as the story shifts toward them the air changes. The camera moves with purpose. The blocking has clarity. The edit finds a rhythm. You can feel a filmmaker engaging with action and ritual and tools of the trade. It is not that these scenes reinvent what an exorcism can look like. They are just alive. They give the movie a spine. And then, just when you are leaning forward, the narrative cuts back to Vanessa and another conversation that pulls the wheels through wet sand.
Momentum is everything in a scare story. The best of the earlier Hell House movies knew that. They were built like careful walks through a crooked attraction. You moved from room to room and the minor gag in one place set up the big shock in the next. The director used clowns and mannequins and cheap masks the way a street magician uses misdirection. The blank face that you are sure did not move in the last shot suddenly tilts a degree. You feel your throat tighten. You think it might have been the light. You think you imagined it. That sensation is key. Your own brain becomes the collaborator on the scare. When a figure moves on camera in a direct and emphatic way it risks breaking the spell. Lineage allows one of its signature clowns to move in a way that recalls a different modern boogeyman, the silent brute from the Terrifier films. It lands with a thud because it goes against what once made those clowns uncanny.
That contrast points to the heart of the problem. The thing people loved about the first Hell House was simple and strong. Take a crew of young people who make a Halloween attraction. Put them inside a location that has a history. Let them move decorations and pull cables and argue about whether the smoke machine works. Let them chase the dream of making a great scare for paying customers. Then slowly let the place close around them until they are trapped not only by the building but by the commitment they have made. I am sure many viewers pictured themselves inside those hallways and felt the practical panic of not being able to get out. That is primal. It does not need a family tree to land. It needs a door that will not open and a laugh from the dark.
Lineage wants us to care about Vanessa’s background more than it wants us to feel that trapped heartbeat. You can admire the ambition. You can even appreciate a filmmaker who does not want to repeat himself. But the choice sends the movie away from its strength. When the story slows to deliver another explanation, the claustrophobia seeps out. When the story races toward ritual in the manor, the energy returns, only to be interrupted again. That push and pull becomes its own kind of frustration. You can see the good version of this film flicker in and out.
There is also the matter of obsession. It is difficult to end something that you built from the ground up. The characters and the setting become part of your routine. They take up residence in your head as if they are paying tenants. I get the sense that Cognetti is still living inside the Abaddon Hotel. He knows where every door leads and what is stashed under every stair. He can feel the temperature change in the kitchen when the fridge door opens. That familiarity can be a gift when you are chasing atmosphere. It can also tempt you to inventory every corner. In horror that urge is dangerous. Fear grows in negative space. If you label everything, the ghosts leave.
Maybe the most generous way to read Lineage is as a document of an artist wrestling with that impulse. He has the urge to explain because he wants to close the loop responsibly. He also has the instinct to unsettle because he remembers how he began. Those two desires are not easy to reconcile. The final section of the film, with the investigator and the priest, suggests a way forward. It leans into direct conflict with the unseen and the unknown. It limits itself to a few rooms and a clear task. It understands the tools of the franchise. You can imagine a tighter movie built around that spine, with Vanessa as an image in the margins rather than the narrator of events.
If this truly is the last entry, it is not the goodbye this world deserves. An ending for Hell House should feel like a confident return to first principles. It should let the format that made the series popular sing one more time. It should be very simple. A building. A team. A goal. A night that goes wrong in ways no one expects. A camera that cannot look in every direction at once. A figure that is never quite where it was a second ago. And a silent agreement to leave some doors shut. We do not require a cosmic map of the Abaddon. We require a lighter flickering in a stairwell and steps that sound like they are coming toward us.
I do not want to be too harsh on a filmmaker who clearly cares. Care is visible in the craft. There are shots here that show a good eye for how to prime an audience. There are stretches of sound design that work on your nerves. There is a late game sequence that is comfortably tense. Cognetti has not lost the ability to stage a chill when he tunes himself to the right frequency. He has just layered too much lore on top and entrusted the point of view to a character who cannot support the weight placed on her shoulders. It happens. Horror is full of sequels that smother their own spark. The trick is to recognize the mistake and walk back toward the fire.
Maybe that is why the thought of this being the end rings hollow. Not because studios always find a way to keep squeezing a name. Rather because there is still something left in this idea that has not been properly used in a while. The haunted house that turns on its makers remains a perfect little machine. The clowns that only move when you are not looking still have a chill inside them. Put a camera in the corner of a room and tell me it will not catch anything I want to see and I will watch that corner for an hour. Lineage remembers pieces of that sensation and then drifts away to talk about who lived here a century ago.
When the credits roll you may feel that old after image in your mind. You may listen for sounds in your hallway. But you might also feel the buzz of a long conversation that wore you out. That unresolved tug makes the viewing experience uneven. You want to be carried by the story the way a walk through a haunted attraction carries you from one scene to the next. Instead you keep stopping to read a plaque on the wall. The plaque is interesting in a way. It just is not scary.
I hope Stephen Cognetti gets a night of dreamless sleep. I hope he wakes up and remembers what made the first Hell House so contagious. A floor plan. A handful of performers. A camera that is not sure what it will see. A fear that grows when we are not looking straight at it. A willingness to let some mysteries stay unnamed. If he returns one day to that recipe, maybe under a different title or with different faces, I will happily line up again. And if he really is done, then thank you for the original scare. It crawled under the skin in a way that few small horror films do. Lineage does not manage to send the series off with the same shiver. It feels like someone standing in the dark waiting for a sound that never quite arrives. But you can tell he still hears the music. Maybe next time he will let it play.
