Hell House LLC (2015)

Hell House LLC arrives from 2015, a found footage document of a haunted attraction in upstate New York that killed fifteen people on opening night. The film presents itself as an investigation, complete with a documentary crew, recovered tapes, and a survivor who may or may not exist. It is a modest, efficient chiller, and it is also, for our purposes, a fascinating artifact: a piece of horror cinema so entirely devoted to the mechanics of dread that it never once pauses to address the social questions of its era, let alone ours.

On the matter of representation, the cast is a standard ensemble of horror archetypes, indistinguishable from any number of similarly budgeted productions. There is no LGBTQ+ material, no feminist intervention into the genre's habit of treating women as victims, no engagement with race or systemic inequality. Body positivity and neurodivergence do not appear even as footnotes. The climate goes unmentioned, which is understandable given that the primary threat is a shadowy cult in a basement. The film is not hostile to progressive sensibilities. It is indifferent to them, which is a distinct and perhaps purer category.

The single point of contact with contemporary social critique is the CEO who insists on opening the attraction despite mounting supernatural warnings. This gestures toward corporate negligence, though the film treats it as a plot mechanism for getting bodies into a haunted basement. There is no sermon here, no lecture, no moment where a character turns to the camera to explain what the audience should think. The result is a lean piece of found footage horror, culturally weightless and, in its own quiet way, refreshing.