HELL HOUSE, LLC (2015) is an excellent found-footage horror film, a part of the genre I typically avoid due to its predictability and lurching cameras. While the screenplay focuses on the scares and gives us little reason to invest in the characters, it’s a solid horror film propelled by mystery and suspense and just plain good fun. My editor, Bradley Englert, recommended this one to me, and it turned out to be a great recommendation.

The film begins with news coverage of tragedy at a haunted house attraction in Abaddon, NY. Nobody knows what happened to the people running it. The police sealed off the house and refuse to release details of their investigation. Five years later, a documentary crew tries to find out what happened. They’re approached by Hell House, LLC’s sole survivor, who has tapes.

The result is a story about a Halloween attraction company arriving in Abaddon to set up “Hell House” in an abandoned hotel for Halloween. They end up living there for the month leading up to the attraction opening to the public. We’re introduced to the owner, his girlfriend, three crew members, and three local actors they hire. While living in the hotel, they transform it into a pretty cool haunted house, learn some of the hotel’s very strange history, and deal with scary occurrences.

The characters are likeable, though we’re not given enough story for them to really invest in these people. There are conflicts, but they’re on the surface, and otherwise each character is given a single trait that defines them: Alex is the driven owner in denial about what’s going on, Sarah is his cute and plucky girlfriend, Paul is a goof, etc.

The main event is the house itself and the mystery surrounding it, what happened the night everything went down, and the suspense leading up to it. While low budget, the monster element is pretty well done. There is some denial and bad decisions that affect willing suspension of disbelief–like scared people running around in the dark with flashlights instead of turning on the lights–but the raw found footage feel and pretty decent acting make up for it and then some.

Overall, HELL HOUSE, LLC is a solid, tense, fun horror flick, and as a found footage film, it’s actually quite great.

Written and directed by Gaspar Noé, CLIMAX (2018) is a French horror film about a group of dancers celebrating after a rehearsal and succumbing to a group freakout after somebody heavily spikes the sangria with LSD. The result is loud, crazy, but at times oppressive and tedious.

Supposedly, the film is based on a true story about a dance troupe in the 90s. It begins at the end, and even rolls the final credits, before introducing us to the dancers by way of a series of audition tapes. From there, we see the final rehearsal, filled with some pretty amazing dance moves, and the after party. After a while, it becomes clear that the sangria was spiked with something heavy, leading to a sinister collective freakout.

The film is highly stylized, with red lighting and odd camera angles and even the camera being upside down for a while. It’s also lightly scripted, resulting in stimulating visuals but very little story and virtually no character development beyond the one- or two-dimensional. The whole thing comes across as a single interpretive dance piece, with the director telling the dancers to just keep dancing in character. What we do get to learn about the dancers is largely (and at length, and repeatedly) that they’re full of themselves and horny. As a result, we may be interested in seeing what happens to them but really don’t care what does. Combined with Noé staying way too long on his sequences, the result is overstimulating tedium. There’s something not quite right with a movie when I’m watching an extremely titillating scene but I’m checking my watch, or that I leave the theater feeling like the movie was 2.5 hours when it was only an hour and forty minutes.

In the end, I liked CLIMAX quite a bit, but in a reluctant sort of way. The idea, the dancing, the madness, the rush, and the overall audaciousness of the film all add up to something unique and extraordinary. But for me, in the end, it ended up feeling oppressive and self-indulgent without a solid payoff.

MAUS (2017) is a harrowing movie about how a war may stop but may never really end for those who survive it. Writer/director Yayo Herrero’s film starts off clumsily but gains confidence and builds enormous tension and horror by combing realism with excellent use of an unreliable narrator.

The film begins with Alex, a young German, and Selma, his Bosnian girlfriend, who are stranded on a remote road in the woods after their car breaks an axle. For Alex, this is an inconvenience, nothing more. To him, the Bosnian war was a long time ago, and the country is a safe place. Selma, however, is terrified–by landmines that may still be in the area, and by other dangers that may lurk in the forest, including an apparition that is slowly manifesting as her fear grows.

When they meet two Serbian men who offer to help, the film begins to build tension in scene after scene. We learn what Selma suffered as a child during the war, what she’s capable of, that her perception of reality is unreliable, and that again, for some, the war never really ended.

Overall, I liked it far more than I thought I would after the first few minutes. The film offers extraordinary tension in scene after scene with only a few characters in the woods, is thematically powerful, and visits moments of extreme and realistic brutality.