Hell House LLC Director Reveals the Key to the Perfect Found Footage Movie

Found footage is a technique that’s both horror’s most rewarding and most challenging. You have the mainstays of the format like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield going up against countless others. Then there are entries like the Hell House LLC franchise, popularizing the genre once again after a decades-long period of mediocrity. As Hell House LLC helmer Stephen Cognetti tells us, there’s one key to making a successful found footage picture: you’ve got to make it scary.

“I think you can get a little leeway in found footage about not having the certain types of depth that you learn in writing school and regular features have because you can’t do that with found footage because you have to justify the camera, and you’re not going to be able to have the third person perspective in a lot of different ways,” Cognetti tells ComicBook.com.

That said, Cognetti adds that he still tries to add the depth to the films but doesn’t go overboard; he’d much rather have the films be as scary as possible.

“I try to put depth into these stories as much as I can, but it is really hard to do, so really what I think any good found footage just really has to scare people. And I think that’s really what people watch these movies for,” the filmmaker adds. “I think found footage in general is to be have people scared enough to just to get that rush of adrenaline and being scared because it feels so real.”

He concludes, “I think that’s why people really want to go to found footage, just to get that sense that, ‘I know it’s not real, but it felt so real and it’s different from a bigger budget narrative feature,’ so I think the key is it is just being very scary and I think there’s so many good found footage films out there that really achieve that. I don’t mean in a shock kind of scare, I mean this this sense of sending-chills-up-your-spine kind of scare.”

The original Hell House LLC trilogy is now streaming on Shudder. Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael House hits the service on October 30th.

What’s your favorite found footage horror movie? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section!