After Stephen Cognetti injected some much needed life into the largely sterile and drab Hell House franchise with his previous film Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor, which was a genuinely creepy and scary slab of cosmic horror, he has now decided to move away from his dear franchise and finally direct a film not part of the Hell House universe. But despite straying from the confines of his well-established series — he is currently four films deep and doesn’t seem to show any signs of stopping — Cognetti hasn’t abandoned the horror genre, and with his latest film, 825 Forest Road, he instead reuses many themes and ideas that make up the veins of Hell House. Regrettably, however, despite finally appearing to understand how to manipulate found footage for maximum scares, Cognetti falls remarkably short in this latest project from reaching the surprising heights of his last work.
825 Forest Road is a fatally drab film that bears a story and dialogue that both feel as entirely crafted by someone working on autopilot. Or even worse, as if they have been generated by AI. Narratively, it’s a dull and monotonous rehashing of an exhausting list of tropes, including ones already used by Cognetti in previous films. The film takes place in a rural American town, where couple Chuck (Joe Falcone) and Maria (Elizabeth Vermilyea) have just moved due to Chuck’s estranged sister, Isabelle (Kathryn Miller), starting college nearby after the recent death of their mother: a spectre that haunts both of the characters throughout the duration of the film. However, their new town is gripped by the spirit of a woman who lived there during the 1940s, and due to her daughter committing suicide, killed the bullies’ family and then herself. She persists as a menacing spectre that plagues the town’s residents, and anyone who seeks her house, the titular 825 Forest Road, in order to stop her is instead driven to suicide by her ability to control people’s dreams and bodies.
A strong sense of story isn’t usually the focal point for the horror genre, and many horror films with questionable dialogue and wooden acting remain solid entries thanks to their ability to either terrify or disturb the audience. Unfortunately, 825 Forest Road’s main problem is that Cognetti clearly doesn’t realize ow precisely lacking the materially actually is — unsurprising in that he also wrote the film — and so persists in packing most of it with incessant streaks of melodrama, including narrative sub-plots about family ties, mental illness, and grief that often lead nowhere. What this ultimately results in is the film lacking any real terror because so little of it is focused on generating any real horror elements: there’s a despairing absence of any sort of tension throughout, and at no point does anything here give the viewer cause to feel on edge. This is doubly frustrating in that The Carmichael Manor masterfully used its threadbare narrative in order to focus on slowly building dread and fear that felt palpable; here, it feels like Cognetti’s main driver is narrative drama, something which he doesn’t seem well-equipped to deliver.
Another disappointing element here is the film’s governing aesthetic, as 825 Forest Road also marks a departure from Cognetti’s signature style of found footage, a style that the previous four Hell House films all embraced. This time out, however, instead of limiting the screen to just a single character or camera POV, Cognetti uses a wide variety of angles and camera movements that offer him more freedom. Unfortunately, with this pivot, we lose a lot of the visual flair Cognetti mastered across years of refining his found footage sensibilities. While we see glimpses of this approach when 825 Forest Road utilizes laptop webcams to display what’s going on behind characters, and although these moments do offer bursts of brief intensity, they never last long and mostly only function to underline how bland the rest of the film’s style really is.
Cognetti also makes the strange decision to add a Rashomon-style narrative device to his film by breaking it down into four separate sections: one for each of the three main characters and a final, shorter one that delivers the film’s ending chapter. But the gamble fails to pay off as it only really functions to muddy up the narrative, which again is the weakest and least interesting path to follow here. The changing perspectives don’t serve to craft any new scares or expand on creepy moments, but instead simply tread water until leading to a final chapter that feels incredibly cobbled together and ends on a moment that makes little sense and feels astonishingly abrupt. The best that can be said for it, then, is that it at least offers a more downbeat and defeated ending than most horror films are wont to do, a glimmer of redemption in its last breaths.
Ultimately, though, 825 Forest Road doesn’t work because of how inert and lifeless the final result feels, with little terror throughout to distract from the monotony. There is no atmosphere — which Cognetti has elsewhere proved capable of delivering — and everything looks decidedly bland, anonymous blending in with any other generic horror film one can think of that’s been assembly-lined for streaming services. Adding insult to injury is that when Cognetti finally gets to a secret organization and brings some cultier elements into play, he just as quickly pulls away and ditches them for clunky and hamfisted melodrama. Breaking free from the chains of found footage, which has proven to be a liberating experience for horror directors past, clearly isn’t the answer for Cognetti, at least not based on 825 Forest Road, and that freedom has led the director down the wrong path. Hopefully it’s not one of no return.
DIRECTOR: Stephen Cognetti; CAST: Elizabeth Vermilyea, Kathryn Miller, Joe Falcone, Darren F. Earl; DISTRIBUTOR: Shudder; STREAMING: April 4; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
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