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After a family tragedy, an estranged brother and sister set out to repair their relationship—but they pick the wrong place for a fresh start. In 825 Forest Road, the new narrative film from found-footage favorite Stephen Cognetti (Hell House LLC), the siblings move into a vintage house being sold for a surprisingly low price, in a small town that’s hiding some mighty dark secrets.
io9 got a chance to speak with Cognetti about his narrative debut, which comes after four Hell House LLC found-footage films (and a fifth on the way, which we also asked him about). 825 Forest Road hits Shudder this Friday.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Cheryl Eddy, io9: Fans know you from your Hell House LLC found-footage films, but this is your first narrative film. Why did you decide to change formats for this one?
Stephen Cognetti: Well, [found-footage] was the format I think worked best for Hell House. But [825 Forest Road] was definitely a story that was not a found-footage story. It was a narrative story, and that allowed me to do fun things like the nonlinear timeline, [breaking the story into] different sections. I went to film school and was trained as a filmmaker in the traditional sense. Found footage is something that I personally love. I love found-footage horror. But it’s not something that I wanted to do all the time. So it was a really nice change of pace to do something outside of found footage.
io9: Obviously scaring the audience is a goal for any horror filmmaker. What was different about your approach in a narrative format as opposed to your found footage films?
Cognetti: Yeah, that is the goal, is to scare—and that’s really the only thing I want to do ever in a film, is make sure that it scares on some level. Hell House got a lot of reviews [calling it a] “slow burn,” and I think this film is also a slow burn in that sense. I always like to introduce things slowly to the audience, not have anything over the top happening too early, to kind of build our way throughout the story. In [825 Forest Road] we open with a pretty good scare, but after that it’s kind of just subtle things, and I wanted to ground the story that way to make it not feel too over the top.
I wanted to make it feel relatable for anybody who’s ever moved to a new town; [you] feel like a fish out of water, and there’s things that just don’t make sense or just feel off because you’re in a whole new environment. I wanted to present it that way and just have some odd things start compounding on top of each other.
io9: There are some similarities between the Hell House films and 825 Forest Road—we have a haunted house, a creepy mannequin, and the idea of a tragic history that’s still affecting events in the present. What draws you to those storytelling elements in particular?
Cognetti: There’s something about [inanimate objects] that’s so fun to play with. An inanimate object being out of place is just so simple—to me, that’s always been so subtly creepy. That’s just always a fun theme, even if it carries over to something else other than Hell House.
I also just like folklore—like small-town folklore. Every town has its own legends and most of the time none of them are remotely in the realm of possibility or even true, but they’re fun stories to tell. So this one is just like, well, what if one of those stories was actually true? And not only is it true, what if it still to this day has huge ramifications and is affecting people? It’s not just a fun story that people tell each other about the town. It has so many more implications than that, and I thought that was a fun premise to start with: small town folklore, small-town legends, but it’s actually real this time, and then go from there. And someone who’s a fish out of water, how does that affect him and his family?
© Shudder Obviously the specific folklore [in the movie] is from my imagination, but in 2018, I moved out of New York City into small-town Pennsylvania. I remember talking to neighbors and everybody would have a story to tell about the town’s history. [That was] the seed that grew, well, “What if you moved to the small town and it had its own ghost stories, but these ghost stories turned out to be true?” That was the fun in the writing process—exploring that [perhaps the] folklore is not just local legend, but is very true for everyone involved. I had a lot of fun writing this film.
io9: You mentioned this earlier, but you have the movie structured in chapters divided between the main characters. Why did you decide to do different points of view, with the overlapping scenes?
Cognetti: I like nonlinear storytelling. I think it’s interesting and fun to write that way. And I kind of feel like haunted house movies are a very overdone subgenre of horror. So I wanted to tell a haunted house tale, but tell it a little differently—and I think it was just a fun way to write these narratives, to have them almost be three separate films that blend together as you’re watching it. I think it makes it a lot of fun for the viewer to watch one story and you can pick pieces out, like little Easter eggs, in everyone’s story, and see how they interact with other people’s stories. Something you might notice in the background of one story that you don’t know what you’re looking at pays off later, and it makes sense when you see it from another person’s perspective later on.
io9: Though it’s not a found-footage film, 825 Forest Road does have a livestream sequence. Why did you want to include that?
Cognetti: I think when people watch it they might [think it’s] a shout-out to my found-footage roots, but I just thought it worked. It was just a scare that worked for her character. And it just came out that way. A lot of these scares come out organically in the writing process: what is a scary thing that could happen [to this character] at this moment? I wrote that scare so many different ways, and it had different effects on her in every draft, and it was fun to just kind of see where it landed and where it came out. I think it’s a fun scare. It’s always fun, I think, to include something that seems found footage within a traditional narrative film.
© Shudder io9: There are a few other scenes that sort of draw on what you did really well in Hell House—like when you perceive something in the background that makes you go, “Did I just see that thing in the corner?”
Cognetti: Those are things that I love to do. I just love that, making something rewindable, in that sense of like, “Wait a minute, what was that?” Seeing things in the corner of your eye and subtle things—I think it just makes watching anything worthwhile and fun.
io9: What can you tease about the fifth Hell House LLC movie, Lineage? Is it a prequel?
Cognetti: It’s not a prequel. It’s just like [2023’s Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor]; it has prequel parts and parts that are in the present. We live in the past a little bit, we live in the present a little. But what I love about this film is that we’re breaking away from the found-footage area, and that’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while in Hell House. I think it’s going to make it fresh for people, because I feel like if you do found footage over and over again within the same world, it gets a little old. So I think it’s a good way to just make a fifth movie of any franchise—changing how it’s shot just makes it different and, I think, watchable. So I’m very excited for that as well and that’s coming out in August.
io9: Oh cool—so it’s not found-footage.
Cognetti: Yes, non-found footage, and I think it will be the scariest of them all.
io9: Wow! And is this going to be the last Hell House movie?
Cognetti: I think so. I think at the very least it’ll be the last Hell House movie I’m a part of. And that’s not to say that this last movie wraps up everything. I don’t think the story is wrapped up at the end of Lineage. I think there’s still more story to tell. I just don’t know if I can make another Hell House movie after this. [Laughs]
825 Forest Road arrives April 4 on Shudder.
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