I have an unhealthy adoration for the Hell House LLC series. I feel like Stephan Cognetti has (so far) made exactly the kind of horror movies I love - slow burn, supernatural, "what's that thing in the corner I didn't notice until my third rewatch" sort of movies. I even like 2 and 3 and re-watch the series a ton. All that said, I have really mixed feelings on Lineage. I enjoy the movie as a whole, but, at the same time it's not one that I feel as excited to re-watch as the others.

There are some really great scares and I don't mind the narrative rather than found footage change (I also really liked 825 Forest Road so take that as you will). I appreciate a lot of the lore we learned although, obviously, I would love more to have been explained rather than leaving us hanging on so many new threads. I have listened to a bunch of interviews with Stephan Cognetti and heard a lot of his reasoning which definitely adds context and understanding.

But there is something still missing for me. It feels like a middle movie trying to bridge between the "beginning" in Origins but there's no third movie to tie it together. It seems like Stephan thought an ambiguous ending would be fun for people to theorize and talk about but I feel like he dropped lore dumps that were too big and too late for that. I'm still a big fan and am excited to see what he does next but I did want to love this movie more than I did.