‘Death House’ Trailer: Welcome to the Area 51 of Evil, Whatever That Means

Are you ready to journey to the Area 51 of evil? I sure as hell hope so, because here comes Death House! Featuring a cast that will be very familiar to horror aficionados and written by Gunnar Hansen, the man who played Leatherface, Death House is set in a secret prison full of murderous inmates. Watch the Death House trailer below, if you dare!

Death House Trailer

Let’s look at the cast of Death House, shall we? Dee Wallace (E.T., Cujo, The Howling), Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Kane Hodder (Friday the 13th), Doug Bradley (Hellraiser), Bill Moseley (House of a 1000 Corpses), Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes), Danny Trejo (Machete), Adrienne Barbeau (The Fog), Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator), Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead), Camille Keaton (I Spit on Your Grave), Tony Todd (Candyman) and more all appear here. That line-up is like a who’s-who of old school horror actors, and that alone might be enough to get people curious about this.

But then those curious people might watch this trailer and change their minds, quickly. To be blunt, this does not look great. But horror movie fans are a forgiving lot. More often than not, with horror fans, it’s the thought that counts, not the execution.

Now let’s look at the rather lengthy synopsis of Death House:

The Death House is the Area 51 of Evil… a subterranean government facility that holds humanity’s worst on nine levels. Hell, Dante’s ninth level, holds the Five Evils… the “dark stars” of Death House. These individuals are so heinous they can never walk among society again. They may also be supernatural.

Agents Toria Boon and Jae Novak have their own dark pasts, arriving at Death House to tour its levels and observe its denizens first-hand as well as the medical and mental experiments of Drs. Eileen Fletcher and Karen Redmane. Their depraved experiments date back to the Nazi doctors of WWII.

Prison cells are virtual reality holo decks that recreate prisoner environments before they were incarcerated. A special hallucinogenic gas keeps inmates under control. The victims are homeless, bused into Death House to play literal victims while killing habits are studied. The results are sick, but only a hint of what goes on here.

Hell literally breaks loose inside the facility when an EMP device detonates, killing all power and communication and… releasing every prisoner. Boon, Novak, and Fletcher are caught in a race against advancing prisoner hordes led by occultist Neo-Nazi Sieg. The monsters are freed, and they’re going down.

Boon and Novak’s fight through Death House turns into a house of horrors gauntlet; their only hope of escape is descending into Hell and enlisting the help of the Five Evils. Events culminate in a violent face-to-face standoff with absolute evil… only to find that they have traveled down a rabbit hole and through a looking glass. Black is white and white is black and the definitions of good and evil no longer apply.

Who are the monsters? Who will escape?

There’s a lot going on here! Monsters, Neo-Nazis, hallucinogenics! There’s enough packed into this synopsis to make any season of American Horror Story blush. Death House is being dubbed “The Expendables of the horror genre,” and to drive that point home, the official poster features a logo clearly borrowed from the Expendables logo.