House on Eden opens in theaters Friday, July 25.
House on Eden offers a word of warning for social-media creators considering a transition to conventional movies and TV: What captures the common doomscroller’s attention for a few minutes won’t captivate a paying audience for over an hour. The first feature written and directed by Canadian Internet celebrity Kris Collins (a.k.a. KallMeKris) is a found-footage horror movie about two mega-popular creators investigating a haunted house. They say write what you know, and Collins has here, to an extent: She and her co-star Celina “CelinaSpookyBoo” Myers boast tens of millions of collective followers, but those were earned by skits, reaction videos, and streams. Making a full-length movie requires an entirely different skillset (and a premise that isn’t a full decade past its sell-by date), as proven by the sluggish and instantly forgettable House on Eden.
They’re not the first creators to think they can go viral with a few bucks, a Handycam, and improvised dialogue like “Shhh, did you hear that?” House on Eden is just the latest pale imitation of The Blair Witch Project, sending fictionalized versions of Collins, Myers, and Collins’ collaborator Jason-Christopher Mayer to an uninhabited home in the middle of nowhere. There, the famous TikTokers foolishly meddle with demonic forces for a few clicks, but so little happens in House on Eden that often feels like watching the discards from superior, actually scary found-footage classics.
Collins aims for the type of nauseating shaky-cam frights found in Blair Witch or Grave Encounters, but can’t replicate their slow-burn chills or intimacy. Kris, Celina, and Jay’s trip to the titular house drags on and on, and even then, it’s eons before anything remotely interesting happens there. The cast ad-libs the dialogue of ghost hunters who typically “speak” to followers by typing in chat comments, which makes their interpersonal chatter flat and unnatural. Myers lets a bit about a “shit tent” go for way too long, Mayer constantly interrupts the dull blathering for another shot of empty treelines, and the model of quickfire content creation generally fails to translate into exciting or even vaguely juicy onscreen chemistry.
Speaking as an outsider looking in – I familiarized myself with Collins, Myers, and Mayer’s online work before seeing House on Eden, but I’m by no means a superfan – this is a hollow and at times obnoxious showcase of the trio’s talents. Collins and Myers have done YouTube investigations of famously haunted landmarks together, and there’s a genuine chilliness in those that’s missing here. You might recognize the blinky cat toys in House on Eden from their exploration of Gray Towers Castle, where they yield a much stronger reaction. It makes sense to try to parlay such real-world hits into a movie (after all, it’s what Sam Golbach and Colby Brock – who make a cameo in House of Eden – have done), but a rigid adherence to found-footage convention and the gang’s lackluster improv skills fails to let their winning online personalities shine through.
Even worse, House on Eden is hapless and nonsensical in its structure. Mayer and co-cinematographer Adam Myers use an arsenal of equipment including grainy film cameras and high-definition rentals, and Collins puts that gear in the hands of her characters, but the way the visuals alternate between 8mm home-movie quality and crystal-clear 4K is odd and unnecessarily distracting. The geography of the house is unclear, which makes chase scenes that already look like they’re filmed in a cement mixer even harder to follow. Everywhere you turn, there’s an homage, with Collins nearly replicating scenes from Hereditary, The Witch, Kill List, and (again) Blair Witch; but as a byproduct, there’s very little that makes House on Eden stand out as its own, unique creation. Half of the runtime is an exhausting hike, lousy with “What was that?!” fakeouts. Then, a whimpering payoff tries to convince us that it was worth the inconsequential 70-ish minutes of off-camera deaths and spooky old people preceding it.
The biggest problem is that House on Eden doesn’t seem to be in on its own jokes. Kris and Celina are depicted as brainrotted online clout seekers who keep brushing off certain death, but their dangerous ambition doesn’t feel like commentary. The characters have zero self-preservation instincts, using investigative tools like spirit boxes to communicate with and provoke evil spirits, but these standard-issue interactions with the beyond only lead to boringly redundant and uninventive outcomes. It’s bland, by-the-books found-footage gruel that might work for less attentive or knowledgeable viewers, but feels slightly disrespectful to horror diehards.
At best, House on Even is a fan film built from blocks stolen from better and more accomplished movies. Until its final minutes, there is no excitement. Stationary cameras are rigged all around the house, and yet they almost exclusively only record empty rooms and doors that “spookily” slam shut. Collins and Myers’ onscreen alter egos exploit self-endangerment for entertainment value, but do so without an underlying layer of wit or introspection. We’ve seen this before and we don’t need to see it again – at least not if it’s going to be this shoddily done.
