House on Eden

Can you watch a found footage horror film and not be constantly asking yourself, who edited this footage together? Who pulled from one camera, then another, spliced in security cam stuff? Who looked at all the footage from all the different cameras and decided what we would see when? And how did they get it all? And where did they go?

If it does not bother you, then it’s possible that you will enjoy writer/director Kris Collins’s House on Eden more than I did.

This found footage horror clings close to real life. Spooky content creators “KallMeKris” Collins, “celinaspookyboo” Celina Myers, and filmmaker Jason-Christopher Mayer play versions of themselves, social media handles and all. The trio is out to make a great video, not one of those boring videos everyone makes. So instead of going to the cemetery Celina has researched, Kris diverts the road trip to a house she found online that she’s sure no one has ever been to.

Sure. Because totally anonymous houses post themselves online.

And what’s the draw? Why is it spooky? Because maybe a girl went missing somewhere in the vicinity 60 years ago.

For context, wherever you are standing at this very second, some girl has gone missing from that spot in the last sixty years.

So, three youngsters break and enter into a beautiful, well-maintained home, not a speck of dust anywhere. But it’s really, really far away from everything else so surely, it must be abandoned.

That is to say, three people break into a well cared for, isolated home to unravel no mystery they know of in one of the more tedious, uninspired, lazily written found footage horror films in recent memory.

It’s not as if found footage can’t be done well, even the ghosthunter variety. Deadstream is epically watchable, funny and scary at the same time, and it maintains the integrity of found footage pretty well. My advice to you is to watch that instead.