A generation that grew up watching The Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity series is bound to be obsessed with found footage horror films. Even though you know it’s make-believe, the mockumentary style has an immersive quality. It satisfies the voyeuristic thrill of watching something that is not meant to be seen and noticing things that even the subject(s) seems to be unaware of. The horror genre is pretty much a game of anticipation—something is definitely going to go wrong, but the question is when? Kris Collins’ House on Eden follows a similar route, and you can already guess that the iconic found footage films have influenced her to a great degree. By now it has almost become a rule that the more fun a character has at the beginning of a horror film, the worse the situation they’ll end up in, and the happy faces at the beginning of House on Eden guaranteed a spooky affair.
House On Eden marks Kris Collins’ debut as a director. The YouTuber, popularly known as ‘KallmeKris,’ has over twelve million subscribers on her channel, where she mostly discusses true crime stories. Collins is not the first one to try her hand at filmmaking after a successful YouTube career; the Philippou brothers, known for their YouTube channel RackaRacka, directed Talk To Me (an A24 production), and most recently, 19-year-old Kane Parsons’ story took the internet by storm. The YouTuber has created a found-footage horror series on his channel (Kane Pixels) titled ‘The Backrooms,’ and at present he is set to direct an A24 film based on his series. Are YouTubers the future of filmmaking? Well, that’s a discussion for another day. But for now, this phenomenon is intriguing, and it goes to show that your filmmaking journey can very well start from a YouTube video.
Celina Myers, who goes by CelinaSpookyBoo on YouTube, is part of the paranormal investigation team that House on Eden introduces us to. Jason Christopher Mayer also has a YouTube channel, and he is the primary videographer in the film. The three colleagues/friends head out in search of spooky tales for their documentary. They’d decided to shoot at a cemetery, but they had a change of plans in the middle of their journey. Kris surprised them with the idea of exploring an abandoned house tucked deep in the woods. Celina and Jay were not on board at first; they felt they were not well prepared enough to make such a hasty decision. They thought it was important that they took decisions together as a team, and they didn’t appreciate Kris’ domineering. But after finding out that the ‘house on Eden’ Kris wanted them to investigate hadn’t been covered by the most prominent paranormal investigators, they decided to adapt to the plan in the hopes that they would finally get the recognition they’d always been chasing. As paranormal investigators, they carried their ghost-hunting devices to see if there was any spirit in the house. While it had become quite apparent to them that the house was haunted, they were curious to find out who the spirit was and why they were trapped in the house on Eden.
Even with a runtime of 78 minutes, House on Eden is slow-paced. While there are a few terrifying moments scattered in between, it’s the climax that steals the show. Kris Collins banks on the element of anticipation. The three characters make it to the haunted house roughly twenty-five minutes into the film. Since the plot is not one-of-a-kind (you can already guess how things WILL go down at an abandoned, supposedly haunted house!), Collins and her team take their time setting up the story, building on the thrill with every passing minute. It subtly draws you into their journey. It’s not just the curated bits that are shown to the audience, but also the silly banter that may not drive the plot forward but contributes to character building and deepening audience engagement. That is the beauty of the subgenre that makes it look like the film is made of unedited footage played one sequence after the other.
Neither the plot nor the narrative is out of the box, but it’s the myth that the film delves into towards the climax that makes it compelling. A few scattered pieces of a puzzle were introduced to us, and we didn’t know what to make of it, but the climax helps in piecing it all together and figuring out the meaning behind the symbols or occurrences that we’ve seen in the course of the film. I am not a fan of horror films that does not fully explain the reason behind said events, and thankfully House on Eden doesn’t really come up with a summarized conclusion and leaves it to the audience to make sense of the climax.
The overall performance of the cast is acceptable considering they are YouTubers and don’t really have an acting background. The found footage angle helped in this case; when you have blurry, shaky videos, the focus does not tend to be on the intricacies of the performance. Considering it’s a small production with a limited budget, the end result is not too bad. Yes, it’s predictable, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be spooked out. The found footage genre deserves all the limelight, because I don’t know about you, but it always creeps me out. ‘Paranormal Activity’ was also made on a tight budget, and here we are still discussing it. The subgenre deserves to be experimented with. It can be so much more than paranormal investigators or curious students trying to uncover the truth behind horror stories. Hopefully, we’ll get to see more in the found footage subgenre with, ideally, an experimental plot and an unpredictable narrative to keep it interesting.
Considering my bias towards found footage, I would recommend giving House on Eden a watch, especially if you’re in a mood to be spooked out. The film takes a very conventional route, so don’t expect social commentary, but the climax is exciting, and everything is ultimately tied together satisfyingly.
