Ever since the monumental success of The Blair Witch Project (1999), found-footage films have always benefited from being made on a small budget that can explode on a wide scale. Blair Witch was the work of amateur filmmakers who took a trio of actors into the woods and shot a horror film with virtually no on-site monsters or special effects—it relied on building organic tension and atmosphere to compensate for its $60,000 budget. (The film would go on to gross over two hundred million dollars.) Decades later, it’s still one of the most unique niches for indie horror filmmakers to break through massively.
House on Eden (2025) is the directorial debut of Kris Collins, a social media personality known as KallMeKris. She made the project in seven days, in which she and her social media friends, Celina Meyers and Jason Christopher-Mayer, went into the woods and made a horror film in the same vein of Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity (2007), and the recent run of A24 horror of The Witch (2015) and Hereditary (2018)—Eden feels like the amalgamation of horror fans aping the films that’ve influenced them. In some respects, it’s a loving homage to the movies we’ve all grown up with and have an affection for, that era when we believed a found footage film was real before social media exploded in the mid-2010s.
Kris (Collins) and Celina (Meyers) are a pair of paranormal investigators who, along with their videographer, Jay (Mayer), head out to the middle of nowhere (or as they refer to it as “cousin-fucking country”), looking for a cemetery for a new segment for their online series. Kris has ulterior motives, as she reveals to her camera that she’s trekked through online forums looking for a haunted house that’s deep in the woods. It’s the classic set-up of overly confident, cocky horror characters toying with the paranormal in search of an existence beyond their reality. The three find this abandoned house after a dizzying slog into the woods. Their overnight stay brings about startling bumps and strange occurrences as they tempt whatever ghostly spirit occupies it. Kris increasingly ostracizes her group, as her investment in learning more about its inhabitants trumps her friends’ concerns and fears, and she’ll soon realize haunted spirits are not interested in taking part in her clout-chasing endeavor for online fame.
Eden struggles to move beyond its influences and form its own identity that can co-exist with those films, rather than being overshadowed and relegated as a pale imitation. It’s great when content creators move toward making cinematic ventures that can contextualize decades’ worth of images and concepts through a modernistic lens. However, scary imagery and creepy atmosphere can’t make up for the rote narrative culminating in an unsatisfying end, despite the genuine chemistry among the main three leads.
The narrative is not incredibly remarkable, as it follows the basic formula that found-footage films tend to follow. The first act does a good enough job of establishing the close-knit chemistry the real-life personalities have, as their buckeirng and messing around feels authentic in relating their relationships as the driving force of this story.
By the third act, freakish and scary images relate the horror experiences to the cast, inducing palpable scares. Yet, by the climax, the breakdown of the friend group by Kris feels contrived and forced, as she lashes out too quickly at their lack of competency and passion for her project (obvious reference to Heather’s downward spiral in Blair Witch). The amount of lore and backstory Collins feels the need to cram into a sparse runtime to make it more grand and layered implies a larger story that feels haphazardly tacked on, making up for the lack of a resolution.
The filmmaking is unique. Cinematogrpahers, Mayer and Adam Myers, arrange a wide spectrum of video formats—ranging from HD to 8mm home video camera—that help lend to some spooky images, like an old woman in a white dress standing idly in the far corners of a shot or making the viewer squint hard to look in the dark background when a character isn’t suspecting anything. It’s an effective quality, relaying how much we film our lives, that retro technology is fashionable as a means of “what’s old is new” retrofitting. Your iPhone may capture the most beautiful and pristine images, but when Eden cuts to silent 8mm footage where all you hear is the flicker of the film roll through the camera, it produces an eerie feeling, like your body hairs standing up when you walk down a dark hallway at night.
Horror has always benefited from characters discovering the unknown and paying the consequences for their intrusion into the otherworldly. When Kris surprises her friends, they don’t take too kindly, yet Kris pleads that this is in the goal of doing something surprising and exciting, something “not rehearsed,” as she emphasizes. It does speak to the social media age, where most interactions and experiences are planned and prepared. Sadly, the film doesn’t delve deeper into their perspective roles as characters who feel the desperation to record the most messed-up horror. Some self-reflection on the actors’ parts as online personalities would’ve helped distinguish this from feeling like a compilation of other, frankly, better found-footage horror films.
One pivotal scene involves Kris begging for any entity to cross a series of blue lights that will trigger with its presence. “Can you please do something on camera?” she requests. The film skirts playing on their real-life personas; the lack of any real bite or interest speaks to a lack of curiosity on Collins’s part (who also wrote and co-produced it), which is a shame. It’s not often that social media influencers can use the horror genre to poke fun at their industry, much less incorporate themselves into the film.
If anything, House on Eden proves Collins’s ability to transition and utilize the tools and influence available to construct a horror film made from a place of love. Horror studios cheapened the found-footage genre, with some of the worst entries—The Devil Inside (2012) and Chernobyl Diaries (2012)—degrading the genre with some of the most cynical filmmaking techniques. Collins is adept at wearing her influences on her sleeve, making it feel far safer and unchallenging. The film that looks and sounds like it was made on a larp; hopefully, she will level up and distil her passions into a unique horror experience befitting the new millennium that was born from the cultural shock of The Blair Witch Project.
Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Image Credit to RLJE Films and Shudder via IMDB
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