Found footage films have come a long way ever since the Blair Witch Project back in 1999. That’s 25 years ago now. There have been franchises set around them like Paranormal Activity .This subgenre of horror has been used in a lot of different ways. Some are very creative. Others not so much. House on Eden is the latest in this subgenre.  It was made by a couple of tiktokers who have a bit of a following doing comedy shtick. They should have stuck to tiktok because this wasn’t a very good found footage horror film. They throw a lot against the wall, and not much of it sticks.

Kristina (Kris Collins) Celina (Celina Myers) and Jay (Jason Christopher Mayer) are going to do a video at a haunted cemetery that they heard about but unbeknownst to Celina and Jay, Kris is taking them to a haunted house she heard about instead. At first, this doesn’t go well with the others, but eventually, Kris convinces them that it’s a good idea. After a long walk through the woods, they get to the house. It’s a beautiful house that is abandoned with no electricity.  After being there for a few hours, they start to notice something is in the house with them. They try to communicate with it, and all hell breaks loose instead.

The tiktok channel Kris and Celina runs Spooky AF, and the names they use to do their videos are CallMeKris and Spooky Boo. These are the same names they use for their videos in the film. That means that this movie is semi-autobiographical. It is based on their real lives. With that in mind, I didn’t get a lot about the pair of women in the movie. With any film you want to care about the protagonist, in this case three people, but the film barely gives viewers any information about them for us to develop an interest in them or so we can care about them. I truly didn’t care what happened to them because the story didn’t show me enough to do so. I wished it had.

One particular quote that made me semi interested in what was going on in this movie was, “Something is happening in this house, and we need to figure out what it is.” Uttered by Kris. This was the first time I actually cared about what was going on with these three people. When this happens, the intensity of the story/film picks up. Things started to happen for all three of the main characters, and that is when the movie got interesting. The first hour of this movie was just a waste of time, so I could see the last 20 or so minutes. Yes, this is a 77-minute movie, but it didn’t keep me interested in most of it. 

Found footage films are supposed to keep the audience glued to the screen. This one bored me until the third act. This trio was traipsing around the woods for the second act of the movie, bumbling and stumbling over each other. They had three different kinds of cameras going at the same time to try and create something new, but all it did was confuse me instead.The different kinds of footage being shot were edited together to make the final film, but most of what they shot was unwatchable. The home video camera footage was semi interesting because of how it looked in the finished product, but even that wasn’t coherent. Overall, this movie was barely watchable, and that’s me being generous with my thoughts.

House on Eden was a full-length tiktok skit that came to life. It had all of the originality of a film school project. The trio at the forefront of this story wasn’t all that interesting. They didn’t give much about themselves to the viewers watching.  Which was a bad thing, but because it made us not care about them. Tiktok schtick might work for people quickly scrolling through the app who don’t have much of an attention span, but it doesn’t work for film goers looking for more of an established storyline or plot. Right from the beginning, this seemed like an amateurish outing. Hopefully, the trio learned something from this, and if they make another film, it has an interesting story behind it. 

1 star

Dan Skip Allen