House on Eden (2025) - Movie Review
What if I told you my wife’s favorite YouTuber and my daughter’s favorite YouTuber made a found footage horror?
Wait, Wait… don’t go.
It has some bright spots!
(crickets)
Let’s discuss.
House on Eden is a found-footage, micro-budget horror film brought to us by writer/director/YouTuber/Goddess (@CallmeKris) Kris Collins. Kris is one of the biggest YouTubers on the planet. Not only is she my daughter’s favorite YouTuber, she’s one of mine as well. I enjoy her true crime and horror content, while my daughter watches her more kid-friendly comedy offerings. She is one of the most likable current influencers, as she doesn’t take herself too seriously and comes across as a down-to-earth human being. Likewise, the other heroine of the film, Celina Myers, is my wife’s favorite online personality due to her ability to laugh at herself, and especially because of her sleepwalking videos, which are endlessly entertaining.
I say all this to illustrate that I highly enjoy these women in their standard capacity as content creators, voice actors, and podcasters. I would say I am a fan and actively root for both of their successes. However, that will not bias me in the review of this dumpster fire of a film.
The film focuses on YouTube ghost hunters, Kris, Jay, and Celina, as they cross the country on a videomaking spree for their respective channels. They have a strict itinerary that they agreed to at the outset. However, Kris calls an audible without telling either of her colleagues. While the other two slept, she drove them hours off course. Kris heard a rumor at a fill-up station that there was a haunted house deep in the woods that no one had ever filmed a ghost hunt at. By the time the others wake, Kris has taken them to a point of no return. This betrayal of their plans reveals a long-running rift that’s been building between them for years. When they finally find the house, miles off the backroads, it’s better than any of them imagined. It is a massive, colonial mansion that sits pristine, its walls covered in occult artworks, its hand-scraped wood floors gleaming with varnish. Though something roils under the surface, a slithering presence that begins to work its way between the group. Will Kris, Jay, and Celina realize the danger before it’s too late, or will they be the latest victims of the House on Eden?
I’ve struggled with summaries recently, but by God— this one makes the movie sound way cooler than it is.
The film has great production value for a found footage film.
The sound design and mixing are also impeccable.
That is the end of the positives.
The main problem with the movie is that it’s shot like a YouTube video. Yes, I know that is the crux of the plot, but when the plot is this thin and the dialogue is this poorly conceived, it comes off as cheap. There’s a joke near the beginning of the film where the characters laugh about all of their dialogue being improvised. However, it proves not to be a joke as all the dialogue is either hammy, cliché, or nonsensical.
Events are referenced, relationships alluded to, but there’s no point of reference for much of it. There are implications of prior issues, maybe romantic entanglements, but they all go nowhere and lend nothing to the overall story. Rather than enhancing the character dynamics or the film experience, they lessen any impact the film could have. Kris, who is known online as one of the nicest YouTubers, with very little public drama, is portrayed as a prima donna. She behaves like a conniving, self-serving diva who thinks of her colleagues as peons. She starts the movie lying to them, and we’re supposed to be surprised when she’s beyond bitchy to them later on. Then they add on that she has been acting like a monster for months, which defeats the idea of the house affecting her. It’s an amateur continuity error that is bound to happen when you’re improvising your script.
The film has good segments and a few cool, atmospheric scares.
The problem is, by the time we got to those points, I couldn’t give a single F*** about the movie. I know it’s harsh, even for me to say, but sweet Jesus… These content creators have the money to make a good film, and they have access to high-end writers and editors. With those resources and their built-in audiences, this should have been a homerun.
There’s a thinly veiled story thread about Lilith, a Judeo-Christian demon utilized in the Rabbinic Literature to embody female independence as evil. Lilith is an overused entity in fiction in general, for a mythological creature that has very little historical basis outside of a single mention in the Torah, and no physical historical basis, but that aside, her use in this film was stupid and unnecessary.
The film would have been more effective without an explanation for the house, with better set-up of the characters, and better pacing.
House on Eden somehow makes an hour and eighteen minutes feel like three hours.
I highly recommend watching these creators’ channels on YouTube. I cannot recommend this movie.
It’s an absolute waste of time.
If you do need to serve some penance, this one is available exclusively streaming on Shudder.
