Studio:   RLJE Films/Shudder
Director: Kris Collins
Writer:   Kris Collins
Producer: Kris Collins, Jason-Christopher Mayer, Celina Myers
Stars:    Kris Collins, Celina Myers, Jason-Christopher Mayer

Review Score:

Summary:

Amateur ghost hunters encounter paranormal activity while connecting a girl’s mysterious disappearance to an apocryphal legend inside a strange woodland home.

Synopsis:

Content creator Kris and her best friends Celina and Jay set out to record a ghost hunting video in a graveyard for their social media channel. During their drive, Kris upsets her friends with the surprise reveal that she is detouring them to a supposedly haunted house in a remote forest instead. Celina and Jay agree to Kris’s change of plans after she explains that the “House on Eden Street” where a girl mysteriously disappeared 60 years ago is a lesser-known urban legend likely to attract more viewers.

When the country road ends, Kris, Celina, and Jay travel the rest of the way through the woods on foot. In addition to hearing strange sounds in distant trees, the trio discovers an old shack with hissing noises coming from inside and a large bonfire circle with wooden logs arranged in the center.

Kris, Celina, and Jay eventually arrive at a seemingly abandoned, yet fully furnished home by itself in the middle of nowhere. Inside the house, the amateur investigators examine religious-themed decorations depicting a nude woman and a snake.

When they notice one of their cameras is missing, Jay and Celina backtrack into the forest to look for it. Both of them hear strange noises in the distance again.

Upon returning to the house, Celina and Jay find Kris collapsed on the floor with no memory of what happened to her. Rattled by the circumstances, the three friends agree to spend the night in their van and return to the house in the morning.

Inexplicably, Kris and Jay suddenly wake the next day to discover they blacked out in different rooms. Kris finds Celina momentarily entranced inside an upstairs bedroom with the name “Lilith” scrawled above the door.

That night, the two women conduct an investigation using various devices for detecting paranormal activity. Wearing headphones to listen for ghostly voices, Celina hears the word “Lilith.” While Kris rushes upstairs to the bedroom with the same name, Celina begins muttering in another language as a static camera shows an old woman in a white dress on the other side of the bedroom door, which is now locked.

Jay breaks Celina out of her trance. An argument ensues when Jay raises concerns to Kris about the strange events in the house. Jay ends up storming outside alone to calm down.

Kris’s online research reveals Lilith predated Eve as Adam’s original companion in the Garden of Eden. However, Lilith became cursed through defiant actions and transformed into a demonic succubus who walks the earth tormenting men and possessing women so she can bear children that inherit her power. Kris decides not to tell the others about her discovery so she can see if additional information is revealed naturally.

Kris and Celina each experience more supernatural activity that terrifies them. Unable to locate Jay, the women search outside and find his camera on the ground. Kris and Celina angrily exchange frustrated insults until Kris reveals she is pregnant.

While Kris returns inside to rest, Celina reviews footage Kris recorded earlier. The video shows Kris asking a local convenience store clerk about the house on Eden Road while the old woman from the bedroom observes from a wheelchair. As Kris exits the store, the woman curiously says, “congratulations.”

Celina reviews Jay’s footage next. His video shows him disappearing into darkness on the outside porch. Hearing Jay suddenly scream, Celina rushes outside to search for him.

When she wakes from her nap, Kris explores the house and finds Celina wearing a white dress and clawing a gouge in her arm while possessed. A ghoulish old woman, Lilith, attacks Kris. Kris hides in a bathroom where Lilith pushes her into a tub filled with water.

Gasping for air, Kris eventually reemerges from under the water. When she’s attacked again, Kris tries hiding in an attic only to be knocked to the floor by a naked Lilith. Lilith cuts her own throat, bleeds onto Kris, then falls over dead.

Kris rises with Lilith now possessing her body. She then walks to the bonfire circle seen earlier where entranced women are now gathered. With Celina and Jay’s bodies lying nearby, the women disrobe Kris and begin hailing her in ritualistic worship.

Review:

Judging by suspicious IMDb user reviews with a 10/10 score or an exclamatory “amazing!” somewhere in the title or text, social media personality Kris “KallMeKris” Collins and her video-making partner Celina “Spooky Boo” Myers are evidently so popular, fans blinded into believing the women can do no wrong have no problem falling on a sword of integrity to assure others that the duo’s “found footage” film “House on Eden” is a contender for the greatest horror movie of all time. I assure you it isn’t, though that’s coming from someone who has no affinity for the comedic TikTok clips that made the two of them internet famous, and had never even heard their names before now. Don’t feel behind the times if you don’t know who Kris and Celina are either. Not knowing them is nowhere near as bad as them not knowing 2025 is at least 10 years too late, maybe even 20, to push out a routine fright flick in a beaten-to-death subgenre long past its prime.

“House on Eden” starts with the same setup as every other haunted house/asylum/forest exploration that’s ever been dumped in the bottomless ocean of homemade horror shot in a single location and some trees. Three friends who are armchair investigators of urban legends set out for, where else, remote woods to search for a lone home where someone disappeared 60 years ago. Once they arrive there, pedestrian paranormal activity gradually escalates until rational minds reasonably wonder, “who found this footage and why did they cut it together like this?”

Before we can get to the stale spooks of doors closing on their own, noises in dark distances, and minor “what was that?” moments that don’t show anything, we first have to endure the usual bland buildup. “House on Eden’s” “getting to know you” portion consists of Celina taking a dump in a plastic bag, Kris teasing someone about how they pronounce “horror” by having the camera zoom into her mocking mouth repeating the word, and their friend Jay counting in a goofy voice when the trio of adults stops to play hide and seek. Are these asides meant to say anything meaningful about their characters or are they only included as first-act fluff? The main duo’s diehard supporters are adamant about them supposedly being hilariously funny, but to an objective observer, what’s amusing or endearing about any of the antics described above?

“House on Eden’s” poor production quality provides an excellent example of how regular reliance on a phone to automatically handle essentials like focus and exposure has rendered many people completely clueless about how to operate an actual camera. Between bright, blown-out exteriors that’ll make you reach for a pair of sunglasses to a significant portion of footage being blurry beyond belief, “House on Eden” does a terrific job of simulating a wide variety of vision problems like cataracts, dilated pupils, and temporary blindness. For people who’ve made a profession out of recording videos, they don’t appear to have absorbed much knowledge of aperture, angles, lighting, or focal length.

Shot choices are also bizarre. Part of their “on the road” montage includes footage from a static camera mounted near the wheel well as a tire rolls on the road. Going through the trouble of affixing a camera there in the first place seems odd. It’s even worse that the lens is pointed down at the ground, so it doesn’t even capture surrounding scenery. Even if you were specifically making a travel diary, why on earth would anyone ever think to film footage of asphalt as B-roll?

As ordinarily happens when a film backloads action to the final few minutes, the initial exploration of the house on Eden Road consists of nothing much at all. While Jay handles camera duties, Kris and Celina speak at empty air and wait for a garbled voice to briefly blip over a radio. When one of their EMP devices goes dead, they spend some time searching for replacement batteries. They also look for a camera accidentally dropped in the woods outside, a popular place for collecting shots of pitch blackness where they thought they heard strange sounds coming from.

Biblical apocrypha built into the backstory adds a tiny bit of intrigue later down the line, but “House on Eden” is otherwise an indistinguishable clone of every other amateur effort made on the fly by four or five people running around a forest at night. The plot’s path is predictable. Limited creeps are cribbed from better movies. The film’s only justification for existing in the first place is to capitalize on the leading ladies’ millions of followers who maybe don’t know this entire concept has been done to death for decades. Everyone else regrettably realizes “House on Eden” is what you get when a horror film is treated as a mere conduit for disposable content rather than a revered medium for cinematic storytelling.

Review Score: 25