Review: "House on Eden"

“House on Eden” may mark a new chapter in contemporary filmmaking and cinema.  Rather than a movie created by filmmakers, it’s a feature film made by content creators.

The project is the brainchild of 29-year-old Kris Collins, a former Canadian hairdresser turned social media star, whose Kallmekris You Tube channel has over 12 million subscribers, and whose TikTok has over 50 million followers. She wrote and directed “House on Eden” in addition to playing the lead role of Kris, an ambitious young woman with a burning interest in paranormal activity.

Her co-stars are Celina Myers (as Celina) and Jason-Christopher Mayer (as Jay). The three friends are on a mission to record some awesome video of ghostly spirits and entities. It’s a hot topic subject that has spawned numerous TV shows, movies, books, articles and podcasts.  

Actress Celina Myers is a paranormal writer, influencer and entrepreneur whose celinaspookyboo Instagram has over three million followers. She is also the host of The Haunted Estate Podcast.

Jason-Christopher Mayer rounds out the cast. In addition to being an actor, he is a video editor with eight years experience making short videos and music videos. 

Their collaboration is a departure from mainstream filmmaking. Rather than being filmmakers, they are social media stars who have boldly stepped into the world of moviemaking. 

Their movie, “House of Eden,” is essentially a re-make of the 1999 mega hit “The Blair Witch Project,” a low-budget, independent film made for $60,000 that went on to make a staggering $250 million at the box office.

Like “Blair Witch,” “House of Eden” is a story told through the eyes and cameras of its characters. The style is characterized by bumpy, hand-held video, shot by amateurs in what amounts to mock cinema vérité. The lack of slickness and professionalism was meant to convey a sense of immediacy and realism. In the case of “Blair Witch,” the movie hype suggested that the footage was assembled from actual, recovered video.  We were to believe that the story actually happened. It was all just movie marketing.

“House on Eden” doesn’t take the hype that far, but it does heavily borrow the premise of young adults attempting to capture paranormal activity in a remote, deserted house in the middle of a dark forest. The hyper-frenetic camerawork style is mimicked and amplified, to the degree that it could induce motion sickness. The shots are wildly erratic, occasionally out of focus, and sometimes bewilderingly irrelevant. 

Shaky-cam photography and rapid-fire editing can sometimes work, as in the case of the brilliant Jason Bourne movies. They are a textbook example of the power of this approach. While seeming chaotic, the shots intricately link together into a tight visual narrative. The sequences are meticulously structured, frame by frame.

In “House on Eden,” you never get the impression there’s any rhyme or reason to the script or the visuals. Everything seems spontaneous and unplanned.

It’s a strange movie. The deserted, ostensibly haunted house isn’t the creepy environment you might expect. It’s a vacant, but well-furnished, well-maintained home that would seem completely normal but for the sake of a few scary dolls and a couple of erotic paintings of a nude woman entwined by a large Satanic serpent.

Eventually, spirits are summoned using some high-tech equipment familiar to fans of the paranormal investigation shows, but even that proves to be rather anticlimactic.

While the footage in the movie is supposed to have been shot by the three main characters and a few stationary cameras they have set up, the movie breaks its own rules by introducing shots that could not have been recorded by them. You’re not meant to notice.

The ending of the movie (borrowed straight from the finale of the 2015 film “The Witch”) is the most glaring example, showing a lengthy scene that was impossible for any of the three main characters to have recorded.

In the way of full disclosure, I recall giving “The Blair Witch Project” a less-then-favorable review back in 1999. It seemed completely over-hyped regarding the scariness. I did recall the audience gasping in fear at the sound of breaking twigs and branches heard in the middle of the night by the main characters huddled in a camping tent with flashlights pointed up at their faces. I’ve gone camping. I didn’t think it was scary.  Apparently, a lot of other people did.  To the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars.

The lesson learned here is that fear is subjective. While I didn’t think that “House on Eden” was scary, I have to remind myself that I’m not the target audience. If the millions of social media followers of the people who made “House on Eden” flock to the theaters to see this movie, it will be a hit, despite all its flaws and shortcomings.

It might mark a major shift in contemporary cinema regarding the new generation of people who will be making movies and the new generation who will be paying to see them.

I’ll be watching with great curiosity.

“House on Eden” is Rated R.