I know how to work a camera” … Do you, though?
Main Cast: Kris Collins, Celina Myers
Director: Kris Collins
As I’ve said countless times, I love two genres more than any other: found footage and ghosts. So when I saw Shudder had a new movie called HOUSE ON EDEN and I saw it was a found footage movie about a haunted house—and it was only 78 minutes long—I asked the wife if she wanted to watch it. She likes found footage too, so we got our lunch and sat down to it.
We were about 10 minutes in when we decided we hated these characters and wished terrible things to happen to them, which prompted me to read one of the Shudder reviews which said pretty much the same thing. However, there were some really positive reviews there, too, so we pressed on.
But what a struggle it was.
HOUSE ON EDEN was “written” and directed by its main star, Kris Collins, a YouTuber who invited two of her friends, Celina Myers and Jason-Christopher Mayer, along for the ride. In the “film” they were a group of paranormal investigators desperate to get more eyes on their channel. What was supposed to be a trip to a supposedly haunted cemetery turned out to be something else when the other two found out Kris was actually driving them to a house no one else in the community had ever heard of, the House on Eden.
Remember, this movie is only 78 minutes long, but they didn’t even reach the house until 25 minutes in, which is insane. What were they doing all that time? Driving a lot, and then they stopped to play hide and seek in the woods where they found a small shack that had no bearing on the plot, then they found a large burned-out fire pit that does come back around later, and all the while my wife and I were just wishing something would be in focus and that the actors would realize we’re not actually looking through their eyes; we only see what the camera sees so, one, aim it at ANYTHING other than your feet while you’re walking, and two, HOLD IT STILL!
Thank God we weren’t watching this in one of those theaters with the seats that move, we both would have left with serious back and neck injuries and maybe a slight case of CTE.
By the time they finally got to the house, our patience was wearing thin. Thank God they actually knew their stuff and pulled out a couple of tricks we’ve seen first-hand when we’ve attended ghost hunts at a local mental hospital, so they definitely got credit for that.
But that’s about it, because the rest of this movie was just so much camera waving and trying to focus. I believe another edit of this thing could have produced a decent movie. You’ve got to lose all that playing in the woods crap, though, and, again, stop jostling the camera and if you see something weird in the distance, we need to see it, too. You can’t just whip the camera around and say I thought I saw something over there. Because if we didn’t see it, in a found footage movie, it didn’t happen.
I’m sure Collins and her friends went into this with the best of intentions. I mean, they did find an awesome location to film in, and there’s even a backstory with a couple of genuinely creepy shots. But this movie has all the signs of people who saw a thing, said I can do that, and did it without doing any research into what makes the successful examples work. Spoiler: it didn’t work. The reach exceeded the grasp here, with the story of Lilith playing a big part in the third act reveal, plus the movie’s called HOUSE ON EDEN, it doesn’t take a theology major to see the connections, but it just never comes together in any way the audience cares about at all.
The only bright side coming out the other end of this movie was that it’s over and we don’t ever have to revisit it. HOUSE ON EDEN was a short story they tried to stretch into a novel by padding the opening beyond its limits, and then by fumbling their way through the rest with only a vague outline of where the story went. The end devolved into a rehash of so many other movies of this type that in all 78 minutes I didn’t see a single thing I haven’t seen in half a dozen other, better movies. If I ever learn of a follow up movie that has these same “actors”, that’s a hard pass from me.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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