House on Eden review
Three podcasters head into the woods to find a story. Unfortunately, the footage was found.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
House on Eden
Directed by Kris Collins
Written by Kris Collins
Starring Kris Collins, Celina Myers and Jason-Christoper Mayer
House on Eden Review
If you’ve ever wanted to grab a camera and head out into the woods with friends to make your own horror movie…you’ll understand where House on Eden is coming from. There’s a do it yourself attitude to the production that is to be admired. Proof that a setting, a couple of cameras, and a few willing participants can make a movie. And further proof that you shouldn’t put that movie into theaters if you fail to capture anything interesting along the way.
Shudder is having a tough year. We’ve officially crossed from troubling to tough with the release of House on Eden. It hasn’t come out on Shudder yet…that’s part of the problem. Now…this isn’t directly Shudder’s issue. House on Eden is an RLJE Production. They usually put their films in theaters (or on VOD) before adding them to their streaming partner’s service. But people aren’t thinking about any of that when they head to theaters to see a new horror release. What they’re thinking about is seeing that Shudder production logo and then watching a movie that will directly reflect what that viewer thinks of the quality of their catalog. It’s a good thing when movies the quality of Late Night with the Devil or Oddity hit theaters.
But House on Eden isn’t a good movie. The Rule of Jenny Pen and Ash were put into theaters before hitting Shudder this year…and they were only “pretty good”. Now we’ve reached the point where the movies that make their way to theaters before joining the streamer don’t even have to hit that level. What makes the release of House on Eden more interesting is that Shudder did add a new movie to its service on the same day. Monster Island is a pretty good movie…whose throwback rubber suited creature may have held more appeal than Eden’s throwback found footage movie (more on that in a bit). In a strange way…this feels like a win for subscribers…because the house’s content has been divided against itself.
House on Eden comes from a great place. Real world podcasters playing versions of themselves attempt to make a video at a supposedly haunted house in the woods. This is normally where I would say that “wackiness ensues” but House on Eden is far too light on wackiness. It’s nearly completely void of scary moments. Often feeling like the crew tried to figure out what to do next from scene to scene. There’s an aspect of that which fits with an attempt to feel real…it’s completely true to the story happening. But it doesn’t make for an exciting viewing experience.
The best thing that House on Eden has going for it is the chemistry between its characters. It makes sense. These people work together…create things…in real life. To that end, however, it feels like House on Eden winds up being a poor advertisement for their other works. While you may not completely dislike the time you spend with Kris and Celina…you may not find anything interesting about what they spend time doing either. That’s because, at its core, House on Eden is a bad found footage movie. It’s one of the worst things you can be in modern horror.
Love it or hate it, found footage movies have come a long way since they blew onto the scene with The Blair Witch Project. Not every subsequent release has attempted to innovate the formular, of course. The format allows practically anyone to pick up a camera and shoot a movie. That’s awesome for budding filmmakers…and results in plenty of subpar releases. The ones that fail the mightiest can’t escape feeling that they have missed any of the innovations the subgenre has seen in the 26 years since three amateur filmmakers disappeared in the woods of Maryland. House on Eden is one of those failures.
The trio of characters we follow search for a strange, abandoned house in the woods…and attempt to uncover a local legend. That is the plot of both The Blair Witch Project and House on Eden. They aren’t the same movie past the plot…but that’s actually not a point in Eden’s favor. It does a far worse job making its thin plot interesting. We spend most of the movie inside of the house…with some static camera shots to break up the moving monotony. But there is, conservatively, nothing exciting about the setting or story until its final moments. That is another hallmark of subpar found footage movies that would be better left in the past. The Blair Witch Project got away with very little happening for a very long time because it was innovating a subgenre from its opening moment. That lightning has never struck twice despite repeated attempts.
And the story should end there. House on Eden could have been another in a long line of forgettable found footage movies that have a certain do it yourself charm and very little else going for it. Actually…that is where it ends for House on Eden. But it isn’t where it ends for Shudder. This is another future release from the service that fails to measure up to what it used to provide. We’re still searching for the bottom on this new era of Shudder. The only scary thing about House on Eden is that it represents a further cheapening of Shudder’s output.
Scare Value
With all due admiration for going out and doing it yourself…House on Eden simply doesn’t work. It’s never scary and rarely interesting. The movie feels like it skipped the last quarter century of found footage movies. As if they took some cameras into the woods directly from watching The Blair Witch Project and though…we can do that. I’m sure they had fun making it. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to be had watching it.
1.5/5
House on Eden Link
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