HOUSE ON EDEN - Mark Reviews Movies

House on Eden, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 24, 2025

Social media personalities moving into the realm of more traditional media was pretty much inevitable. House on Eden represents such a shift for writer/director and star Kris Collins, who makes videos on assorted online platforms. Along with her co-stars and fellow filmmakers, she plays a version of herself in the movie—an internet personality interested in true crime and the paranormal, working on the most ambitious project of her career thus far. There might have been something to this sort of self-reflective story and filmmaking, but Collins and crew have instead taken the easiest, most predictable route imaginable.

It's a found-footage horror movie, played seriously and with no apparent recognition for what a fictional version of the cast/crew's paranormal hunting means for their supposedly "real" endeavors in the same arena. Once you know the process of a magician's tricks, it's much more difficult for that magician to convince you of the illusion. A magician who actually tells the audience that there is trickery involved in an act had better have another layer or two to the performance to compensate.

Whatever this movie means for Collins and her co-stars in terms of making more videos involving paranormal investigations is irrelevant to the movie itself, of course. It is funny, though, to realize that Collins, Celina Myers, and Jason-Christopher Mayer have undermined any of their past projects revolving around the same kind of techniques. After all, any supposed supernatural experience that can be staged for a horror movie could be faked or otherwise manipulated in another context.

This contradiction could have been fun for the filmmakers to explore, but as soon as we meet Kris (Collins) and Celina (Myers) and Jay (Mayer) in this story, the whole course of that tale might as well be laid out in front of us. The fictional versions of Kris and Celina work together on investigating haunted places, and the former has recently heard of one such location that has gone under the radar for decades. It's a house on Eden Road, although the building's actual location is nowhere near anything that resembles a street, a road, or even a path. The house is in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere.

Collins mistakenly takes the intrinsic eeriness of such an edifice as the entire reason the movie should be scary. There's very little information offered about the house's past, its history as a supposedly haunted place, or even how Kris finds out such a non-entity in the first place. Even though the trio spend an entire day driving to and wandering around the woods before finding the house, the only key detail about the place is that one young woman disappeared near or in it "about 60-ish years ago." In terms of building tension for the potential threat of a location, this doesn't even approach the bare minimum.

The rest of the story has the three exploring the house and its surroundings, going out into the woods at night to retrieve a camera Jay somehow forgot, and, after all of them black out on their first night, setting up mounted cameras and ghost-hunting equipment to find some supernatural presence. Admittedly, there are a couple of neat tricks and the concepts of potentially scary scenes here. One has Kris in a small room surrounded by "cat balls," which illuminate with flashing light when someone or something touches them. After yelling at a possible spirit for wasting her precious time, the balls start lighting up as if an unseen force is making determined steps in Kris' direction.

Most of it, though, relies on the erroneous belief that the idea of a haunted house, with only the context that it must be haunted or else there'd be no point in the movie's existence, is frightening enough on its own. Collins doesn't establish the dramatic illusion that it is or even could be haunted until the story is well into the supernatural games, and as for the characters here, there aren't really any dramatic stakes for why they're doing this and stick around after they're convinced something could be terribly amiss. The staging of some scenes, such as one in which a character disappears after going outside but whose yells are only heard after someone else watches a video of what happened, is inconsistent, and the editing regularly cheats by cutting away for no reason, except to keep up a false sense of mystery.

It's all pretty routine, essentially, and not exactly convincing as a gimmick or storytelling. The most intriguing element of House on Eden has little to do with the movie itself, because it might be very interesting to see how it affects the participants' "real-life" ghost-hunting activities in the movie's aftermath.

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