“I already made one shitty horror movie in my lifetime, I don’t need to make another one,” says Jay – or rather, Jason-Christopher Mayer. The filmmaker has been video editor for online content creator Kris Collins aka KallMeKris (51 million TikTok followers and counting) for four years, but he made his feature directing debut with the immemorable 2012 slasher Nobody Gets Out Alive. That fourth-wall-busting in-joke is just one of many self-aware moments in House on Eden, the found footage horror and feature debut for online star-turned-director Collins.
Part of that content he’s edited has been Collins’ growing library of true-crime video, a change of pace from the character sketches that made her famous. Ghosthunting is more the domain of Celina Myers aka CelinaSpookyBoo, host of the Haunted Estate podcast. For House on Eden, the film versions of their online personas go on one of Myers’ spook quests and get exactly the comeuppance they invoked. Collins, Myers, and Mayer are doing more than just riffing on The Blair Witch Project by playing characters with their own names, even introducing themselves by their online nicknames. The line between character and content creator is deliberately blurred to the point of erasure in this meta-tinged found footage haunted house horror.
It’s the classic formula for the genre: The trio blunder through the woods, blithely staging footage and playing hide-and-seek until they stumble across the murder house and accompanying slaughter shed. What’s supposed to distinguish it is that it’s set in the world of online content creators and, unlike streaming media satires Deadstream, Spree, #ChadGetsTheAxe, and Meanspirited, it’s actually made by online content creators.
What it could do, in a way that no other influencer horror can, would be to show how the life of a zero-budget celebrity works. Instead, it’s consistently generic, going from the Act 1 (no one takes anything seriously) to the Act 2 (everyone tries to ignore the growing weirdness) to the Act 3 (run, scream, bleed, fade to static) that we all know so well. Too well, if anything. The only references to creator culture are when the film gets caught up in a self-referentiality that serves as its own gatekeeper. Don’t know who Sam & Colby are? Tough. No idea what format The Blair Witch Project was shot on? You’re in trouble. There’s a lot here that depends on knowing both found footage minutiae and contemporary online culture, but that’s not enough to sustain a movie, even if Collins uses every trick to at least give the film a little visual flair and innovation.
What House on Eden re-enforces is the disappointing realization that, 27 years since Blair Witch and over two decades since the first episode of Ghost Hunters debuted on SyFy, this genre has evolved so little. Collins and crew follow the well-worn tracks entertainingly enough, running up and down stairs and catching figures just at the corner of the shot and arguing about whether they should keep filming or not, but there’s nothing new.
For all its flaws and infuriating gimmickry, at least Robbie Blanfitch’s pinhole camera horror The Outwaters felt like it was trying to innovate the mechanics of found footage. The only reason that House of Eden couldn’t have been made at any point in the last 20 years is some product placement. Honestly, it may as well come with a 10% off code for Alice Boxes and SBOX Spirit Box. Then it would really feel like real modern found footage, downloaded straight from the internet. Instead, it feels like just another Hi8 jump scare home movie.
This article appears in July 25 • 2025.