Movie Review: HOUSE ON EDEN

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: July 25th, 2025 / 12:37 PM

HOUSE ON EDEN movie poster | ©2025 RLJE Films

Rating: R
Stars: Kris Collins, Celina Myers, Jason-Christopher Mayer, Barb Thomas
Writer: Kris Collins
Director: Kris Collins
Distributor: RLJE Films/Shudder
Release Date: July 25, 2025

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT was released approximately twenty-six years ago. Since then, there have been many (to put it mildly) other films inspired by or, indeed, imitative of its style and/or substance.

HOUSE ON EDEN is one of the latest to follow in BLAIR’s ultra-low-budget, faux documentary footsteps. The irony here is that writer/director Kris Collins has come up with a fundamental mythology that’s intriguing but might have been better served by a regular narrative format.

HOUSE begins promisingly with a shot of plant life. A Venus flytrap is prominent in the foreground, while a fly buzzes in and out of frame.

Before we can learn the fly’s fate, we meet our three protagonists, all armed with multiple cameras, who are making a horror vlog. Kris (filmmaker Collins) is the leader of the group, loyally backed up by her friends Celina (Celina Myers) and Jay (Jason-Christopher Mayer).

Their intended destination is a cemetery, but Kris springs a surprise on the others. She’s learned about a haunted house on Eden Road that supposedly nobody else knows about and wants to be the first to document it.

The house is, of course, in the middle of the woods. There’s a gigantic recently-used fire circle in a nearby field, but otherwise no evidence of neighbors.

The house itself is a seeming contradiction, decorated in what looks like 1950s-style furnishings, extremely well-dusted, but with no electricity.

Kris insists on everybody using their cameras all around, even when a few things happen that suggest they may want to leave.

Collins stages a few good jump scares, though there’s at least one point where it seems like a camera is picking up something from an impossible angle (assuming there can be a camera there at all).

The film also has a good concept – let that title sink in – that picks up creepy steam when Kris and Celina unpack some items that supposedly allow them to communicate with spirits.

Collins directs herself and her two costars with easy naturalism, and gets a fearless turn from Barb Thomas, but she also falls pretty to some problems that plagued BLAIR and some new ones specific to HOUSE ON EDEN.

A few shots are direct homages to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. While we aren’t subjected to massive map examination, the film’s entire first fifteen minutes are dedicated to discussion of camera equipment.

For all Kris’s enthusiasm, we have to question her and the other characters’ assumption that the house is unoccupied, if only because of the clearly-tended flowers out front, to say nothing of the housekeeping.

Then there’s the inevitable squabbling and sniping, which is not much more fun to observe here than it would be to experience in person. At least some of the sequences appear to be improvised, resulting in repetitive phrases, especially “This is insane!” whenever anything interesting is encountered.

Finally, the mystery of how nobody except Kris has ever heard of this place is not addressed, even though it feels like the right sort of answer could add to the tension.

HOUSE ON EDEN has intriguing supernatural notions and solid performances, bracketed by uneven execution within a by-now familiar subgenre.

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