Posted in: Exclusive, Horror, Interview, Movies, Shudder | Tagged: House of Eden, rlje films

House of Eden Stars on Developing Their Characters, Endings & More

House on Eden stars Kris Collins, Celina Myers, and Jason-Christopher Mayer spoke to Bleeding Cool about their characters, endings, and more.

Writer, director, and star Kris Collins, Celina Myers, and Jason-Christopher Mayer are the best of friends who developed a similar passion for the screen, but they also wanted to create a film as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Thanks to some intuitive scouting of locations, a few actors to help make their ending, their ragtag crew, and studios RLJE Films and Shudder, they made the found footage horror film House of Eden a reality. Inspired by the 1999 classic The Blair Witch Project, House on Eden follows paranormal investigators Kris (Collins), Celina (Myers), and their videographer Jay (Mayer) as they expect the usual scares when they set out on their latest case. But after being mysteriously rerouted to an abandoned house deep in the woods, they find themselves facing a force, unlike anything they've encountered before. As the night spirals into chaos, missing crew members and eerie phenomena hint at an ancient, malevolent presence watching their every move. The trio spoke to Bleeding Cool about developing their film counterparts on top of Collins' script, what went into developing the film's ending, and if they considered anyone else to play the leads.

House on Eden Stars Kris Collins, Celina Myers, and Jason-Christopher Mayer on Fleshing Their Film Counterparts, and Climactic Ending

How long did it take to develop what we see in the film, as far as like the characters you all flushed out, how it came to be, and how much of yourselves did you put in those characters?

Collins: When I was writing it and talking to these guys as well, I felt like making it easier on myself, for them, and since it was for our audience, I was like, "Let's be ourselves and then become not ourselves." For myself, it was more so because I'm 2 percent myself in this movie, which is my own fault. I thought it would make it flow easier because we only had seven days to film it. There was no time for rehearsal. The only thing we rehearsed was the end scenes. I don't want to give stuff away, but there's a fire, some blood or whatever, so we had to rehearse, but other than that, we had no time, so we were trying to think of how we can make this as seamless as possible, and that was being a version of ourselves.

Did you play around with different endings, or was the one that you had filmed always the one?

Collins: I had a few different endings in mind. They were all versions of the ending that's there. I knew the shot because the shot in the end mirrors the shot at the beginning of the movie. I knew I wanted that, but it was like how to get there and how exactly we were going to do it. There were a few differences, but I'm glad about the one that we decided on. Jay was in the sound studio in LA, and the guys were trying to figure out what the sounds would be in that last shot as well. There were quite a few options there.

Was it always going to be you three working it out, or did you consider bringing other people to play the leads except for those involved in the final scene?

Collins: I feel bad answering all these questions.

Myers: You got the answers, baby.

Mayer: You got it, bud! Take it away!

Collins: I mean, again, it was all about how we can make a movie in the quickest amount of time, on the smallest budget, and in the most comfortable way. It was always going to be just us three and then those few actors who made appearances. That was always the plan. We were like, "We can do this, because we also wanted as little amount of cooks in the kitchen as possible," because we're all control freaks.

House on Eden is exclusively in theaters.

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