Deadstream Review: Evil Dead-Inspired Slapstick Horror with Diminishing Returns

When Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter), the protagonist of Joseph and Vanessa Winter’s Deadstream, arrives at the spooky old house he calls “Death Manor,” he yanks out his car’s spark plugs and tosses them into the woods. Once inside the place, he padlocks the front door and drops the key down a filthy grate. Even by the standards of horror movie characters—a species hardly known for its intelligence—Shawn is taking things a bit far.

To its credit, Deadstream has a perfectly reasonable explanation for Shawn’s flagrant stupidity: He’s a YouTuber. Recently “canceled” for an incident that becomes clear over the film’s running time, Shawn has pulled out all the stops for the solo livestream with which he hopes to make his big comeback. In the early parts of the film, we watch him set up multiple motion-activated cameras to swap between, explaining Death Manor’s checkered history through research he’s done and video clips he’s queued up. In doing so, Deadstream skillfully positions itself as a rather elaborate found-footage film alongside contemporaries like Rob Savage’s Dashcam, Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Spree, and Jung Bum-shik’s superb Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum.

Deadstream’s chief inspiration, though, lies outside its chosen format. If the found-footage film is often decried for being all buildup with minimal payoff, this one wastes little time before running Shawn through a slapsticky horror gauntlet reminiscent of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2. Leveraging practical effects for gross-out gags, the film initially sets down its incidents with refreshing immediacy and a high-energy vibe. But Deadstream grows a little one-note once it shifts into nonstop panic mode; this is a one-man show for Shawn, so beyond a few pauses in the action that feel contrived and unnatural, he has less room to peruse the video clips, alternate camera feeds, and “live” comments that define the film’s more varied first half.

Worse, the filmmakers make the somewhat fatal mistake of having the comments by Shawn’s viewers create an element of doubt over just how “real” Deadstream’s haunted events are. The found-footage horror subgenre is premised on the perception of reality, and many films play with that idea by employing a storied horror trick: fake scares that characters have set up themselves. But by suggesting that Shawn might have staged Death Manor, Deadstream invites a level of scrutiny that the effects and structure of the film don’t stand up to.

For one, the film unintentionally motivates the audience to cast a skeptical eye on things like makeup and rubbery suits when we might otherwise have suspended disbelief for horror done on a budget. Even the frequency with which Shawn explains his situation and stops to interact with the chat becomes increasingly suspect. By the end, the film’s is-it-real-or-not game simply leads viewers to the deflating realization that they weren’t supposed to notice all those little details in the first place. Intermittently entertaining though it may be, Deadstream doesn’t quite live up to its promising premise and handful of clever camera gimmicks.