[SXSW 2022 Review] 'Deadstream' is 'Evil Dead' Meets Found Footage and It Rocks

It’s almost a rite of passage for controversial YouTubers to make an apology video. Typically, the YouTuber presses their luck over the course of videos until something pushes too far or they get embroiled in some kind of real life drama. Maybe they get demonetized. Maybe sponsors pull out. Maybe they lose subscribers. Regardless, it all boils down to the mass exodus of the thing that matters most: money. Writers/directors Vanessa & Joseph Winter understand the YouTube spiral perfectly and use it to great effect in Deadstream, a film about a controversial YouTuber who’s willing to do anything to get back on top. 

Deadstream opens with various videos from Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter), establishing his kind of YouTube fame. A self-professed Biggest Wuss, he does one dumbass challenge at a time and the movie gives us a look a few of them. Whether he’s sailing down a river, swaddled like Baby Moses or antagonizing cops and then running from them…or he’s paying someone to give him the “smuggled across the border in the trunk of a car” experience. In other words, this is a man who’s ready for a cease and desist. And he gets one in the form of charges being filed against him, being kicked from YouTube and having his sponsors fled. So he does the Apology Video and sets up his biggest come back video ever: he’ll stay the night, alone, in The Most Haunted (but not too famous for him to film there) House in the United States. 

And he’ll livestream the entire thing. 

The front half of Deadstream sets up the location and the situation, as Shawn throws spark plugs into the wilderness to ensure he can’t flee, padlocks himself inside the rundown and heavily graffitied two story house, and sets up various camera points inside and outside the house to track any ghostly apparitions. It also begins to establish the murky history of the house. Shawn tells his audience the story of Mildred, a mormon woman the house was built for who ultimately committed suicide and began a long history of mysterious deaths in the house. Eventually, the thumps in the night begin, his running chat room commentators begin telling him things they’ve seen on the footage, and Shawn begins to find secret rooms and hidden items throughout the house. It all culminates in a battle between Shawn and the entities living in the house. 

What follows is some of the most delightful and inventive bits of horror-comedy that serves up both scares and laughs. The easiest point of comparison is that Deadstream is The Evil Dead by way of found footage. While it never reaches the heights of frenetic insanity that Sam Raimi wielded in his trilogy, it takes staples of the found footage filmmaking style and creates something new and exciting that evokes some of the cinematic playfulness Raimi embedded in his films. At one point, left with a long stick of beef jerky, a camera and duct tape, Shawn fashions a “Beef Camera”, as he refers to it, to look outside and see what’s coming at him. And later he’ll attach it to a weapon that is used hilariously. 

Also owing to Raimi’s filmmaking, Deadstream utilizes practical effects and throws a small but unique set of monsters at Shawn that can (and do) appear anywhere to great effect. This is a film I’d love to see in theaters because the jump scares are fun, inventive and effective. Watching this YouTuber go toe-to-toe with the denizens in the house, some of which fall into the “WTF Did I Just See?!” category, brought a smile to my face when I wasn’t jumping or surprise-shouting. 

Ultimately, Deadstream doesn’t reinvent the subgenre, but it has such a studious understanding of the haunted house and found footage tropes that it can somehow make both feel fresh and inventive. Anchored by a charismatic and hilarious performance by co-director Joseph Winter, Deadstream is the most fun I’ve had watching a horror film in awhile.