Deadstream (2022): Please Like, Subscribe, and Ignore the Demon Eating Your Face

There are easier ways to rebuild an internet career than locking yourself inside a haunted house overnight.

You could make an apology video.

You could start a podcast.

You could simply wait six months and assume everyone has found somebody new to be angry at.

Shawn Ruddy chooses the haunted house.

This turns out to be a poor decision for Shawn, but a pretty solid content strategy.

The Wrath of Shawn Returns

Shawn is the host of Wrath of Shawn, an online channel built around one basic idea: Shawn is terrified of everything, so he films himself doing things that scare him.

He also has the exact room we expect from this kind of creator: collectibles, old video games, glowing lights, merchandise, and the general atmosphere of someone who has spent more time arranging his background than reconsidering his life choices.

His career has recently taken a hit. A controversial stunt got him demonetized and cost him sponsors, and after six months away he is ready for his comeback.

Shawn describes himself as such a horror lightweight that the last scary movie he watched was only the first half of Ghost Dad. His mother has packed him a survival kit containing holy water, a crucifix, salt, garlic, and a silver dagger, which is a respectable collection if Death Manor turns out to contain a demon, vampire, werewolf, or particularly aggressive Italian dinner.

It is absolutely not about the money.

This is why he immediately plugs his merchandise, promotes his music, drinks his sponsor’s energy drink on camera, and explains that if he violates the rules of tonight’s livestream, he does not get paid.

Very spiritual journey.

Shawn’s comeback event is an overnight livestream from Death Manor, an abandoned house near Payson, Utah, with a history of mysterious deaths. Since ghosts are supposedly his greatest fear, he plans to spend the night alone while his viewers watch.

To make sure he cannot chicken out, Shawn removes his car’s spark plugs and throws them into the woods. Once inside the house, he padlocks the front door and drops the key down a floor grate.

We would normally criticize a horror character for eliminating both available escape routes within approximately five minutes.

In Shawn’s defense, stupidity is literally his brand.

Welcome to Death Manor, Population: Increasing

As Shawn plants cameras throughout the house, he tells his audience the story of Mildred Pratt.

Mildred was a wealthy young woman whose father built the house for her in the nineteenth century. She was unmarried, lonely, and apparently considered dangerously close to becoming an ancient spinster despite being roughly the age modern people are still forgetting to schedule dental appointments.

Mildred wrote poetry and eventually began corresponding with a wealthy publisher named Lars. The two fell in love through letters, but before he could come to her, Lars died.

Mildred hanged herself.

Afterward, more people died inside the house. Shawn theorizes that Mildred has been collecting the dead because she never got to have a family of her own.

It is not a terrible theory.

It is also wrong.

Shawn continues exploring, screaming at sticks, spiders, jackets, noises, and anything else that occupies physical space near him. Dan found the screaming increasingly unbearable. Talon thought the exaggerated shrieks fit the character because Shawn feels less like a grown man doing paranormal research and more like a child performing terror for an audience.

The tour gives him several specific haunting targets. There is the master bedroom, associated with a tall apparition Shawn calls Corner Man. Five children reportedly died in the nursery. The bathroom contains the house’s last known death and an old EVP recording with phrases that will matter much later. Shawn declares one room his safe room and turns it into mission control for the livestream.

He also discovers a strange hand-shaped plaque hanging inside a closet.

At first it is just another weird thing in a house full of weird things.

Then the cameras begin catching something Shawn cannot see with his own eyes.

A figure appears in the hallway.

His viewers see it.

Shawn checks the hallway and sees nothing.

Naturally, his solution is to destroy the strange protective-looking object he found earlier.

We have now reached the portion of the evening where the haunted house is no longer responsible for what happens next.

Red Rover, Red Rover, Send Dead Babies Right Over

Shawn has promised his sponsor that if he hears or sees anything paranormal, he has to investigate it.

His viewers are delighted to enforce this. The live chat becomes almost a second character, mocking every scream, researching the house in real time, and repeatedly reminding Shawn that cowardice is a breach of contract.

Talon and Dan both enjoyed the chat, especially because it makes the livestream format more than a visual gimmick. Shawn is never really alone while the comments are moving. He has thousands of tiny bad influences available at all times.

Eventually they pressure him into spinning his “wheel of stupid things to do,” which leads him toward a séance. Shawn attempts to contact the dead children who reportedly died in the nursery and opens with the respectful spiritual invocation:

Red Rover, Red Rover, send dead babies right over.

The dead remain surprisingly unwilling to provide five-star customer service.

After enough noises to send Shawn scrambling back toward his equipment, someone begins pounding on his safe-room door.

He is terrified.

Then the door opens and a young woman walks in.

Her name is Chrissy, and she claims to be one of Shawn’s biggest fans. She followed clues from his posts, figured out where Death Manor was, and came to meet him in person.

This should probably concern him more than it does.

Instead, Shawn is mostly irritated that another person has entered his livestream.

His viewers love her, so he reluctantly lets her stay.

Together they explore more of the house and discover Mildred’s poetry book in a hidden cellar. Shawn is disappointed because he was hoping for a scandalous diary and instead got poetry that, in his professional literary opinion, does not even rhyme.

Chrissy takes that criticism strangely personally.

That should probably concern him too.

Chrissy Is Having a Very Weird Fan Meet-and-Greet

Shawn and Chrissy use a spirit board and attempt another communication with the dead.

Chrissy provides a Latin phrase she claims is peaceful and tells Shawn to repeat it.

He does.

Because apparently we learned nothing from breaking the mystery talisman.

As the night continues, Chrissy keeps disappearing, jumping out at Shawn, and enjoying his panic a little too much. Eventually Shawn starts doing something rare.

Thinking.

He locked the front door.

The house was already sealed when he arrived.

So how exactly did Chrissy get inside?

She claims she entered through an open upstairs window, but Shawn has had enough. He accuses her of stalking him and orders her to leave.

Chrissy responds by attacking him and biting his neck.

Shawn tears a piece of wood from the wall and drives it into her neck.

She collapses.

He immediately panics, tells his viewers it was self-defense, asks them to call police, and promises to turn himself in.

When he goes back to check on Chrissy, she is gone.

The pool of blood remains.

This is not reassuring.

Shawn searches the floor grate for the padlock key he dropped earlier, but pulls out a different key instead. It opens a locked memento box containing a severed finger and a photograph of Mildred.

She looks exactly like Chrissy.

Then the livestream chat starts doing what Shawn probably should have done before entering the most haunted house in America: research.

A viewer identifies the hand-shaped object Shawn destroyed as a hamsa, a ward meant to keep evil at bay.

Another discovers that the Latin words Chrissy convinced Shawn to recite were not peaceful at all. They were part of a ritual Mildred used to bind souls to herself.

Congratulations to everyone involved.

The fan meet-and-greet has been canceled.

Mildred Wants Followers Too

The house stops pretending to be subtle.

Shawn sees Mildred hanging above the stairs through his camera even though nothing is visible to his naked eye. Grotesque former residents begin appearing. Doors slam. Things crawl. Something eventually sticks a long fingernail into Shawn’s nose for reasons neither Talon nor Dan could determine.

Maybe evil has hobbies.

Shawn finally escapes through the upstairs window, injuring himself badly in the fall. Outside, he manages to find the spark plugs he threw into the woods with remarkable ease, proving that the most supernatural force in Death Manor may actually be convenient object placement.

Unfortunately, the house’s dead residents have followed him outside.

One appears as a police officer, which gives Shawn approximately eight seconds of hope before the man’s voice turns demonic.

Another attacks him near the car.

Shawn fights back using a potato gun loaded with a Shawn Ruddy bobblehead, because apparently his merchandise has finally achieved defensive capability.

During the struggle, his tablet is destroyed.

For the first time all night, Shawn is truly alone.

That matters more than he expected.

Until now, even while physically isolated, he has always had the chat. Thousands of viewers have been mocking him, warning him, researching for him, and telling him what to do.

Without the screen, there is nobody there.

Just Shawn, the house, and Mildred’s poetry.

And reading it finally gives him the answer.

Mildred was never collecting a family.

She was collecting an audience.

The ghost and the influencer have been doing the same thing all along.

Let’s Demonetize This Bitch

Shawn finds the ritual Mildred used to gain her power and decides to turn it against her.

The logic is questionable.

The confidence is not.

He arms himself with whatever paranormal Home Depot has available: a silver dagger taped to a broom handle, garlic, holy water loaded into a syringe, Mildred’s book, and the butcher knife we noticed hanging in the kitchen much earlier.

At least this movie’s foreshadowing has the courtesy to let the character notice the weapon before requiring it.

Shawn returns to Death Manor and gets back to his equipment, where a spare tablet reconnects him with his audience.

Before beginning the ritual, he gives another apology.

This one is more honest than the polished video that followed his cancellation. Shawn admits that his old stunts hurt people. We finally learn that one involved paying a homeless man to fight him, resulting in the man being hospitalized. Another involved a racially offensive stunt crossing the border.

His apology is not exactly elegant.

But for once, he appears to understand that being acquitted does not automatically mean he did nothing wrong.

Dan saw this as a small amount of redemption.

Talon was less convinced it would survive daylight. If Shawn actually escaped Death Manor, she fully expected him to return to being exactly the same asshole once death was no longer breathing directly into his face.

Still, tonight he has bigger problems.

Mildred is coming.

And Shawn has decided he is going to demonetize the bitch.

Duct Tape Is Not Demon Rated

The final stretch turns into an increasingly ridiculous supernatural brawl.

Shawn fights the house’s ghouls with holy water, garlic, improvised weapons, and the kind of survival logic generally associated with someone who has watched half of several horror movies.

At one point he winds up in the filthy bathtub, where he pulls out an eyeball and eats it while apparently under supernatural influence.

This raises several questions.

Most of them begin with “why.”

He battles Corner Man and other increasingly rubbery-looking residents of Death Manor. Dan initially hated the creature effects until Talon pointed out that Deadstream is a low-budget independent production made by the husband-and-wife filmmaking team of Joseph and Vanessa Winter.

Once judged on those terms, the homemade quality fits the movie considerably better.

This is not polished studio horror.

It is a movie where a ghost gets stabbed with a syringe full of holy water and another attack involves supernatural urine waterboarding.

Eventually Shawn gets the upper hand on Mildred. He drives the butcher knife into her head, knocks her down, draws his own protective symbol on the floor, and duct-tapes her to it.

Talon would like to note that duct tape is wonderful.

It is not, however, generally rated for demon containment.

Especially when applied to a filthy floor.

Mildred breaks free.

The ritual initially fails, and Shawn realizes he has forgotten the final requirement: a sacrifice of flesh.

The severed finger he found earlier suddenly makes sense.

So Shawn takes the butcher knife and chops off one of his own fingers.

It takes more than one attempt.

There are easier ways to lose a subscriber.

The sacrifice completes the ritual. Mildred is dragged screaming into a bloody opening below the house and disappears.

Shawn has won.

For roughly thirty seconds.

The Verdict

Shawn immediately returns to his audience and celebrates like he just won an award for paranormal content creation.

His viewer count is enormous.

He thanks everyone, congratulates himself, and begins wrapping up the greatest livestream of his career.

Then the remaining dead residents of Death Manor appear around him.

The stream cuts to black.

Whether Shawn actually dies is left unresolved, but the joke lands either way. Mildred wanted an audience. Shawn wanted followers. By the end, he has more of both than he could possibly want.

Talon expected to hate Deadstream when it began.

She did not.

Once she realized the movie knew exactly how ridiculous Shawn was supposed to be, his exaggerated personality and shrieking became part of the joke rather than something working against it. She especially liked the livestream chat, the references to real internet culture, and the way the movie kept its tone light enough that the cheap effects and absurd ghost fights became fun instead of embarrassing.

She gives Deadstream 6 cents out of 10.

Dan had seen the movie before and remembered disliking it, largely because Shawn’s screaming drove him crazy. Rewatching it changed his opinion. He appreciated the horror-comedy approach more this time and thought Joseph Winter did exactly what the role required: he made Shawn irritating on purpose.

Dan also gives Deadstream 6 cents out of 10.

Neither of us thinks Shawn’s near-death apology is likely to create a permanently better human being.

But maybe that is the most accurate influencer joke in the movie.

He finally confronts his demons, loses a finger, nearly dies, and learns something about himself.

Then the camera is still rolling.

So naturally, it is time for the outro.