Deadstream

 Have you heard of "Influencer houses"? They're these houses or flats that investor groups rent and dump a bunch of influencers into to generate 24/7 #content, in the hopes that they will go viral and generate revenue. Upon first hearing of them a couple years back my first thought was that they the perfect setup for a slasher film. Think about it; an enclosed, possibly remote location with a ready-made supply of loathsome young people to get put through the meat grinder. And if you frame it as their 'Halloween special', you have an excellent excuse for the no one to take the carnage seriously: the whole world is watching, and thinks everything is staged.
 The main problem would be finding someone sympathetic enough to be a final girl in that world. Oh, and you'd actually need to watch something that's similar enough to a bunch of influencers trying to make it big in TikTok for at least a while- that shit is beyond parody at this point.

 Deadstream is much cleverer than that. There's been a glut of "internet paranormal experts discover that ghosts are real and get more than they bargained for" in the past few years, some of them actually good. But this centers on a single live streamer - Shawn Ruddy (Alex Winter, also one-half of the writing/directing team), a Logan-Paul-style dipshit who streams stunts like getting locked in the trunk of a car to be smuggled across the border to Mexico, picking fights with cops, and paying a bum to fight with him on his live casts.
 After one of those stunts went horribly wrong, Shawn was effectively booted off the internet for a year, deemed to toxic to sponsor.

 Now back after an apology video, and with some corporate backing, his stream ("Wrath of Shawn") is back, and it being Halloween Shawn's next stunt is to go into "Death House", spend the night there, and see if he can pick a fight with the supernatural...

Spoilers: he does. And a fight is not the only thing that's picked.

 The whole movie simulates being part of that stream. Everything's shot either through the main camera Shawn carries on a harness pointing at his face, the GoPro strapped on his forehead, or the multiple remote cams he sets up across the house; the stream chat pops into view whenever Shawn looks at it, offering some fun jokes (a lot of them of the 'blink-and-you'll miss it' variety.) Later viewers submit their own videos and offer advice.

 Shawn himself is a brilliant creation, effectively poking fun at all the masses of screaming man-babies of the internet who attempt to make money by putting themselves through some degree of discomfort or humiliation for their viewer's enjoyment. Willing to scream at the drop of a hat, displaying "authenticity" and being cannily self-effacing while trying to peddle all sorts of merch...
 It's all effective satire, ruined by the fact that, well, all of it could easily pass for the real thing.

 At first things are effectively spooky. It's not exactly slow-burn, but there's a good sense of dread as Shawn locks himself in the house and starts sweeping through it, room by room, while unveiling the place's macabre natural and supernatural history. Creeping through a dark, abandoned place with only a flashlight will always be creepy, and both the stories Shawn tells and the things he finds effectively build tension and set up things for future scares. Not to mention that the house's simple geography is very effectively set for the ensuing action.
 He soon runs into fan (Melanie Stone, whose radiant natural charm gets some laughs playing off Shawn's pettiness) that managed to figure out where the stream was taking place. He begrudgingly lets her tag along, but her behaviour becomes more and more erratic as the night goes along; things soon come to a head, and the movie gleefully switches gears into Evil Dead territory.

 I believe the correct term for this sort of blood-soaked mayhem, coined by Sam Raimi himself for his brand of pull-out-all-the-stops, let's-entertain-the-shit-out-of-people horror, is a spookablast. That is what the movie becomes for its latter, hilariously deranged second half.
 Unlike Fede Alvarez's excellent Evil Dead remake, Deadstream focuses more on the fun side of horrific goings-on than on intensity (more Evil Dead 2 or Drag me to Hell, in other words, than the first Evil Dead). The house's resident evil has a puckish sense of humor in its way of fucking with Shawn, its undead are definitely deadite-influenced, and even the protagonist's resourcefulness echoes Ash in some ways. And of course there are more overt homages as well.

 This grueling gauntlet of clever and horrifying horrors for Shawn makes for a hugely satisfying third act; It doesn't quite reach the heights of inventiveness that Raimi did in his prime (an impossibly high bar), but does a respectable attempt out of it and has a huge amount of fun while doing so. Writer/directors Joseph and Vanessa Winter milk a lot of clever scenes out of the rigid stream-mimicking format, especially when switching between Shawn's point of view and static cameras, and manage to get a lot of cool monsters and gore out of a minuscule budget.
 There are some attempts at establishing a mythology and setting up some themes, but they mostly fizzle without registering and are shoved aside to set up the next gruesome joke/shock; It's not a huge loss when what's happening on-screen(s) is so much fun.

 Highly recommended.