The Unrated Netflix Comedy That Reinvents Supernatural Terror

By Robert Scucci
| Published 14 seconds ago

For years, I’ve been looking for the perfect found footage comedy, with mixed results. The Creep franchise is the closest I’ve come, and I’m beyond glad it’s slowly becoming a media empire that explores morbid humor through its found footage delivery. Mark Duplass is a picture perfect psycho, and his sense of menace pushes the franchise to hilarious extremes. While Creep (2015), its sequel, Creep 2 (2017), and its television spinoff, The Creep Tapes (2024 to present) lean into comedy, it’s still a horror franchise at its core. It’s close, but not quite what I was looking for.

This brings me to 2022’s Deadstream, which scratched that years-long itch so well that I wish I had clicked on it sooner while browsing Netflix. The problem is that I don’t read reviews because I don’t want them influencing my own. If I had, I would have found exactly what I was looking for much sooner than this past weekend.

Deadstream is inherently obnoxious and over the top, parodying streaming and prank bro culture so convincingly that you’ll feel like you’re watching the real thing. Husband and wife team Joseph and Vanessa Winter must have exposed themselves to countless hours of YouTube brainrot to pull this off, and it shows through their co-writing and directing efforts.

Shawn Is Perfectly Obnoxious

After having his channel demonetized for a cruel prank involving the homeless that lands him in serious trouble, Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter), the personality behind the Wrath of Shawn YouTube channel, decides it’s time to fire the GoPros back up and embark on his most ambitious project to date. Having gone on record saying he’s genuinely afraid of haunted houses, he resolves to livestream his trip to Death Manor, which is supposedly haunted by the evil spirit of Mildred Pratt.

Going all in, Shawn pulls the spark plugs from his car, throws his keys down a sewer grate, breaks into the house, and sets up shop. He mounts cameras in what he believes are the most haunted rooms and immediately starts testing his luck. He conducts a séance, destroys what appears to be a precious artifact, and runs around with a camera strapped to his head while documenting everything on one of the many iPads he brought with him. He also makes sure to plug his sponsors whenever the opportunity presents itself.

When one of his fans, Chrissy (Melanie Stone), shows up at the property, his viewers encourage him to keep exploring with her. Shawn soon realizes her presence will cause far more problems than he anticipated, especially since he promised his sponsors he’d be doing this alone. After reciting a mysterious Latin phrase at Chrissy’s urging, he has reason to believe he actually conjured Mildred’s evil spirit. What started as a clout chasing stunt becomes the ultimate test of his will and integrity as the stream takes a sinister, supernatural turn that even he cannot stage.

Production Values That Make Sense

Lesser found footage horror movies often stumble in the production department. There’s nothing more infuriating than characters recording on iPhones while transitions still crackle with VHS era static. Deadstream avoids this technological tomfoolery by leaning into modern streaming logic. Shawn is tech savvy, uses high-end GoPros, and essentially sets up a closed circuit system on his iPad.

We get glimpses of the house’s floor plan from this digital vantage point, while the GoPro strapped to Shawn’s head captures his immediate reactions. Across all devices, we see exactly what Shawn is experiencing, and it’s immersive enough to feel like a real livestream.

What really pulled me in, though, is Shawn himself. He’s irritating in the best way. Loud, rude, constantly talking smack to his audience in real time, and completely disrespectful of his surroundings because he’s so focused on his brand that he doesn’t yet grasp how serious his situation will become. Even when he takes what appears to be a supernatural beating, he laughs it off and keeps romping through the property. At one point, he tapes a GoPro to a Slim Jim because he’s trapped in a compromising position and has run out of tripods. It’s classic live streamer behavior pushed to its most ridiculous extreme.

If you’re looking for a straight up found footage comedy, Deadstream is it. There are genuinely effective jump scares here, but its real charm comes from Joseph Winter’s Shawn Ruddy, who even recorded his own theme music to congratulate himself for his brilliant idea to livestream inside a haunted house.

As of this writing, Deadstream is streaming on Netflix.