One thing I’m always searching for at New Orleans French Film Fest every year is French-language horror films: the kinds of artsy genre titles that premiere in the Midnight or Un Certain Regard programs at Cannes and then quietly seep onto streaming platforms like Mubi & Kanopy years later with no wide theatrical distro.  This year’s French Film Fest lineup delivered the familial sorcery drama Omen and the bestial body horror The Animal Kingdom, which where both solid but left me wanting more.  Thankfully, Overlook Film Fest came through town just a few weeks later, screening a surprising number of French-language titles that would have been just as worthy of New Orleans French Film Fest proper.  Partially sponsored by Mubi, the international programming at this year’s Overlook was impressively robust, and I made the most of what French-language horrors I could cram into my schedule . . .

Hood Witch

Like the aforementioned Animal Kingdom, Hood Witch is more of a fugitive-on-the-run thriller than a proper horror film.  Like Omen, it’s also an attempt to reconcile old-world witchcraft practices with modern cultural sensibilities.  Golshifteh Farahani stars as Nour, a single mother who exploits her Parisian neighborhood’s religious superstitions so she can financially  support her young son.  This mostly manifests in a smuggling operation that sneaks dangerous, exotic animals into the country for elaborate healing rituals and in developing an app that connects users to the faith healers who practice them – like Uber for exorcists.  Her schemes blow up in her face when one of her customers suddenly dies, having relied on old-world sorcery where modern medicine should have intervened.  She’s blamed for the tragedy by the most conservative zealots of her community, which leads to a literal witch hunt through city streets.  It’s an exciting clash of modernized, urban witchcraft and old-fashioned, tried and true cultural misogyny – a clash that’s telegraphed by an opening montage of witchcraft documentation through the ages, from Häxan to TikTok.

Hood Witch is most inventive in its weaponization of smartphones on both sides of the witches vs mob justice divide.  The mob uses their phones to broadcast the fugitive witch’s live location to fellow vigilantes, stirring up paranoia in the ability to turn anyone with an internet connection into a Matrix-style sleeper agent; they also use their phones’ flashlights as makeshift torches.  The so-called witch uses her social media feed to antagonize her legion of anonymous enemies with broadcasts of spells & curses they don’t need to be physically present for to suffer.  In some ways the movie pulls its punches in constantly teasing the audience about whether Nour is an atheist or a believer (and in occasionally shying away from onscreen gore), but Nour herself relies on that ambiguity to survive.  It also wouldn’t be a modernization of old-world witch hunts if she wasn’t wrongly accused of practicing sorcery, so it can’t fully commit to the supernatural implications of its premise without completely undermining its thesis.  Omen does a much better job of fully satisfying both sides of that believer-skeptic divide, but that’s about the only way the two films can be compared.

Red Rooms

The reason I’m specifying “French-language” so much here is that there are always a few French-Canadian titles that sneak onto the French Film Fest lineup, which means I’m also going to sneak one onto this list. Like Hood Witch, Red Rooms is more of a thriller than an outright horror film, and it’s also one of that generates a lot of its tension through online misbehavior.  Set in Quebec, it’s a Fincherian cyberthriller about an edgy fashion model who’s romantically obsessed with a tabloid-famous serial killer.

The film opens in the sterilized white void of a Quebecois courtroom, where one long shot follows the opening arguments of the obviously guilty killer’s crimes, floating between the horror on the faces of his teen victims’ parents and the perverse attraction on the faces of his doting fan club.  Later, the screen glows red as our fashion model anti-heroine watches direct evidence of the gruesome crimes in question: dark web snuff videos purchased with Bitcoin currency she earns through shady video poker transactions & Neon Demon-style photo shoots.  This bizarre, improbable collection of character details never gets any easier to understand or to stomach.  Red Rooms is mostly just a chilling character study of an absolute weirdo, one who’s only one or two dark web searches beyond the average true crime junkie.  Nothing especially shocking happens in the movie, but every new detail about our POV fashionista is revealed as a twisty Event, while the world around her breaks down into pixelated digital waste.

Infested

In a way, the when-spiders-attack horror Infested is the perfect crossroads between typical French Film Fest & Overlook programming, where Shudder meets Mubi.  Since the sensation of venomous spiders crawling all over your body and hatching eggs inside it is so automatically, reflexively freaky, the movie has a lot of free time for bonus details like character development & emotional stakes.  Another Parisian horror in which a well-meaning exotic animal smuggler whose personal-survival hustles result in a body count, it’s a story about the breakdown of community in a time of supernatural crisis.  Our boneheaded sweetheart protagonist is introduced specifically in the context of his relationships with his housing block community, so that later there’s genuine emotional heft to his friendships & family bonds being tested by selfish survival instincts once his escaped specimens mutate into supernatural arachnid monsters.  It’s like one of those semi-documentary film festival dramas about life on the poverty line in French housing projects (Girlhood, Gagarine, Cuties, etc.), except with way more gigantic, pissed off spiders than usual.

If there’s anything especially nuanced about Infested‘s scares, it’s in the way the cops outside the housing block are just as dangerous as the killer spiders inside.  There’s a deep, valid mistrust of the armed brutes who are supposedly quarantining residents for their own safety that not only informs characters’ desperate decision making here, but also illuminates some of the mob justice mentality of Hood Witch in retrospect.  That’s not what makes the movie scary, though.  It’s the constant flood of CGI spiders that invade the homes & bodies of that community that makes the movie so effectively upsetting.  All told, I attended thirteen screenings at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, and without question Infested was the scariest theatrical experience of the weekend.  It didn’t have to try all that hard to earn that accolade (at least not when compared to more inventive, cerebral horrors like I Saw the TV Glow or Cuckoo) but it more than made up for that easy layup by investing in its characters, taking care to make sure each of their deaths matter to the audience.

-Brandon Ledet