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Sand on the Glass, Leaf in the Pitt

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A good friend recently lent me a DVD compilation of experimental short films from animator Caroline Leaf, titled Out on a Limb. He kept excitingly telling me that Leaf primarily works with a “sand on glass” animation technique, which I struggled to understand in the abstract. In retrospect, the term is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of working with the ink-on-paper or clay-on-wire or code-on-computer techniques of more popular animation styles (hand-drawn, stop-motion, and CG, respectively), Leaf made a name for herself on the 1970s art scene by producing short films entirely animated in beach sand. She’d spread her collected sand across an illuminated table, shaping it to represent all figures & settings captured by the camera. The technique was not entirely novel to her heyday, having been used as a texturing effect at least as far back as Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 landmark The Adventures of Prince Achmed (largely cited as the oldest surviving animated feature film). Leaf was among the first animators to utilize sand-on-glass animation as her primary medium, however, like a chef who only cooks potatoes or a guitarist who works only in arpeggio; it was an experiment in technical limitation.

It turns out, you can do a lot with the simple manipulation of light & sand. In her early experiments “Peter and the Wolf” (1969) & “The Owl Who Married a Goose” (1976), Leaf finds a freedom from the tyranny of setting & geography in her animated sandscapes. Those folktales are retold in a white, boundaryless void where figures transform from one animal to another as the story demands. The wolves, owls, geese, and children drawn in fine-grain beach sand often lose any & all distinctions between their differing animal bodies, turning into and maneuvering around each other in surreal configurations that would be impossible in any other medium. However, her sand-on-glass project didn’t reach its apotheosis until she adapted Franz Kafka’s most famous novella in the 1977 short “The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa.” Her Metamorphosis adaptation is the exact existential bug-transformation crisis you know & love, with the same anything-can-transform-into-anything surrealism of her previous shorts, except with the added limitation of having to actually depict a physical, closed-off setting. It’s her most claustrophobic work in sand-on-glass animation as a result, but its claustrophobic tension is entirely appropriate to the text it illustrates. There’s a muddied, charcoal-drawing style smear to her technique that emphasizes the story’s inherent grime while drawing comparisons between the artist’s solitary production style and her character’s pathetic, socially isolating plight. You cannot fully lose yourself in the story of The Metamorphosis, since the literal fingerprints of the artist conveying it are visible in every gritty frame.

While Leaf did explore other animation techniques, her most recognizable & influential works were rendered in beach sand, to the point where her name is near synonymous with the technique. At least, she was on my mind when diving into the collection of short films animated by Suzan Pitt that are currently hosted on The Criterion Channel. In Pitt’s 2006 short “El Doctor,” her titular hand-drawn doctor ends a drunken bender by hallucinating in the driver’s seat of his car outside a Mexican pub. His blurred vision is overpowered by a gigantic sea creature chasing a man in his impossibly bright windshield, an image illustrated in Leaf’s signature sand-on-glass technique. Later, when the same doctor is visited by an angel, Leaf illustrates the supernatural encounter by scratching that angel directly into the celluloid to accentuate the uncanniness of its image. Notably, this scratching technique was also a favorite got-to for Caroline Leaf’s later career, after she had abandoned beach sand as her primary medium of choice. It’s unclear whether Caroline Leaf was on Suzan Pitt’s mind when making “El Doctor,” but she was certainly on the top of mine while watching it.

Like Caroline Leaf, Suzan Pitt started her animation career with a distinct trademark style before moving on to experiment with other techniques & textures in later works. Her most formidable shorts “Crocus” (1971), “Asparagus” (1979), and “Joy Street” (1995) all reflect her fine-art background as a painter, literalizing the “every frame a painting” cinematic cliché. Pitt would paint her figures on traditional transparent animation cells against a black velvet-style backdrop, but the level of color & detail in her psychedelic fantasy realms far outpaced what you’ll find in the commercial end of the medium. She’s also unconventionally morose for an animator, centering all three of those works on the madness, loneliness, and despair of women isolated in dissatisfying domestic spaces, staring out their windows at the big, scary world outside. In “Crocus,” a woman performs mundane domestic duties like child-rearing, self-primping, and marital sex while occasionally taking breaks to stare out the window and dream of a freer life. In “Asparagus,” a woman struggles to make sense of the alien world outside her window but finds a way to repackage it as a psychedelic stage act for the delight of a bewildered theatre audience. In “Joy Street,” a woman stares at the desolate street life below her window before slitting her own wrists, and is then revived by Fleischer style cartoon characters who relocate her limp body to a Technicolor jungle outside city. All three films feel like funhouse mirror distortions of a lonely, dissatisfied artist’s diary, just as confessional as they are inscrutable, grotesque, and beautiful.

These experiments in form are most compelling in a multimedia approach, something Pitt was aware of early in her career. When her faceless onscreen surrogate puts on a surreal theatrical performance at the climax of “Asparagus,” her audience is rendered in a crude Claymation technique, further alienating the artist from the rest of her fellow citizenry. By the time she incorporated the sand-on-glass and scratched celluloid techniques from Leaf’s work in “El Doctor,” Pitt had already established an anything-goes approach to her animations, incorporating paper dolls, magazine collage, and live actors into her signature fine-art painting style. While Leaf is best known for her work with sand, she also reached her greatest artistic heights when expanding her approach to multimedia techniques — most notably in “Interview,” a short film collaboration with fellow animator Veronika Soul. “Interview” is a dual portrait of the two artists at work, vulnerably gushing about each other and confessing their own personal insecurities while excitedly jumping from one experimental animation technique to the next. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen any filmmaker come to approximating Agnès Varda’s free-flowing autofictional documentary style with any convincing success, and it took two filmmakers working in tandem to accomplish it. It’s also the most I feel like I got to know Caroline Leaf through the content her films, since so much of her most prominent work is more about technique than about personal expression. In contrast, Suzan Pitt lays bare the ugliest, most intimate parts of her own psyche in her signature animations, daring the audience not to look away. Both artists have trapped themselves in an isolating, labor-intensive medium that requires them to work alone in a dark room for untold hours; the difference is largely in whether the proverbial door to that room is locked shut or left open for the audience peer in.

-Brandon Ledet

David Bradley’s Silent Monsters

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The single-screen microcinema Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge has been hosting weekly silent movie screenings with live piano accompaniment every Sunday afternoon for months now. I know this because I happened to see a flyer for the series while catching another movie there. While other local repertory series like Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth program are regularly well attended, Zeitgeist’s Silent Films series feels like an open secret, a kind of backroom speakeasy version of local theatrical programming. The vibe in the room can be electric, as pianist David Bradley’s live, semi-improvised movie scores add an immediacy to century-old relics like Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! that wouldn’t earn nearly as big of laughs or gasps streaming alone at home with a canned soundtrack. It can also be remarkably intimate, echoing the spirit of a D.I.Y. punk show whenever Bradley finds himself playing to a near empty room, engaging his audience in conversation and asking for help wheeling his instrument into the theatre. These are live concerts after all, even more so than they are movie screenings, with all of the fluctuating charm & chaos that distinction suggests.

The reason I got such a wide sample of live-concert experiences at Zeitgeist’s Silent Films showings is that Bradley’s weekly programming veered hard into my personal interests last month, in a series he titled “Silent Monster May.” In the immediate days after I had fallen in love with the century-old romance horror of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), Bradley announced that he’d be exclusively screening silent horror movies that month, including a precursor to Chaney’s Phantom in the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I hit all three screenings in the “Silent Monster May” series, which varied in attendance & intensity but were consistently high quality. Before live-scoring 1920’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Bradley mentioned that he hadn’t seen the movie in a while and doesn’t like to overprepare before showtimes, choosing instead to react and respond in real time along with the audience. His silent movie soundtracks are rolling moodsetters that emotionally ebb & flow along with the action onscreen, which in the case of “Silent Monster May” meant accentuating the pitiable romance & tragedy of horror cinema’s earliest monsters.

The most pitiable monsters in the program were also the most famous, both penned by French literary hero Victor Hugo. Lon Chaney’s aforementioned hunchback, Quasimodo, is ugly-cute like a scraggly stray dog. He lusts after the Romani bombshell Esmeralda while playing voyeur from the upper tiers of Notre Dame’s ornate walls, occasionally descending to join in her community’s orgiastic parties so he can watch her dance along with her other, handsomer suitors. The Hunchback of Notre Dame gets a little sleepy in the middle stretch whenever Esmeralda indulges in romantic flings outside of Quasimodo’s’ crooked view, but Chaney is dependably entertaining as the lovelorn monster in every scene which he appears. Not only is “The Man of a Thousand Faces” notoriously talented at transforming himself through rudimentary prosthetics, but he also proves to be an impressive stunt performer here; he crawls all over the church’s exterior walls and hangs upside down from the ropes of its ringing bells like an impish Tom Cruise with wagging tongue & protruding eye. He is, unquestionably, a silent horror movie star, and he carries that burden on his bulging, knotted shoulder with apparent ease.

1928’s The Man Who Laughs also presented a kind of silent-horror celebrity, although one associated less with an actor than with pop-culture IP. Conrad Veidt’s titular laughing man is most famous for having inspired the design for Batman’s arch nemesis, The Joker, which would be immediately apparent to any modern audience who catches a glimpse of his Glasgow smile. Paul Leni’s post-German Expressionist adaptation of Hugo’s novel says less about comic books than it does about the ever-evolving history of Universal horror movies, though. Since they’re no longer considered scary, the modern take on Universal’s famous monsters is that they’re tragic figures, sympathetic victims of society’s ills. The Man Who Laughs didn’t waste any time waiting around for that reclamation; the laughing man’s only monstrous quality is a surgical disfigurement that makes him look extremely friendly, however grotesque. Its circus-carny setting (the only place a permanently smiling abomination could find work) also positions it as a softer, kinder version of Freaks, which Tod Browning would soon direct for MGM. Like every monster in this series, he’s just looking for love, but the world around him is too cruel to allow it. It wouldn’t even qualify as a monster movie at all if it weren’t for the disturbing intensity of Conrad Veidt’s facial contortions, which he intentionally undercuts by reflecting deep wells of pain from behind his watery eyes.

Because the legends of Lon Chaney and The Joker came with their own pre-packaged expectations, I was most impressed by the 1920 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, which is saddled with a much lighter load of modern scholarship & hype. Admittedly, it’s been several decades since I last read its Robert Louis Stevenson source material, but I don’t remember quite so much of the original Jekyll & Hyde novel being set in a strip club & brothel, so the silent movie version largely took me by surprise. John Barrymore plays the virtuous Dr. Jekyll, whose future father-in-law and other colleagues find unnerving for his high morals and buttoned-up demeanor. So, they drag him to the local house of pleasure to catch a glimpse of the real him and, thus, trigger his first ever crisis of conscience. Jekyll doesn’t especially enjoy feeling adulterous lust for the first time in his life, so he invents the mad-scientist concoction that separates his monstrous impulses into the dastardly doppelganger Mr. Hyde. It’s a continually relatable story about the fact that there’s a lecherous pervert lurking in all of us, desperate to claw its way out at the slightest wayward temptation. As a result, it’s not only a great monster movie but also a great strip club movie, placing its dual nature early in the lineages of both Striptease and The Substance — the full Demi Moore spectrum.

All of these vintage monster flicks are highly demanding on the modern attention span, but well worth the effort. The color-tinted frames that distinguish their interior-exterior settings (like the pink hue of Jekyll’s brothel and the cold blue of Hyde’s moonlight strolls) and the massive scale of their crowd scenes (like the castle-storming sequence of Hunchback, wherein Quasimodo scalds the crowds below with vats of molten lead) are remarkably, inextricably cinematic for an artform that was still working to distinguish itself from the moods & methods of stage theatre. You just have to put down your smartphone long enough to witness them. Even with the distracting sounds of traffic, parties, and general urbanite mayhem occasionally audible through Zeitgeist’s theater walls, it’s much easier to lock into the wavelengths of these cinematic relics than it would be at home, especially with the guiding hand of a live piano score reacting to each scene’s emotional gearshifts in real time. If you have any interest in silent era cinema, there’s no better way to experience its old-world magic in New Orleans than to keep up with David Bradley’s microcinema concerts. I’ll be returning to them soon myself, and I’ll hopefully meet more classic movie monsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet

The Hardest Working Prop in Hollywood

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Until 1956’s Forbidden Planet screened at The Prytania last week, I had only ever watched it as a VHS tape, fuzzed out and color-faded on a squared-off TV screen. It’s easy to take the movie for granted as an Atomic Age sci-fi novelty in that format, where it resembles any number of 1950s space adventures of the Buck Rogers mold. Revisiting it in CinemaScope on the big screen painted a much clearer picture of just how extravagant its production was for that genre. If anything, Forbidden Planet is the Atomic Age sci-fi novelty. Between its flying saucers, laser battles, psychic monsters, synthesizers, mini-skirted alien babes, and Mid-Century Modern decor, it stands as the Platonic ideal of Atomic Age sci-fi, a perfect specimen. Its influence on all space-adventure sci-fi to follow is also glaringly apparent in retrospect. Within the first five minutes, the Earthling astronaut heroes step into a light-beam transporter device that looks suspiciously like the ones on Star Trek; the yellow text scroll of its original trailer looks suspiciously like the opening prologues of classic Star Wars films. Not for nothing, composers Bebe & Louis Barron’s far-out analog synth soundtrack is also cited as the first feature-length electronic score in movie history, overloaded with futuristic beep-boop sounds that would change the shape of music forever, in cinema and beyond. I was delighted by the Barrons’ opening credit for “electronic tonalities,” since what they were doing with their self-invented gadgetry was so experimental the studio unions weren’t convinced it technically qualified as music. I was even more delighted by the similar credit “introducing Robby the Robot” in that sequence, though, as if Forbidden Planet‘s breakout robo-star was a working actor instead of a movie prop.

Robby the Robot should be familiar to any movie lover regardless of their personal interest in Atomic Age sci-fi or whether they know Robby by name. His image is synonymous with the genre, to the point where he earned the nickname “the hardest working robot in Hollywood” for how often he was referenced in other works. Robby has dozens of acting credits on IMDb, ranging from speaking roles in vintage TV shows like Lost in Space, Twilight Zone, and Columbo to uncredited background cameos in Gremlins, Explorers, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and even a few movies not directed by Joe Dante. His continued popularity after his “introduction” in Forbidden Planet was at least partly genuine, since he is an instant charmer in that big screen debut. Robby was introduced to audiences as a kind of robot butler & 3D printer, always available to serve cocktails and fabricate gem-studded haute couture gowns at the simplest request. His flat vocal affect (provided by actual-human actor Marvin Miller) and his overly buff body design also made him an oddly manly screen presence, so bulkily muscular that he had to toddle across the screen like a baby taking its first steps. A lot of Robby’s continued public circulation after Forbidden Planet was an effort from MGM to recoup a return on investment, though, since his construction for his introductory film appearance was exorbitantly expensive, estimated at nearly 7% of the film’s overall budget. That money was put to great use, affording Forbidden Planet a recognizable mascot that could sell tickets with his coneheaded good looks and dry robotic wit, but it was a huge gamble to invest so much of the special effects budget on a single prop. The only way to justify the expense, really, was to put the robot to work.

Without question, the most bizarre ploy to squeeze more return on investment out of Robby’s robo-body came the immediate year after Forbidden Planet, when the sci-fi mascot was once again billed as a big-name actor in the children’s comedy The Invisible Boy. Robby’s second acting credit only does the bare minimum to justify the logic of his screen presence, gesturing towards an offscreen time travel device that connects its 1950s suburbia setting to a future century when Robby could’ve conceivably traveled to Earth after the events of Forbidden Planet. All of this half-baked lore is effectively contained to a single postcard, briefly discussed by the father-son duo who hog most of the runtime. Personally, I prefer to take the opening credits at face value, agreeing to a reality where Robby is a working actor whose appearance onscreen doesn’t need to be narratively justified any more than his human costars’. The important thing is that Robby is given the opportunity to make friends with a young nerd in the American suburbs, offering some direct-to-consumer wish fulfillment for the target audience of sci-fi adventures like Forbidden Planet. Then, a dirty Commie supercomputer hijacks Robby’s programming, temporarily turning him evil and overriding his prime objective to do no harm to living beings. He gets up to increasingly ridiculous, nefarious deeds in his second outing: turning the young boy invisible, kidnapping him to the moon, and getting hit with a military-grade flamethrower for his troubles. Then, he finally snaps out of it and becomes the Robby we all know & love in the final scene. All’s well that ends well, I guess, as long as you don’t pay too much attention to the Father Knows Best familial dynamics that continue in the subtly abusive family home Robby invades, in which spankings are frequent and other expressions of parental affection are difficult to come by.

The Invisible Boy is kiddie stuff, but it’s at least memorably deranged kiddie stuff. There’s a brief comedic sequence after Robby first turns his young friend invisible that threatens to run out the rest of the runtime with slapstick hijinks (again, mostly involving unseen spankings). Instead, the movie gets admirably bizarre in its scene-to-scene plotting, diverting attention from Robby’s new homelife to the evil machinations of a treasonous supercomputer, hellbent on ruling the world in an AI takeover by hypnotizing the humans at its controls. That computer is about the size of an average home’s living room, but it’s said to contain the sum total of human knowledge in its memory banks the same way the cavernous underground computers in Forbidden Planet were explained to contain the sum total of space-alien Krell knowledge. Any of The Invisible Boy‘s direct connections to Forbidden Planet could only diminish it in comparison, though, since that bigger-budgeted work was set entirely in a sound stage otherworld (the first of its kind in that regard as well), while the action sequences of its kinda-sorta follow-up mostly amount to military goons firing blanks at its most expensive prop in an open, barren field. Whenever Robby’s not onscreen in The Invisible Boy, the audience is asking, “Where’s Robby?,” whereas he’s just one of many wonders in Forbidden Planet, competing with flying saucers, psychic monsters, and laser battles for the audience’s attention. It sure is fun to imagine what life would be like with Robby hanging around as your big, buff robo-butler as a child, though, which makes the overall appeal of The Invisible Boy immediately apparent. We all wish we could spend more quality time with our good friend Robby, which is partly why he has never truly gone away. He’s always hanging around in the background somewhere, chilling and collecting royalty checks from past acting gigs.

-Brandon Ledet

Deren to Dream

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The biggest shakeup for me on the latest edition of the Sight & Sound Top 100 list was not the much-discussed displacement of Hitchcock’s Vertigo from the #1 slot by Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, but the total elimination of one of the precious few short films on the list: Buñuel & Dalí’s 1920s surrealist landmark Un Chien Andalou. The only thing that lessened the sting of that loss from the canon-defining list was that another surreal masterwork was added to take its place: Maya Deren’s 1940s follow-up Meshes of the Afternoon. Whereas Un Chien Andalou is a free-association free-for-all that defies any ascribed linear narrative, Deren’s later mutation offers more tangible themes, characters, and progression from scene to scene. Remarkably, it loses none of the dream-logic surrealism in the process, simulating the out-of-body experience of a young woman taking an ill-advised afternoon nap and becoming unmoored from reality as a result. Like Un Chien Andalou, its dreamworld iconography is foundational to the artform, recalling monumental works to follow as daunting & disparate as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. Often cited as “The Mother of the Avant-Garde,” Deren collaborated with then-husband Alexander Hammid to translate her artistic background in dance & poetry to reinvent cinema as a medium in works like Meshes. She traveled internationally with her films, staging lectures & debates to reshape public perception of what The Movies are and what they could be. Anyone who watches Meshes of the Afternoon instantly understands her to be one of the medium’s all-time greats, just as worthy of prominence on the Sight & Sound list as Buñuel (who, as of 2022, has fallen off the publication’s prestigious Top 100 list entirely).

So, after years of respecting Deren as one of the all-time greats based on that one title alone, I figured I was overdue to catch up with the rest of her work. Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray disc The Maya Deren Collection is as good of a crash course in her greater catalog as any, making for a much clearer, more concise compendium than the Wikipedia articles listing her most notable works among her unfinished projects. After spending an evening with that collection, it’s clear to me that Deren has at least a trio of films worthy of the all-timer status Meshes now enjoys. 1944’s At Land and 1946’s Ritual in Transfigured Time are just as essential to appreciating Deren’s artistry as Meshes of the Afternoon, something Deren seemed to be aware of herself when she screened that exact trilogy under the banner “Three Abandoned Films” in New York City in 1946, in one of her earliest art-scene triumphs. For its part, At Land feels like a direct beach-trip sequel to Meshes, like those TV movie sequels to sitcoms where the cast goes on a tropical vacation. Deren’s dazed everywoman washes up on a mysterious shore, then impossibly sprints through interior & exterior spaces in the exact looping, interpretive-dance logic she puzzles her way through in Meshes. By the time she made Ritual in Transfigured Time, she feels more firmly rooted in New York City, staging an East Coast cocktail party where guests continually move affectionately towards each other but never convincingly make contact — every single interaction belonging in the next day’s “Missed Connections” newspaper column. As a trio, they hardly feel like Deren’s “abandoned films”; they’re by far her most convincingly complete, accomplished works.

The other Deren titles considered to be her major works all register as camera tests, sparks of ideas put to greater use in her “Three Abandoned Films” masterworks. The most stunning of these camera tests is 1945’s A Study in Chorography for the Camera, in which a muscular dancer spins with such precise, relentless fury that he stops resembling a ballerino and starts resembling a multi-faced deity. That ferocity is again echoed in 1948’s Meditation on Violence, which similarly documents & abstracts the dance-like movements of a Wu-Tang style martial artist, teetering on the border between ballet & violence. By the time Deren got to the 1950s, her ideas were less cutting-edge but no less fascinating, culminating in the film-negative outer space fantasia of 1955’s The Very Eye of Night, in which balletic performers are superimposed over the Zodiacal cosmos. Any one of these shorts would kill as a background projection at a hipster house party or a living room punk show, emphasizing visual splendor over theme or narrative. As a group, they feel like watching an avant-garde filmmaker invent the music video as a medium in real time, which is a bizarre takeaway given that they are intentionally silent, with no sound component to match the musicality of their dancers’ movements. The way she manipulates those movements by playing with projection speeds and backwards looping in the edit are interesting as standalone ideas, but those ideas are put to much more coherent use in, say, the backwards tides of At Land or the freeze-frame human statues of Transfigured Time.

The most baffling entries in Deren’s filmography are the ones where sound was added in later edits. Whereas At Land will feature silent footage characters engaging in a vigorous walk-and-talk, 1947’s The Private Life of a Cat has since been edited to include a narration track that explains every action & intention of its subjects. The result practically feels like an industrial or educational short for a 1950s Biology classroom, to the point where it’s confusing to see it listed as an “experimental film” at all. I cannot tell if that designation carries on because of who made it, when it was made, or because of how notoriously difficult it is to work with cats. In any case, Deren & Hammid document the live birth & early parenting of a litter of kittens in their NYC apartment, later ascribed meaning in narration that compares the domesticity of the modern housecat against the ferocity of their wild-predator ancestors. It’s one of the longest titles and also one of the most straightforward, a combination repeated in her final work, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, which was completed posthumously in the 1970s. Divine Horsemen looks & sounds like Anthropology 101 homework, documenting the dancing rituals of Vodou religious practices, which became a major interest of Deren’s late in her life. At nearly an hour in length, though, the relentlessness of the dancing does gradually evoke a kind of genuine delirium in the audience, especially if you can tune out the dryly academic narration track added after her death. As Deren’s films got less visually experimental, they paradoxically became more aligned with the ritualism of Kenneth Anger’s work, just with different spiritual interests. She was more interested in Vodou than in cinema, only using the latter to access the physical poetry of the former.

Frustratingly, the rest of Maya Deren’s catalog appears to be unfinished or unpublished in one way or another. I could find no useful information about 1949’s Medusa or 1959’s Season of Strangers other than their online listings in her filmography. Meanwhile, 1951’s Ensemble for Somnambulists did not make the cut for the Kino Lorber disc, but once you watch it on YouTube, the reason for its exclusion is immediately apparent. It feels like an early-sketch camera test for the film-negative space ballet of The Very Eye of Night, which itself is already thinly conceived. The only exclusion from Kino’s Maya Deren Collection that I can really fault is 1944’s The Witch’s Cradle, which pulls on the same artistic strings as her masterful trio of “Abandoned Films.” Unlike that now-canonized trio, The Witch’s Cradle was actually abandoned in that it was left unfinished, but its surviving footage (also available on YouTube) features some of her most strikingly surreal, darkly magical images. Its cloistered apartment setting and yarn-stringed spiderwebs suggest that Deren reworked its basic ideas into the more accomplished & coherent Transfigured Time, but it’s got enough of its own distinct texture & personality that I wish she saw the project through to completion. In general, her filmography feels frustratingly incomplete, since cinema only appears to have been one of her many artistic & spiritual interests, among poetry, dance, Vodou ritual, Leftist labor organizing, and whatever else struck her fancy on the fringes of NYC social life. She pounced on the medium with great ferocity, then wandered away from it like a bored housecat, distracted by her next momentary prey. Even the three great works we got out of her before she moved on were self-described as “Abandoned Films,” a series of dreams that she awoke from, dazed.

-Brandon Ledet

Smells Like Dean Spirit

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James Dean has been on my mind a lot lately, and not entirely by choice. New Orleans is lucky to now have two weekly repertory programs in Gap Tooth and Rene Brunet’s Classic Movies, where until recently we only had the latter. The two series both operate in their own hermetic headspaces, and their weekly film selections rarely speak to each other in any discernible way. So, it was a little jarring that the same week Gap Tooth screened David Cronenberg’s Crash, in which Elias Koteas restages James Dean’s vehicular death as an act of ritualistic foreplay, The Prytania happened to program Dean’s major bid at traditional movie stardom: the 1955 Steinbeck adaptation East of Eden. This was a coincidence, of course, as the two films are only truly linked in their shared highlight of James Dean as an Old Hollywood icon – a status solidified by Eden and later perverted by Crash. What struck me about that coincidence was a reminder during Harry Griffin’s introduction to East of Eden that Dean had only filmed three major film roles before his shocking death at age 24, two of which received posthumous Oscar nominations after his infamous car wreck. It was simple math, but I couldn’t help but dwell on the equation as the pre-film Looney Tunes short rolled . . . If we had already covered James Dean’s performance in the epic melodrama Giant a couple years back, and I was about to see his most prestigious performance in East of Eden, that means I’d only have one Dean role left to see to complete the trio. Wait a second, how had I gotten that far into his filmography without having seen his most iconic role in Rebel Without a Cause, the one that made him a star? Isn’t it a little weird that I’ve repeatedly watched James Spader get a boner at the thought of Dean’s death in Crash, or Tommy Wiseau whine “You’re tearing me apart!” at top volume in grotesque Dean caricature in The Room, but I’ve never bothered to witness Dean in all of his teen-rebel glory first-hand? I felt some deep shame about this realization all the way through East of Eden‘s blank-screen overture, making a mental note to finish my homework as soon as I got home.

Thinking back on it now, my lack of urgency in catching up with James Dean’s filmography might be that I felt as if I already knew everything I needed to know about him from still photographs. This assumption was, of course, ludicrous. In my mind, James Dean was a cool, laidback bad boy, forever leaning on a nearby tree with a cigarette hanging causally from his lips. That’s what he conveys as a photographic model, anyway: 1950s devil-may-care machismo. His actual movie roles tell an entirely different story. In both Rebel Without a Cause & East of Eden, Dean is a gnarled knot of dorky teenage emotions, more hormones than man. His brow is forever furrowed in some internal debate about what to do with his awkward body next, seemingly always on the verge of sex or violence but choosing to whine in agony instead. His infamous “You’re tearing me apart!” line reading where he contorts his face in Mad Magazine-style caricature arrives mere minutes into the film’s opening sequence, not its emotional climax. We meet Dean as a rich-boy teen reprobate spending the night in his local police station’s drunk tank until his mentally checked-out parents arrive to throw money at the problem, bailing him out. Sure, he looks cool in his iconic red bomber jacket, which director Nicholas Ray transforms into a pop-art fashion piece just as iconic as Dorothy’s ruby slippers or that little squiggle on Charlie Brown’s t-shirt. Dean’s road-to-ruin antics as a teen rebel in peril are just far more anguished & whiny than you’d expect from the movie’s still frames. Onscreen, he expresses way more of the hormone-addled anxiety of being an actual teenager than he does the idealized teen-rebel cool you’ll see him exude as a still image on dorm room posters. I have to assume that’s a major factor as to why he was so popular with the youth of the era. The basic concept of a “teenager” was a Boomer-generation invention in the wake of WWII, and James Dean was there at ground zero to embody the exact puberty-pained animalism that defines that state of being – just as much of a hormonal monster as The Teenage Werewolf.

There’s some exciting tension in watching Studio System directors like Nicholas Ray & Elia Kazan attempt to match Dean’s off-kilter method actor energy in their filmmaking style. For his part, Ray goes full pop art, blowing up the Roger Corman teen crime picture to blockbuster scale. Elia Kazan is a little more subdued in East of Eden, taking the historical literature origins of its source text just as sincerely & somberly as George Stevens does in Giant. That is, until you get to the scenes in which Dean fights with his father. Surprisingly, East of Eden is just as much of a “Parents just don’t understand!” teen screed as Rebel Without a Cause, except instead of Dean’s internal crisis being triggered by his own participation in a deadly game of chicken, he’s challenged by the discovery that his estranged mother is not, as he was originally told, dead; she’s just the madame of a popular brothel one town over. This puts the sheltered farm boy at direct odds with his overly pious father, who’s always treated him with an unspoken disgust as the product of his mother’s sins. The film is grandiose in scale, using its wide CinemaScope framing to capture the great rural expanse of turn-of-the-century America. Then, in scenes where Dean’s protagonist confronts his father in domestic squabbles, that same CinemaScopic frame feels wildly inappropriate. Kazan (in collaboration with cinematographer Ted McCord) tilts the camera at extreme Dutch angles during their indoor power struggles, matching Dean’s off-kilter emotional state with a literally off-kilter camera. It’s an outright perverse use of the CinemaScope format, especially during a third-act fight when Dean menacingly lunges at his father from a tree-rope swing and the camera see-saws in either direction with every sway. It’s so disorienting that it’s nauseating. Ray pulls a similar trick in Rebel Without a Cause, often shooting Dean from an extreme low angle that emphasizes the potential for violence in his character’s big teenage emotions and newly embiggened teenage body. The fact that Dean was visibly in his 20s playing these roles only makes the images more confusing & grotesque.

All of James Dean’s teenage whininess, awkwardness, and animalistic capacity for violence are front & center in these leading-man roles, and they do nothing to diminish his sex appeal. In East of Eden, he unwittingly woos his brother’s buttoned-up fiancée, who finds herself jealous of the sexual freedom the local “bad girls” get to enjoy while following him around like puppies. In Rebel Without a Cause, he goes out of his way to woo a local bad girl, and he happens to pick up a homosexual admirer along the way in Sal Mineo, who likewise makes puppy eyes at his chosen master. These wayward teenage girls (& boy) sense a kindred spirit in Dean’s open-hearted rebelliousness, admiring the way he expresses their internal emotional torment on his movie-star-handsome exterior. He wasn’t explosively popular because he looked cool smoking a cigarette; he was popular because he was wildly uncool – overheated, even. In retrospect, that makes the perversion of his iconography in Crash even funnier in retrospect, given that Cronenberg’s characters are all deliberately stripped of any discernible human emotion, making them the philosophical opposite of the idol whose death they worship. It’s the rare occasion where one of our weekly local classic movie screenings helped directly inform the other, instead of acting as cross-town counterprogramming. I thought more about James Dean that week than I previously had in my entire life, and I feel like I get him now. I can also now definitively confirm that, yes, East of Eden is his most accomplished performance, if not only because there’s so little competition.

-Brandon Ledet

Boomer’s Best-of-the-Year Oversights, Part Two (2020-2024)

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In one of our recent end-of-the-year podcast episodes that was partially inspired by my having finally been convinced to watch The Twentieth Century based on my delight in director Matt Rankin’s follow-up feature Universal Language (it was my favorite movie of last year!), Brandon read off a list of film titles that he asked me to identify as a kind of makeshift quiz. Those titles were all films that had been on the Swampflix Top Ten list for their eligible year, and which I had not seen at the time of the relevant list’s publication. I’m not a completionist by nature, but with an upcoming collaborative project, I took that list as homework and got to work filling out these blind spots to determine if the listed films would have made my own end-of-the-year list if I had seen them in time. Part One of that journey can be found here. Now, come along with me for part two: 2020-2024.

2020: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Deerskin – Watched March 27, 2024

Upon Review: I, like Brandon, consistently find myself drawn to the work of Quentin Dupieux. Rubber was heavily discussed in the pretentious collegiate film circles I ran with in my youth and I had an absolute hoot of a time with Smoking Causes Coughing, which was on my 2023 end of the year list. This one somehow just slipped past me when it came out, but I did finally watch it over a year ago, and it’s stuck with me. This film, about a jacket that compels its owner to go to increasingly violent lengths in order to ensure that it is the only jacket in the world (although whether this is actually an act by a conscious entity or merely the main character’s delusion is ambiguous), is a lot of fun. Dupieux could probably have made the whole film work on that premise alone, but the complication of a local woman who buys his story that he’s in town to make a documentary starts to cut together his murder footage into something coherent, the film really goes above and beyond. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes, absolutely.

The Wolf House – Watched March 18, 2026

Upon Review: A marvelous picture, top to bottom. Animation in styles I’ve never seen before or ever even considered were possible. The film is an in-universe propaganda piece about obeying your overseers in the form of a fairy tale that vacillates between stop motion, nontraditional versions of traditional animation styles in the form of time lapse painting directly onto a wall, filled with images both beautiful and grotesque. A masterpiece. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Swallow – Watched February 17, 2026

Upon Review: This film was released in March of 2020, which is why I didn’t see it. I was planning to, however, as I was anxiously anticipating its release after seeing trailers for it for a couple of months that led up to lockdown. Unlike a lot of people (who survived the pandemic), I was not someone who was suddenly blessed with an abundance of free time to make sourdough or practice guitar; my lockdown experience was a constant vacillation between twelve hour workdays and primal, rodent-like fear about the future. I don’t even remember learning that this one had ever come to streaming, and while that’s unfortunate, I also don’t think that I would have appreciated this one in its time. Perhaps it’s because Swallow, unlike The Lighthouse, is primarily concerned with the quiet, hidden, self-destructive habits that emerge from the unholy marriage of isolated boredom and previous traumas, while The Lighthouse’s frenetic madness was much more like what I experienced in quarantine. Haley Bennett is wonderful here in her understated feelings of inadequacy in the presence of her in-law social betters who are universally her moral inferiors, and I loved the performance from Elizabeth Marvel as her seemingly warm but ultimately villainous mother-in-law. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but for the wrong reasons. I wouldn’t have been in the headspace to appreciate this when I would have gotten the chance to see it. 

Possessor – Watched February 11, 2026

Upon Review: This one simply slipped past me in the stream. The Lagniappe Podcast crew watched 2012’s Antiviral in 2023, the same year that Infinity Pool released, and although I very much enjoyed the older film, I could only recognize Infinity Pool for its technical accomplishments as I could not connect with it in the least (Brandon was much more positive). A couple of years ago, I remembered that Possessor was well received at Swampflix, but I ended up watching Malignant (which I disliked but which, again, Brandon had more positive things to say about) instead due to some confusion and am only now working my way back to this one. What a ride! Possessor is an absolutely fantastic piece of art from start to finish. Andrea Riseborough plays a woman who, under guidance from Jennifer Jason Leigh, hijacks the bodies of innocent people through technological trickery and then uses them to assassinate targets. Her most recent possessee is Christopher Abbot, and as she starts to lose herself in more ways than one, she ends up fighting for domination of his body, while he manages to get a glimpse of her family and turns what shambles of a life she has upside down as he tries to figure out what’s happening to him. Gorgeously shot, masterfully performed, drenched in color, and featuring an appearance from Tiio Horn, one of my favorite underrated Canadian performers, this was a delight. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes, absolutely.

The Twentieth Century – Watched December 4, 2025

Upon Review: The viewing of this film for our 2025 retrospective on previous films by some of our favorite directors of that year precipitated the very project that you’re currently reading. Director Matthew Rankin’s 2025 feature Universal Language was my favorite film of the year, and The Twentieth Century is an even more delightful picture, an utterly demented look at the career of W.L.M. King, a not particularly well remembered Canadian Prime Minister, complete with visits to “The Flesh Pits of Winnipeg,” whack-a-mole seal clubbing as part of the candidacy for governance, and the future of our neighbors to the north being determined by an ice skating race through a mirrored labyrinth. One of the funniest movies that I have ever seen. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Absolutely; it would have hit the top 5.

2021: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar – Watched February 20, 2026

Upon Review: Part Josie and the Pussycats, part Romy and Michele, part SNL sketch, and just a dash of Muriel’s Wedding, this Kristen Wiig/Annie Mumolo North Dakota besties-on-vacation comedy is a delight. I love it when a comedy is so perfectly constructed that it scratches that same little itch in one’s brain that a cleverly crafted mystery story does. Everything pays off in the end: the sharp seashell bracelets, the seafood festival queen’s bizarre human cannonball tradition, and even an ocean spirit named Trish. All that, and Jamie Dornan sings to a seagull while flexing on a beach. What more could one ask for? 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Mandibles – Watched January 24, 2026

Upon Review: I didn’t have much fun with this one for its first half, which features two clinically brain dead losers stumbling upon a captive giant fly and coming up with a hairbrained scheme to teach it to rob banks on their behalf. Upon discovery of the beast, they spend some time trying to find a location to “train” it, eventually discovering a remote trailer home whose occupant they force out and which the slightly taller and dumber of the two almost immediately burns down in a cooking mishap. From there they set out on the road to refuel their (stolen) car, at which point they run into a woman who believes that the taller idiot is her high school athlete boyfriend, and invites the two of them to her parents’ home for a bit. This is where things started to become much funnier and more enjoyable, as there is a woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos) there who can’t control her vocal volume, and the film never lets up on its comedy from there. At a breezy eighty minutes, this is worth sitting through the less exciting first half to get to the hilarious last forty. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Lapsis – Watched January 27, 2026

Upon Review: This one feels even more prescient now than it did five years ago. A man with limited employable skills takes a gig economy job as a “cabler,” which involves him going on physically demanding hikes to run miles and miles of electronic cord to connect quantum computers that appear to be used almost solely for financial transactions. The impetus for this is the ongoing chronic illness from which his younger brother seemingly suffers; on the trail, he meets a series of other cablers who fill him in on the backstory of the company, specifically the way that it gamifies obsolescence in the form of forcing the cablers to compete with automatons, and try to introduce him to the concept of collective action. In the past year, I’ve seen my city overrun with driverless cars operated by “Waymo,” and my antipathy toward them makes some people uncomfortable. For me, it was already morally and ethically wrong for rideshare companies to infiltrate urban markets, drive out any taxi/cab infrastructure already in place through lower pricing, then immediately raise those prices sky high the moment that they achieved market dominance. The only positive that came from it was the “agency” that these companies offered to drivers to “be [their] own boss” and “set [their] own hours,” which these new automated rideshares will likewise eventually displace, creating further shareholder value for people who are already rich enough and drive more gig workers into economic desperation. Lapsis, although it occasionally seems like it might be close to running out of steam, creates a dim-witted viewpoint character to try to recite all of the company lines about the positives of gig work and be educated otherwise. It sounds preachy, but the indie film budget, values, and casting of this one make it work. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

The Power of the Dog – Watched February 27, 2026

Upon Review: I’m not terribly familiar with Jane Campion’s filmography outside of The Piano and her TV work on the Elisabeth Moss series Top of the Lake (which I loved), but if you had asked me to describe what I thought her work was like, I probably would have described Power of the Dog. The film is very well made, featuring gorgeous cinematography of beautiful rural vistas, evocatively portraying the isolation of the Burbank house and its lands, and well-acted by all participants, even Benedict Cumberbatch, who I’m never excited to see on screen. It’s also a movie that left me fairly cold and uninvested despite all of its prestige and craftsmanship. Phil Burbank (Cumberbatch) is a deeply unpleasant man deeply in the closet who mistreats his brother George (Jesse Plemmons), and drives George’s new wife (Kirsten Dunst) to alcoholism via his psychological torment of both her and his new step-nephew, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who eventually bites back. It’s all very good, but it didn’t connect with me at all, unfortunately. 3.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No.

2022: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

RRR – Watched February 25, 2026

Upon Review: What an absolute thrill! I’ve been a strong proponent of director S. S. Rajamouli’s work for a long time, ever since I first saw Baahubali 2 on the big screen (for more about that, and for our Lagniappe discussion of both Baahubali films, click here). RRR simply slipped past me in the stream; if it got a theatrical release in my city, I either missed it or was hiding out from the latest COVID variant when it screened, and it came to Netflix after I had cancelled my subscription to that service. I’m terribly sorry to have missed this one, a film about two men who find themselves on seemingly opposite sides of the British Raj of the 1920s: Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.), a man from the Gond tribe who comes to New Delhi to find a young girl who was stolen from their village by the wife of the British governor, and Rama Raju (Ram Charan), an Indian quisling working for the British occupiers who has been sent undercover to locate and root out the Gond tribe members who have come to the city. The two of them engage in the physics-defying rescue of a young boy from a train accident aboard a bridge, and the two of them immediately fall into passionate love with one another. This isn’t textual, of course; both have token lady love interests (the sweet English Jenny who sympathizes with the oppressed for Bheem and childhood sweetheart Sita for Raju), but let’s not kid ourselves. At the midpoint of the film, there’s a major twist that I won’t spoil, but it’s a very satisfying upending of all of the pieces on the board at this point, and I found myself coming close to cheering approximately every ten minutes for the film’s final act. Could not recommend more highly. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Funny Pages – Watched March 3, 2026

Upon Review: I first noticed actor Daniel Zolghadri in last year’s Lurker, and was pleasantly surprised to see him turn up again as one of Rose Byrne’s obsessed patients in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. He was so fresh-faced in his clean-shaven role as the would-be date rapist in Eighth Grade that it took quite a while to recognize him there, and that film used his youthful, innocent boyishness effectively by revealing the predatory nature behind his big, dark, trustworthy eyes. Funny Pages, which was sold to me as a Holdovers-esque misadventure between a high schooler and a crabby old man, likewise plays to the beardless Zolghadri’s juvenile naivete by casting him as an utterly irredeemable ingrate who seems to float by on nothing more than other people’s fondness for him. Zolghadri’s Robert is a seventeen year old who witnesses the tragic death of his beloved art teacher and decides to drop out of school to pursue his dream of being a cartoonist. To this end, he moves into a hellish basement apartment and takes a job working at the DA’s office as a floating office assistant, where he comes into contact with Wallace (Matthew Maher), a dangerous and unwell man who worked for Image Comics years ago, a fact that Robert latches onto. Here’s the thing—I didn’t find this to be funny at all. (I laughed precisely once, when Wallace claimed that “Rob Liefeld’s line work is industry standard.”) That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it, but what spoke to me here wasn’t the film’s particular brand of dark comedy, which I noticed but didn’t respond to; to me, this is a story about a teenage boy who needs to perform creativity and imagination to give his life meaning, and how he seems to have been groomed to accept mistreatment by authority figures by his relationship with Mr. Katano, the art teacher. The one scene we get before he dies finds him stripping down in his office with Robert and having the boy draw him in a caricature style, and even if it’s not predatory, it’s sufficiently inappropriate that Katano follows Robert in order to elicit promises that the boy didn’t “think it was weird.” From there, Robert ends up moving into a hellish situation that brings Barton Fink to mind and where he finds his constantly sweating older roommates masturbating together over Robert’s vintage Tijuana bibles, and where he fixates on getting Wallace’s approval despite the older man’s anti-social violence, until it ends tragically. Grim stuff. 3 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No.

2023: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Priscilla – Watched January 10, 2026

Upon Review: I’m pretty ambivalent about Sofia Coppola, but a lot of that is probably just lingering apathy about her aughts output. Regardless, this is a solid movie that’s at turns poignant, funny, and stomach-churning. Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla Presley in an adaptation of her autobiography in which she detailed the years she was courted by Elvis, then the most famous man in the world. Starting when she was a vulnerable fourteen-year-old girl living in Germany at an army base, Priscilla was pursued by the musician and movie star who was a decade older than her. Jacob Elordi as Elvis was the perfect casting, since he towers over the much shorter Spaeny in a visual invocation of their inherent power imbalance. The script plays cleverly with the King; if you didn’t know anything about him, one could easily interpret him as closeted in this film, given that he adamantly denies affairs with his lady co-stars and rejects them as publicity ploys as well as his complete lack of sexual overtures toward Priscilla for years while dressing her up and installing her at Graceland like a doll. His predation is still creepy and unnerving, but it somehow feels less sinister, while allowing the narrative to focus on Priscilla’s boredom with being locked away in his chintzy tower. Good stuff; 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but it would have made honorable mention. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem – Watched January 31, 2026

Upon Review: I definitely watched the late eighties Ninja Turtles in syndication in the early nineties when I was a kid, and although I remember some core concepts about it, it never imprinted on me enough for me to remember the different turtles’ personalities despite them being recited in the opening theme song. I have a fondness, but I’m not invested. I overlooked this one during a really packed summer, and because I saw a trailer for it before Barbie and saw the MPA’s PG rating assumed it was for kids. And, I mean, it is, but it’s a movie about teenaged mutant ninja turtles; it should be. The roster for non-turtle characters here is populated by A-listers and Seth Rogen’s buddies to presumably draw in a periphery demographic, but the turtles themselves are played by actual teen actors who are unknowns (to me), and they bring an energetic freshness to dialogue that manages to stay just this side of overwritten. Visually, this one is quite a treat as well, with some of the most unique animated visuals I’ve seen since the CGI revolution. I made sure to watch this on a Saturday morning, and I’d recommend others do the same. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but it would have made honorable mention. 

2024: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Taste Of Things – Watched April 12, 2026

Upon Review: I put this one off for a long time. I had no doubt that I would enjoy it, but it’s got a whopper of a run time, and I simply kept finding myself in the mood for something different whenever the opportunity arose. All throughout this procrastination, Brandon repeatedly reminded me that this film would be a pure delight, and although I never doubted him, the time was never quite right. At long last, a perfectly overcast weekend came alone, rainy but not stormy, and I whiled away a perfect afternoon in the company of the always-perfect Juliette Binoche and the less familiar Benoît Magimel, but I was nonetheless perfectly and exquisitely transported to Eugenie’s kitchen. A marvel, worthy of all the accolades it received. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Overlook Film Festival 2026, Ranked & Reviewed

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Self-described as “a summer camp for genre fans,” The Overlook Film Festival has quickly become the best of New Orleans’s local film fests . . . as long as you’re a total sicko. I consistently catch a wide selection of the year’s most stylish, violent, memorable horrors & thrillers in the festival’s lineup, many of which don’t otherwise reach local theaters before they get siphoned off to the cultural void of streaming platforms. It’s a surprisingly sociable experience too, considering that its main attraction is quietly watching movies in the dark. In recent years, all Overlook selections have been corralled to the two locations of The Prytania Theatres, which allows attendees to form a weekend-long bond with fellow movie nerds they continually run into while lining up for the next fucked-up delight. Everyone’s watching too much, sleeping too little, and loving every horrific minute. It really does capture the summer camp slumber party feeling of staying up all night watching scary movies with your friends after the adults fell asleep and can no longer police what’s playing on the TV.

While this year’s Overlook concluded over a week ago for out-of-town attendees, locals have been spoiled with a daily schedule of “lagniappe” screenings that kept the spooky-good vibes going twice as long as the festival proper. It was a decadent indulgence, especially on the afternoon I was able to sneak away from work early to catch the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers screening uptown on 35mm, exhausted & half awake, like Don Draper on a liquid lunch break. That extended Overlook hangover also gave me time to reflect on what I had seen over the busier opening weekend, gathering my hazy thoughts in a week spent writing short-form reviews. Leaving the couple repertory screenings I caught of the 1950s Body Snatchers and Larry Fessenden’s 1990s hipster vampire picture Habit out of it, I’m listing below the ten new-release feature films I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, ranked in the order that I appreciated them, each with a blurb and a link to a corresponding review. For a more detailed recap of the Swampflix Crew’s festival experience beyond these reviews, check out the most recent episode of The Swampflix Podcast.

Buffet Infinity

A Lovecraftian horror story told entirely through local television commercial parodies, in which a small town is swallowed whole by an unholy buffet chain. For all of its high-concept buffoonery, it ends up making a fairly coherent point about how everything decent in the world is currently being devoured in some hostile corporate takeover. Shop local, protect your loved ones, take shelter in the bunker until it’s all over.

The Furious

A child abduction martial arts revenger that solves all the evils of the world with the swing of a hammer, like You Were Never Really Here restaged as an action thriller. Between this & The Forbidden City, it’s already been a great year for legible fight choreography, but this one is way more relentless & brutal. This is very likely the best action movie since RRR, give or take Furiosa. It also very likely means something that every movie I’m referencing happens to be about human trafficking.

Obsession

Turns quirky Movie Girlfriend behavior into a grotesque horror show, delivering the first truly scary Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl. Turns out, the archetype still a little cute even in that context.

New Group

An unofficial Uzumaki spinoff that trades in spirals for human pyramids. This is a delightful headscratcher for audiences of any age, but it’s going to blow the mind of the right teenager who’s watching their first Weird Movie in the phase when their #1 enemy is Conformity.

Buddy

In which Casper “Too Many Cooks” Kelly graduates from one-off Adult Swim novelties to his first fully formed feature, to mixed results. When it sticks to its cursed Barney & Friends episode premise, it lands all of its laughs & scares. When it deviates from that format, it feels like a confession that this should’ve just been another short, since the idea can’t fully sustain itself for feature length.

Hokum

Between this & Oddity, it’s clear Damian McCarthy has a unique talent for constructing an effective jump scare. That’s why it’s a little disappointing this one spends so much time dwelling in Elevated Horror atmosphere instead. There are some exceptional witchy gags in this haunted hotel story, but they’re frustratingly sparse.

Boorman and the Devil

Perfectly captures the alienation of loving movies but hating movie audiences. Who do you side with here? An incurious public who laughed Exorcist II off the screen for taking chances instead of delivering more of the same? Studio executives who lost money on an artistic gamble? Or the artist himself, who improbably staged a literal fever dream on someone else’s dime? Even when this documentary gets cutesy about the mass rejection of the Exorcist sequels, I could feel my blood boiling in general misanthropy.

Leviticus

Supernatural conversion therapy horror set in macho small-town Australia. It shares some cast & crew with Talk to Me, but it plays more like a spiritual sequel to It Follows, making up for that film’s queer oversights

Faces of Death

It turns out to not be such a big deal that the latest Scream sequel was a morally & creatively bankrupt shit show. The new Faces of Death has a lot more to say about modern audiences’ relationship with violent entertainment media than any Scream movie has in at least 15 years. The only letdown is that all of its payoffs are intellectual; it’s not nearly upsetting enough to earn its title, at least not for a desensitized social media addict such as myself.

Mārama

A Māori colonization story set in a kinda-sorta haunted house. It’s the kind of politically furious, grounded-to-reality horror you can tell only dabbles in genre tropes because it’s more difficult to get funding for an arthouse drama on the same subject.

-Brandon Ledet

Buddy (2026) & Adult Swimming at Overlook Film Fest

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One of the unofficial themes of this year’s Overlook Film Festival was the Adult Swimmification of the modern horror comedy, which has gradually emerged as a trend in the last decade of the genre’s furthest-most surreal outliers. Certainly, there have always been post-Tim and Eric, Adult Swim-style horror comedy oddities scattered throughout Overlook’s diverse programming, from the suburban soccer-mom meltdown Greener Grass to the gross-out Frankenstein riff Dead Lover to last year’s festival-wide spotlight on Kuso director Flying Lotus. This year’s Overlook had an even more pronounced Adult Swim presence than usual, though, not least of all due to the omnipresent ambassadorship of The People’s Joker herself, Vera Drew. Ostensibly flown out to participate in a panel about “Techno Horrors in the 21st Century,” Drew could be seen (and heard, thanks to her iconic Jokerfied laugh) at various movies throughout the weekend, taking just as much advantage of her festival pass as anyone else roaming the French Quarter shopping mall hub. The least surprising place to find her, of course, was a double feature of the two most Adult Swim-coded selections in the program, since her own aggressively surreal editing style has helped guide the rhythms of that particular genre niche in projects like Comedy Bang! Bang!, On Cinema at the Cinema, and the aforementioned People’s Joker. Spotting Vera Drew in line for this year’s absurdist horror comedy selections felt like a pre-emptive stamp of approval that we were in the exact right place, swimming with the adults in the horror-comedy deep end.

If any one title could claim to have earned its Adult Swim bona fides, it was Buddy, the debut feature from director Casper Kelly. Kelly first made a name for himself with 2014’s Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks, followed by more recent Adult Swim experiments in the weirdo-comedy block’s Yule Log series. Like those two previous attention-grabbers, Buddy starts as an eerily accurate parody of a long-dead television format, which Kelly then subverts by underlining its most uncanny qualities. After parodying 90s sitcom intros (in Too Many Cooks) and seasonal yule log screensavers (self-explanatory), his first feature begins as a retro episode of Barney & Friends, swapping out the friendly purple dinosaur for an orange unicorn named Buddy. There’s some incredible attention to detail in the cursed children’s TV show set decor, establishing a Pee-wee’s Playhouse style world where every piece of furniture is alive & costumed with googly eyes. Buddy rules over them all as a fascist tyrant, redirecting all attention & behavior from his various “friends” to focus on him at all times, all in the name of mandatory fun. Unfortunately, Kelly then breaks format while sketching about the basic rules of Buddy’s televised universe, leaving that colorful playhouse set for a much more mundane world outside its invisible barriers. When we’re trapped inside the Barney parody with an abusive dictator unicorn, Buddy easily lands all of its discomforting laughs & scares. When Kelly deviates from that format, it feels like a confession that this project should’ve just been another short, since the idea can’t fully sustain itself at feature length.

Simon Glassman’s own directorial debut Buffet Infinity demonstrates a much more admirably stubborn commitment to its own bit. Buffet Infinity tells a surprisingly legible Lovecraftian horror story through a series of local restaurant commercials for fictional businesses in Alberta, Canada. What starts as petty political attack ads between a local mom & pop sandwich shop and a corporate buffet chain quickly escalates into a town-wide hostile takeover, with an entire community swallowed whole by a single insatiable restaurant franchise. Its individual commercial parodies recall the awkward sub-professional sketch comedy of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, edited together with the relentless intensity of an Everything is Terrible! mixtape. For all of its high-concept buffoonery, though, it still makes a fairly coherent point about how everything decent in the world is currently being devoured in some soulless corporate acquisition. All of the quaint hometown flavor of your neighborhood sandwich shop’s family-recipe “secret sauce” is being obliterated by grotesquely underpriced, overstuffed fast-food deals for meat-tower monstrosities with names like “The Beyond Comprehension Burger.” Buffet Infinity urges you to shop local, protect your loved ones, and take shelter until this soulless corporate takeover is all over.

I don’t think the full story of what Casper Kelly’s Buddy means in the current moment of post-Adult Swim absurdist comedy will be clear for some time. The film is still seeking a theatrical distributor after its mixed-reviews premiere at Sundance, and its public perception won’t fully solidify until it can be compared to the other upcoming Barney subversion, improbably reported to be written by Ayo Edrbiri and produced by Daniel Kaluuya. Meanwhile, Buffet Infinity is a self-contained, fully realized project with contracted distribution in the works from Yellow Veil, to be enjoyed by freaked-out stoners everywhere by the end of the year. Together, they made for a perfectly overwhelming double feature at this year’s Overlook, likely the strangest pairing I’ve seen at the fest since I watched Greener Grass back-to-back with Peter Strickland’s killer-dress anthology In Fabric in 2019. Praise be to the Overlook programmers for their longtime commitment to keeping the Adult Swim spirit alive at the festival, love & respect to Vera Drew for acting as that spirit’s living mascot at this year’s fest, good luck to Casper Kelly for finding his way out of his current distribution limbo, congratulations to Glassman, hail Satan, and all the rest.

-Brandon Ledet

Hokum (2026) & Ghostless Hauntings at Overlook Film Fest

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Damien McCarthy quickly became a legend at The Overlook when the festival screened his 2024 spookshow Oddity to a loudly reactive crowd, then snuck in one last scare on the way out by propping up its creepy wooden puppet at the theater’s only exit. Oddity had great word of mouth in the queues between showtimes that year, celebrated as the rare movie to actually scare the jaded horror-nerd audiences who’ve already seen it all. McCarthy’s return to the festival with 2026’s Hokum was highly anticipated, then, boosted by the savvy marketing team at Neon and the name-recognition star wattage of Adam Scott. With Hokum, McCarthy once again demonstrated a unique talent for constructing an effective jump scare (even eliciting a top-volume scream from a fellow Swampflixer, whom I will not name & shame in this review). That’s why it’s a little disappointing that the scares are so sparse in this bigger-budget follow-up, where McCarthy is determined to dwell in Elevated Horror atmosphere instead of routinely setting up & knocking out the scare gags he stages so well. Although each were effective, I can count Hokum‘s memorable scares on a single hand, while the majority of its runtime was spent exploring every inch of its haunted hotel setting in near silence.

A spooky atmosphere goes a long way, though, and McCarthy makes intriguing use of Hokum‘s haunted hotel location by sidestepping the type of supernatural ghoul you’d typically expect to confront there. Adam Scott stars as an asshole alcoholic novelist who’s hoping to spend a few days quietly ignoring the world in a remote Irish inn. Against his will, he accidentally makes friends with the inn’s snarky bartender (Florence Ordesh) and then finds himself investigating the mysterious circumstances of her sudden disappearance (and presumable murder). That vigilante Murder He Wrote investigation quickly gets the novelist trapped in the hotel’s haunted honeymoon suite, where he’s tormented by vengeful spirits of the past. The most shocking thing about Hokum, then, is that it’s not technically a ghost story, at least not in the traditional sense. Adam Scott’s spooked protagonist is specifically locked in an Old Dark House setting with a witch—not a ghost—who’s occasionally joined (or takes the form of?) a humanoid donkey with a wicked sense of humor. She is a stereotypically witchy hag, warts & all, when the film’s setup leads you to expect another classic Halloween costume entirely (a bedsheet with eyeholes).

Hokum was not the only bait-and-switch ghost story I saw at this year’s Overlook. Taratoa Stappard’s debut feature Mārama also plays with Gothic Horror visual tropes that lead its audience to expect traditional ghostly hauntings, but its version of a haunted house story turns out to be “spiritual” in an entirely different sense. Adriana Osborne stars as a 19th century Māori woman who travels from New Zealand to England in search of her missing twin sister. The spirits of her sister, her mother, and another ancestor do haunt the spooky English estate she sets out to investigate, but her supernatural connection to them is more rooted in Māori religious traditions than in haunted-house movie tropes. The real horror haunting the house is not these women’s lingering spirits but the greater evil of British colonialism, which is what displaced them from New Zealand in the first place. Every time our troubled paranormal investigator is confronted with a supernatural scare, it’s always represented as some pilfered & perverted aspect of her culture: relocated homes, ceremonial masks, mutilated whales, a straight-up minstrel show, etc. Mārama is the kind of politically furious, grounded-to-reality horror story you can tell only dabbles in genre tropes because it’s more difficult to get funding for an arthouse drama on the same subject. See also: Nikyatu Jusu’s kinda-sorta folk horror Nanny.

Yûta Shimotsu’s Lovecraftian horror comedy New Group also dabbles in classic haunted-house movie atmospheres, but it proves to be even more difficult to pin to a single genre designation than Hokum or Mārama. Like McCarthy, Shimotsu quickly became an Overlook crowd favorite with his previous picture, Best Wishes to All, but his follow-up swerved in much more inscrutable directions. New Group might be an alien invasion story; it’s hard to say. It’s certainly a variation on the Uzumaki plot, trading in Junji Ito’s town-wide obsession with spirals for a town-wide obsession with “human pyramid” gymnastic formations. Inexplicably, a human pyramid is forming outside a small-town Japanese high school, gradually growing to skyscraper scale one joiner at a time. It’s unclear what’s inspiring this sudden social phenomenon except a generalized urge to belong, and it quickly spreads off-campus to inspire different cheerleader-style human structures elsewhere in town. Because of the film’s scope & budget, though, it’s difficult to convey the widespread danger of the phenomenon, so Shimotsu shrinks the threat down to a single container: the high school gym. Only, the gym was temporarily converted to a Halloween-style haunted house by the students before they were compelled to join the pyramid, providing a traditionally spooky environment for the town’s few defectors to be chased around by the mind-zapped gymnasts in their midst. Supernatural hijinks ensue, both inside the makeshift haunted house and on the playground outside the high school’s walls.

New Group is a delightful headscratcher for audiences of any age, but it’s going to blow the mind of the right teenager who’s watching their first Weird Movie in the exact phase when their #1 enemy is Conformity. The genre-filmmaking payoffs of Hokum & Mārama are much more immediately apparent, since their own haunted house settings are merely stages for their bigger interests in jump scares & political commentary. As a group, this unlikely international trio illustrates just how flexible horror movie tropes as old-hat as a Haunted House still are. Each film uses that setting for an entirely different purpose, stocking it with an entirely different monster: witches, ancestral spirits, and gymnastics-obsessed townie conformists who may or may not be mind-controlled by space aliens, respectively. The reason strictly horror-focused film festivals like Overlook never get tiresome is because the genre allows for that kind of tonal & thematic range, freeing filmmakers to be as scary or political or absurd as they want, trusting that audiences is familiar enough with the environment that they’re game for anything you stage within it.

-Brandon Ledet

Chronologies of Trauma

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Kristen Stewart has great taste. You can tell that by how she’s capitalized on her Twilight notoriety in the past couple decades, leveraging her early teenybopper name recognition to work with directors like David Cronenberg, Pablo Larraín, Rose Glass, and Olivier Assayas in her cinematic adulthood. You can also tell by watching her own directorial debut The Chronology of Water, which features a flood of striking, well curated images that convey a deeper interest in the artform than you might expect from an actor-turned-director. Stewart smartly sidesteps a lot of the familiar pitfalls actors stumble into while transitioning to the opposite side of the camera. It’s typical for those projects to function largely as an acting showcase, allowing their performers an overly indulgent amount of onscreen real estate to run wild and chew scenery. She certainly gives her star, Imogen Poots, a lot to do as the film’s constantly flailing protagonist, but most of the meatier dramatic moments are chopped up & scattered throughout a purposefully chaotic edit, avoiding any potential backsliding into stage-play theatricality. However, that chaotic edit is where Stewart makes an entirely different kind of rookie mistake, the one most that young directors make when translating a novel that they love to the screen. Adapted from the eponymous Lidia Yuknavitch memoir, The Chronology of Water is a rushed, overlong onslaught that attempts to cram in every detail from its source text in direct illustration instead of re-interpreting that text for a new medium. The film covers author Yuknavitch’s life from traumatic childhood to literary notoriety, including long chapters of her story that mean more to her personally than they do to the filmgoing audience (such as her academic mentorship under Ken Kesey, portrayed onscreen by a haggard Jim Belushi). You can tell that Yuknavitch’s story meant a lot to Stewart on the page, and she wanted to bring it to the screen because of the vivid images it evoked, not because it was a convenient vehicle for hammy acting. She just never got a handle on the “kill your darlings” process of editing, choosing instead to stage every one of those images while Imogen Poots strings them together with a voiceover narration track pulled directly from the source text.

If there’s a textual justification for the way The Chronology of Water rushes through the details of Yuknavitch’s personal life, it’s that it takes a long while for the author to express what’s happened to her. We’re immediately aware that she grew up in an abusive household, cowering in fear of her monstrous father (Michael Epp), whose presence is a constant threat to her, her older sister (Thora Birch), and their alcoholic mother (Susannah Flood). At first, the only clear details of that abuse are the feelings of its effect, with the women of the house tiptoeing on eggshells to not draw the father’s attention, so that every sound in the mix thunderous & painful – like a snapping bone. As a high school & college-age Yuknavitch, Poots intentionally avoids processing those details for as long as she can, disappearing into drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and the adrenaline rush of competitive swimming instead of emotionally reckoning with what’s happened to her. It isn’t until she starts writing poetry and personal essays in the film’s back half that she can express the details of her childhood abuse in concrete terms, and the audience gets a much clearer, more horrific picture of what was done to her. Until that point, The Chronology of Water is constant rush of contextless snapshots from Yuknavitch’s life, but the connections between them and the memories that spark them start to make more sense by the time she’s learned to express herself instead of avoiding herself. It’s a conceptually interesting approach to telling Yuknavitch’s story, but the problem is that there’s so much crammed into the frame that the individual details leak through your fingers like water. Yuknavitch describes her semi-confessional approach to creative writing as “telling the truth in lies,” which is an axiom that Stewart finds inspirational but does not fully absorb herself. She’s too enamored with Yuknavitch’s writing to alter the details of her biography, attempting to preserve the truths from the page instead of re-interpreting them into a more coherent cinematic lie. Yes, drops of blood diluting into the water pooled on the shower floor makes for a gorgeous, evocative image, but that image is itself diluted by the excess of everything else Stewart throws at us in the 128min runtime.

I was thinking a lot about The Chronology of Water’s rushed, scatterbrained pacing while watching Catherine Breillat’s 2001 breakout Fat Girl, which screened at Gap Tooth the same week of its local release. Where Stewart rushes, Breillat cruelly dwells, forcing her audience to sit with the details of childhood sexual abuse as they’re happening in real time. Alternately titled under the dedication “For My Sister” in its original French, Fat Girl details the uneasy sisterhood shared by two French teenagers on a beachside vacation. The younger sister (Anaïs Reboux) is suffering the hellish awkwardness of puberty while the “older” one (Roxane Mesquida) believes herself to be a mature woman at the advanced age of 15. Her premature adulthood is challenged when she successfully attracts the romantic attentions of an Italian college boy who’s also vacationing nearby, and she finds herself inviting him over to the bedroom she shares with her less glamorous sister, who only halfway pretends to be asleep while the young couple fools around. A large portion of Fat Girl‘s runtime is dedicated to detailing the step-by-step process of coercive statutory rape, which is then downplayed & rationalized by two in-over-their-heads teenagers who are dabbling in sexual experiences they aren’t mature enough to fully interpret, much less consent to. Once this abusive tryst is inevitably discovered by the girls’ parents, the vacation understandably ends, and we travel back to their home in a tearful long-distance car ride menaced by big-rig trucks that threaten to physically crush the family with the slightest turn of a steering wheel. Then, Breillat physicalizes the constant threat of macho violence in a shocker ending so abrupt it practically plays like a punchline to a sick, sad joke. Even then, the teenage girl response to adult masculine violence is to play it off as no big deal, performing a kind of know-it-all maturity they couldn’t possibly have earned in their short time alive. In The Chronology of Water, the audience is just as distanced from the full brunt of that childhood trauma as the protagonist; in Fat Girl, we’re fully aware of what’s happening to the kids as it’s happening to them, even if they remain clueless until long after the end credits.

You don’t have to go all the way back into the early-aughts archives to find easy points of comparison for KStew’s directorial debut. If nothing else, it premiered at last year’s Cannes along with two fellow miserabilist coming-of-age dramas that tormented school-age swim teams: Julia Ducournau’s Alpha & Charlie Pollinger’s The Plague. Thanks to its seaside vacation setting, Breillat’s Fat Girl also offers a fair amount of swimming-pool escapism to its titular odd-girl-out protagonist, suggesting that there’s something about the sensory deprivation and bodily freedom of an underwater realm that’s a huge relief for teens going through pubescent hell (or for the audiences watching them go through it, anyway). The Chronology of Water and Fat Girl also share a thematic link in their depictions of sisterhood, in which a younger dead-eyed sibling suffers jealousy over the apparent grace & poise with which their older sister navigates the same childhood traumas. Truthfully, none of that was really why Breillat was on my mind while catching up with KStew’s debut. The reason The Chronology of Water had me thinking back to the abrasive, morally challenging feminism of the 2000s & 1990s was that Stewart was taking obvious delight in that era’s most transgressive provocations. Imogen Poots models the distinctly 1990s fashions of the source memoir’s setting, just as she models the social faux pas of a young affluent woman repeatedly using the word “cunt” in mixed company. Much like Breillat, Lidia Yuknavitch’s work is rooted in an era when it was more daring to talk about the supposedly shameful details of women’s bodies, and Stewart seems enthusiastic to bring every liquid she can from that text to the screen: blood, puke, spit, cum, shit, menstruate, the full flight. She makes a point to pause on a chapter when Yuknavitch finds that BDSM offers just as much bodily escapism as the swimming pool, depicting Poots being tied up & whipped by a professorial Kim Gordon. It’s a tangent so compelling that it could’ve inspired its own feature film, but Stewart has no time to dwell on it without sacrificing everything else that happens in Yuknavitch’s memoir, so she quickly moves on to the next unpleasant incident. Breillat offers you no such relief. Fat Girl is all one long, unpleasant incident, with child locks on the car doors to prevent your escape. Stewart may share Breillat’s furious enthusiasm for provocation, but she doesn’t yet fully match her talent for sadism, for (moral) better or for (artistic) worse.

-Brandon Ledet