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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perfectly captures the alienation of loving movies but hating movie audiences. Who do you side with here? An incurious public who laughed Exorcist IIoff 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.
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
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.
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.
Welcome to Episode #263 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, including Larry Fessenden’s hipster NYC vampire flick Habit (1995).
00:00 The Overlook Film Festival 01:34 The Boulet Brothers 10:26 Hokum (2026) 18:55 Buffet Infinity (2026) 25:40 Buddy (2026) 36:01 Faces of Death (2026) 39:46 Obsession (2026) 43:10 Leviticus (2026) 44:48 The Furious (2026) 47:33 New Group (2026) 49:15 Boorman and the Devil (2026)
During one of this year’s pre-screening introductions, it was announced that The New Orleans French Film Festival is the longest running foreign-language film festival in the United States. That’s an impressive feat for such a humble, unassuming event. Even though it’s a major highlight of the city’s cinematic calendar, French Film Fest is by far the more laidback of the New Orleans Film Society’s two annual festivals. It’s more of a for-the-locals event than the Oscars-qualifying red carpet pageantry of New Orleans Film Fest proper. That casual, low-stakes atmosphere is a major part of its charm. Every spring, French Film Fest takes over the original Uptown location of The Prytania for a solid week of French-language cinema from all over the world. It’s usually slotted in the lull between the chaos of Mardi Gras and the chaos of Festival Season, a time when there’s nothing better to do than hide from the few days of nice weather we’re allotted every year in a darkened movie theater. There are even short stints of time allotted to make friends outside in the sunshine, in line between start times. I make sure to never miss it.
I caught four films during this year’s festival. A couple were older titles, a couple were new releases, and they were all the exact kind of non-commercial art cinema that most audiences can only access streaming at home (unless they happen to live in a city with a bustling film festival calendar). It felt great to spend a weekend watching esoteric cinema with up-for-anything filmgoers in a century-old single-screener instead of puzzling through them alone on streaming, where they’d fight for attention with my diabolically addictive smartphone apps. It may be one of the city’s least flashy film festivals, but its casual, accessible, warmly friendly vibe is what makes it also one of our best. To quote every hack journalist who’s ever been flown out to Cannes … Vive le cinéma, vive la différence! And, while we’re at it, vive les théâtres!
Below, you’ll find a rating & blurb for every title I caught at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest, listed in the order that they screened.
Orpheus (1950)
One of the more charming quirks of French Film Fest is the way it integrates The Prytania’s usual Sunday morning Classic Movies series into the program. This year, that repertory slot was filled by Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, which previously played in the same slot way back in the Before Times of 2019. The programmers took the chance to make a mini-Cocteau retrospective out of the event this time around, pairing Beauty and the Beast with the director’s second-most celebrated title, 1950’s Orpheus (and inviting Cocteau scholar Chloe Cassens to contextualize both presentations). As with Beauty and the Beast, it was a pure pleasure to experience Orpheus for the first time in a proper theater, rewarding my procrastination in not catching up with it sooner on The Criterion Channel. Also like Beauty and the Beast, it retells a long-familiar literary tale, aiming to wow its audience with visual splendor instead of twists in narrative. Cocteau recounts the entire Orpheus & Eurydice myth in the opening credits, fully laying out where his tale of a frustrated poet and his even more frustrated wife will go by the final reel. His major deviations from that plot template are temporal and illusionary: updating the story to a 1950s beatnik setting and playing around with cinematic magic tricks to convince the audience of its otherworldly surrealism. It’s ultimately more domestic & restrained than Beauty and the Beast, but it’s no less essential as pre-New Wave French cinema — only “cinéma de papa” if you happen to have the coolest papa in Paris.
Jean Marais stars as both Orpheus and as Cocteau’s onscreen surrogate, a famous poet who feels out of step with the chaotic Left Bank youth who are taking over his industry. Orpheus threatens to blow up his life and his marriage when he starts flirting with the personification of his own Death (María Casares), embodied as an ice-queen heiress who funds the hipper, buzzier work of his youthful competition. The introduction of Death into his household kicks off a supernatural domestic drama that straddles two worlds: life and the afterlife. His wife is transported to the afterlife first, and his efforts to bring her back mimic the more famous section of the Orpheus myth. The amazing thing is that Orpheus initially succeeds, bringing Eurydice back to the land of the living for as long as he can manage to not directly look at her. The resulting sequence is a kind of domestic screwball comedy that literalizes the emotional distance between married partners who are considering cheating on each other, as Eurydice finds an employee of Death of her own to flirt with. The husband cannot see his wife, and the marriage can only last as long as the pair can stand to not confront each other head-on. In a way, this makes Orpheus a great thematic pairing with last year’s repertory selection for the festival, Jean-Luc Godard’s domestic drama Contempt, despite the vast differences in their genre & tone.
Of course, Orpheus‘s main attraction as a cinematic relic is Cocteau’s more surreal visual touches, which are largely saved for the afterlife sequences. There, bodies move backwards and in slow motion, unmoored from the physics of real life, as if in an underwater dream. That otherworld is accessed through household mirrors, which become doorways through an unspoken magic commanded by Death. That’s where the movie really won me over. I’ve always loved when fantasy movies dive into a scary mirror realm, but I usually have to find those realms in schlocky horror films like The Evil Within & Poltergeist III or the supernatural porno Pandora’s Mirror. It was lovely to see that fantasy trope in a Good Movie for a change, one that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to recommend in mixed company. Orpheus is too closely tethered to contemporary Paris to compete with the visual extravagance of Beauty and the Beast, but when it leaves that realm to find another on the opposite side of a mirror, it’s splendidly surreal in its own way.
Dahomey (2024)
The other repertory title I caught at this year’s festival was a much more recent release. Mati Diop’s fine-art documentary Dahomey never screened locally between its 2024 premiere at Berlinale and its subsequent streaming release on Mubi, possibly because its one-hour runtime made it an awkward fit for proper theatrical distribution. Dahomey‘s quiet, distanced approach to documentary filmmaking does benefit from theatrical exhibition, though, so I’m once again grateful that my procrastination was rewarded by this festival. More importantly, it reflects well on the festival’s programmers that they thought to include such a politically combative snapshot of France’s cultural legacy, instead of merely coasting on the easy sophistication of beloved Parisian filmmakers from the past like Cocteau, Godard, and Varda. Diop looks to the past by tracking the recent return of two dozen artifacts plundered from the former Kingdom of Dahomey under French colonial rule to the modern nation of Benin. She attempts to give life back to these stolen & exported statues by literally giving them a voice, allowing them to narrate their own journey from European museums back to their African origins. We spend much of the film’s first half in the darkened crate during transport, then watch the statues’ identity emerge while being cataloged & contextualized once they’ve returned “home.”
For all of its art-house abstraction, I was most engaged with Dahomey in its second half, when the university youth of modern Benin were allowed extensive screentime to debate what those statues’ return means historically & politically, if it means anything at all. It likely does mean something that the conversation—much like the artifacts’ return—is left frustratingly incomplete, with many of the students pointing out the insult of only two dozen artifacts being returned out of the seven thousand that were initially stolen. Not all of the Beninese reaction to the statues’ return is verbal, though. Often, we silently observe the observers, as visitors to the artifacts’ new museum home are documented as reflections in the display glass. What does it mean that these objects are now stored in an African museum instead of a European one, still removed from their original ceremonial purposes? Diop asks this question with no intent of answering it, and the voice she gives the statues is just as confused about what to do to fix the evils of the French colonial past as anyone else. The displacement has already happened; what to do next is literally up for debate. All she can do in the meantime is document the unsettled dissonance of the present.
The Piano Accident (2026)
The two new releases I caught this year were directed by French Film Fest regulars, starting with a new one from returning prankster Quentin Dupieux. Dupieux’s talking-leather-jacket horror comedy Deerskin became Swampflix’s favorite movie of 2020 after its riotous premiere at the festival, mere weeks before COVID-era lockdowns made it one of the year’s only theatrical outings for the crew. I only mention that to note that this year’s The Piano Accident is Dupieux’s best movie since Deerskin, despite heavy competition in intervening Swampflix favorites Mandibles & Smoking Causes Coughing. The major constant in those three Deerskin follow-ups is Dupieux’s ongoing collaboration with French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos, who has been making a bigger & bigger fool of herself in each outing, seemingly relishing the opportunity to de-glam and de-sexualize her onscreen image. Whereas she previously appeared in Dupieux’s goofball comedies as a scene-stealing supporting player, The Piano Accident expands their collaboration into a leading role, casting Exarchopoulos as a sociopathic social media influencer with no redeeming qualities beyond her skills to debase herself for money. She takes great delight in making herself ugly, inside and out, and their ongoing collaboration reaches new heights of deliberately vacuous absurdity in the process.
The titular piano incident is a social media stunt involving a piano dropped from a great height, turning a classic Looney Tunes gag into a grisly tragedy. The monster responsible for that tragedy is a ruthless content creator who goes by the screen name Megajugs (Exarchopoulos, naturally). At first, Megajugs appears to be a collection of off-putting physical quirks. She has the obnoxious laugh, haircut, braces, cruelty, and sense of humor of a teenage boy, stunted in her maturity from earning online fame at an early age. Her ugliness is revealed to run much deeper than the surface, however, when she’s blackmailed into her first longform interview by a journalist who wants to dig past her blank-stare surface. What that journalist finds is a vast, terrifying nothingness. Megajugs saw an out-of-context clip from Jackass as a teenager, discovered that she can make money hurting herself for other people’s amusement in increasingly violent “pranks” on her own body (smashing her hand with a hammer, setting herself on fire, “testing” her family’s electric turkey carver, etc.), and has since devolved into a nihilistic routine of producing self-harm video #content for likes — partly for profit, mostly out of habit. Dupiuex invites you to laugh at her self-destructive online stunts (such as dropping a grand piano on her own legs from a ten-meter height), the step back and gawk at the horrific mindset of someone who would produce or consume that content for idle amusement.
If The Piano Accident has anything direct to say about our post-social media world, it’s that nothing means anything, and the internet has turned us all into miserable pieces of shit. Looking at the larger breadth of his recent output, I think he’s also been expressing a growing frustration with having to explain his own meaningless, absurdist pranks. In Yannick, a theatrical audience talks back in open hostility to a stage play they see no meaning in. In Daaaaaalí, famous surrealist Salvador Dalí evades explaining the meaning behind his work to a documentarian who attempts to sit him down for a sincere interview. The Piano Accident voices that artistic discomfort with audiences & journalists even louder, with the villainous Megajugs grunting in frustration over the expectation to interact with her fans or to explain her artistic intent to the press. She has no idea why she hurts herself for other people’s entertainment other than that she feels compelled to do so. It’s starting to become clear Dupieux feels similarly about his own work; it’s more a matter of routine & compulsion than it is an intellectual pursuit. Thankfully, in both Dupieux’s & Megajugs’s cases the art itself is consistently funny, so it doesn’t matter in the moment that there’s a menacing meaningless behind the cheap-thrills surface. That’s something for you to ponder on your own time, miserably.
The Stranger (2026)
François Ozon is just as much of a New Orleans Film Festival staple as Quentin Dupieux, with past Swampflix favorites When Fall Comes & Double Lover seeing their local premieres at the fest. His latest film, The Stranger, is an adaptation of the eponymous 1940s Albert Camus novel, about an eerily vacant white man who murders an Indigenous local in French-occupied Algeria for seemingly no reason at all. Thematically, it splits the differences between all of the other titles I caught at this year’s fest, combining the literary traditions of Orpheus, the anti-colonialist politics of Dahomey, and the disturbingly vacuous absurdism of The Piano Accident into a single picture. Compared to the rest of Ozon’s catalog, it’s a little too stately to register among his personal best, but it very well might be his prettiest. There’s something to the John Waters adage that “If you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, ‘The cinematography was beautiful,’ it’s a bad movie,” but since The Stranger is partly a story about the vast nothingness lurking under the surface of things, I feel okay saying that the black & white cinematography was beautiful, and the movie was good. It just falls slightly short of Great.
Benjamin Voisin stars as the titular stranger, a coldly quiet twentysomething who gets by on his handsome looks despite his near-sociopathic detachment from all human emotion & empathy. We first meet him as he receives the news that his elderly mother has passed away, spending two days with him in near silence while he travels to her isolated nursing home to see her body buried. As a result, we initially have no idea whether he’s always this emotionally detached or if he’s merely stunned by his grief, but it gradually becomes clear that the problem runs much deeper than familial loss. He is decidedly non-reactive to the constant human atrocities around him, from the neighbor who beats his own dog to the even nearer neighbor who beats his own lover to the daily systemic injustices against the Arab locals who walk the French-occupied streets outside his apartment. By the time he participates in those injustices by firing a gun, his apathy curdles into something much more sinister and much less personal. The entirety of human existence is literally put on trial as the movie picks at his motivations, which feel random & instinctual rather than meaningful. He simply just is, and existence is horrifying.
Camus’s political & philosophical ponderings at how “we are all guilty, we are all condemned” eventually prove worthy of the time spent with this quiet, impenetrable protagonist, but it’s a long journey to get there. The 1st-person voiceover narration that would give the stranger’s actions immediate meaning is delayed until after his random act of shocking violence in the 2nd act, so it takes a while for the narrative significance of the 1st-act events of his life to become clear. Before the terrifying nothingness of his personality is exposed in a French courtroom, we mostly just watch him sip coffee, have sex, smoke cigarettes, and experience a sustained, lifelong ennui — the standard French existence. If you have the patience to discover how the unremarkable hallmarks of his persona implicate much larger, existential evils outside his immediate orbit, the movie ultimately rewards you for sticking it out. Notably, part of that reward is hearing The Cure’s debut single “Killing an Arab” over the end credits, which will be stuck in your head for most of the runtime leading up to that stinger anyway. It’s a thuddingly obvious needle drop, but by the time it arrives it’s a welcome relief from singing it internally yourself.
Without question, the local MVP this Halloween season has been the original uptown location of The Prytania, which has provided the bulk of local repertory horror programming in the lead-up to today’s spooky holiday. Not only was the single-screen theater’s regular Classic Movie Sunday slot repurposed to feature Halloween fare this month (Dial M for Murder, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Haunting, 13 Ghosts, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein — all Swampflix favorites), but The Prytania also doubled down on its Spooky Season Content by staging a week-long film festival of classic horror titles. In collaboration with local MVP horror fest The Overlook, The Prytania launched a “Kill-O-Rama” lineup midway through the month, making up for the relatively anemic output of exciting new horror releases currently making the rounds. This year’s Kill-O-Rama lineup included perennial Spooky Season classics The Exorcist & Halloween, a 30th anniversary screening of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, multiple alternate-ending variants of the murder-mystery crowdpleaser Clue, and a victory-lap rerun of their 70mm print of Sinners (which they’ve been heroically exhibiting all year). It was the exact kind of Halloween-season programming I’m on the hunt for every October, conveniently gathered in one neighborhood theater. Although I was unable to give this year’s Kill-O-Rama the full mind-melting marathon treatment I tend to give other festivals, I was able to catch a few screenings from the program, reviewed below. Here’s hoping that this festival format returns to The Prytania next Halloween season, when I can plan ahead to live in the theater for a week solid — ignoring all non-scary-movie obligations in my schedule until All Hallows’ Eve has passed.
Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Sometimes, procrastination pays off. It’s likely shameful that I hadn’t seen the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire saga Interview with the Vampire until this year, especially since I lived here through the 90s era when the French Quarter was overrun with gothy vampire cosplay inspired by Rice’s local cachet. It was especially fun to watch with a New Orleans audience, though, so I’m glad I didn’t spoil the experience by diluting it with ad breaks on cable. There’s a moment late in the runtime when Brad Pitt’s woe-is-me vampire Louis announces that he is traveling to reunite with his jilted master (Tom Cruise, as the dastardly Lestat) on Prytania Street, and the crowd erupted into titters. It’s the most firmly I’ve felt rooted in The Prytania’s geographical location since catching an early screening of Happy Death Day there (which was filmed on a college campus a few blocks away, with students filling out most of the audience). Interview with the Vampire is not entirely anchored to New Orleans, but instead globetrots between three international cities: New Orleans, Paris, and San Francisco — great company to be in. Still, its locality is undeniable in that New Orleans is the chosen home of its most infamous vampire, Lestat, who attempts to break away from the restrictions of his European coven to establish a new afterlife on American soil, starting his new family by turning the sad-eyed Louis into one of his own. There’s only trouble once that family becomes nuclear, when Louis gives into vampiric temptation by feeding on a small child, damning her to an eternal adolescence as her new two dads’ doll-like daughter. After about thirty years of faux-domestic stasis, she rebels in spectacularly violent fashion, burning their shared home to the ground in a righteous rage.
For all of the A-lister hunks in the cast (Cruise, Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas), I was most impressed with Interview with the Vampire as The First Great Kirsten Dunst Movie. Dunst has been a wonderfully talented screen actor for as long as I can remember watching the screen, but it’s still incredible to watch her out-perform her more famous, better-paid adult co-stars in a role filmed when she was only 10 years old. Dunst’s embodiment of Claudia, the eternally dollish vampire, conveys a world-weariness and vengeful fury far beyond the age of the actor behind it. Part of the reason she stands out so much is that all of the male leads are such sad sack yearners, all fitting neatly into the somber tone typical of director Neil Jordan’s work. Jordan’s interpretation of Rice’s text is more melancholy than it is sensual, finding its hunky, mutually obsessed vampire men jaded beyond repair long after they’ve lost their lust for sex & blood. As the latest addition to that damned clan, Claudia is the only character who’s going through a major emotional upheaval, so that the story’s most violent, extravagant turns rest on her little shoulders. Given the specificity of locale and the name-brand talent elsewhere in the cast, it’s likely the movie would remain undead in annual Halloween-season circulation with or without Dunst’s involvement, but it’s her performance that actually earns that cultural longevity. She’s eternally great.
Corpse Bride (2005)
I was drawn to Kill-O-Rama’s 20th-anniversary screenings of Tim Burton’s stop-motion musical Corpse Bride for a few reasons, not least of all because it felt like a rarer anomaly in the schedule than more frequent go-tos like The Exorcist & Bride of Frankenstein. That’s assumedly because it’s a lesser loved title among the rest of the heavy hitters on the schedule, despite it being a perfectly charming seasonal novelty. When it was first released, Corpse Bride was treated like the microwaved leftovers from earlier Tim Burton/Henry Selick productions like The Nightmare Before Christmas & James and the Giant Peach, but 20 years later it now plays like a precursor for later Laika productions like ParaNorman & Coraline, which have since become the go-to primers for lifelong horror nerd obsession among youngsters. Time has mostly been kind to it, give or take the biggest star in its voice cast (the wine-tasting spit bucket Johnny Depp), but I’ve personally always had a soft spot for it. It’s hard not to adore a movie that fantasy-casts Peter Lorre as a talking brain maggot with kissable lips and takes breaks from advancing its plot to animate a band of stop-motion skeletons playing saxobones against Mario Bava crosslighting. I missed the film during its initial theatrical run, though, so I had only ever seen it on a 2nd-hand DVD copy, which made this repertory screening a must-attend event.
In short, Corpse Bride looks great. All of the visual artistry that distinguishes The Nightmare Before Christmas as a holiday classic is echoed here without any lost integrity. The worst you could say about it is that Burton borrows a little too freely from former collaborator Henry Selick in the production design, to the point where the underworld afterlife setting appears to be pulled from the live-action sets of Selick’s Monkeybone, entirely separate from the film’s production overlap with Nightmare. If I were Selick, I might be complaining, but as an audience member, I’m more than happy to spend time with the cartoon gals & ghouls in that underground otherworld where every day is Halloween. Much like in earlier auteurist works like Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood, Burton conveys a yearning desire to party with the undead freaks of the underworld instead of being stuck with the drab drips of the living flesh. Johnny Depp & Emily Watson voice a soon-to-be-married couple of awkward strangers who’ve had all the joy of life strangled out of them by their uptight, aristocratic parents. They seem to be instantly, genuinely fond of one another despite the grim-grey world they sulk in together, but tragedy strikes when the groom accidentally marries an animated corpse instead while practicing his vows in the spooky woods outside town. The titular undead bride (Helena Bonham Carter, duh) drags the poor, nervous lad down to her Halloweentown underworld where he’s forced to party with the lively dead instead of moping among the dead-eyed living. Song & dance and comedic antics ensue, ultimately resulting in a tender-hearted reunion for the rightful bride & groom and a cosmic comeuppance for the dastardly cad who sent the Corpse Bride underground in the first place. It’s wonderful kids-horror fare, especially if your particular kid has already re-run Coraline & ParaNorman so many times that you’ve become numb to their Laika-proper charms.
Frankenstein (2025)
The concluding event on the Kill-O-Rama schedule was a double feature presentation of James Whale’s iconic 1931 adaptation of Frankensteinand the latest interpretation of that text, directed by Guillermo del Toro. Besides the double-feature format of that programming, the most exciting aspect of the new Frankenstein film’s presentation during Kill-O-Rama is that The Prytania continued to run it weeks after the fest concluded on a 35mm print, the only venue in town to see the film on celluloid before it is shuffled off into the digital void of Netflix. After similar runs for titles like Sinners, Tenet, and One Battle After Another, The Prytania is making a reputation for themselves as the premiere film venue in town by default, since they’re the only place that can actually project film. Given the massive crowds that have been swarming The Prytania every night in the past week to catch Frankenstein in that format, it’s clear that the public yearns for tangible, physical cinema and are willing to pay extra for it. My screening even started with an audience member loudly booing the Netflix logo in the opening credits, to the rest of the crowd’s delight. Netflix’s omnipresence in urban & suburban homes indicates that most of these crowds could’ve waited a couple weeks to see Frankenstein at home for “free,” but they instead chose to attend a big-screen presentation with richer, deeper colors in projection and visible scratches on the print. It was a classic theatrical experience befitting such a classic literary adaptation.
As for the movie itself, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Guillermo del Toro adaptation of the Mary Shelley source text. It’s pretty, it’s moody, and it’s got a surprisingly sensitive heart for a movie in which a mad scientist stitches together leftover corpse parts to create a monster and then proceeds to abuse that monster. The biggest surprises in Frankenstein lurk in the intensity of the performances, given that the actors could have easily gone through the motions and let the exquisite sets & costumes do all of the work. Mia Goth conveys a defiant ferocity as Dr. Frankenstein’s uninterested love interest, matching his creative intensity but swatting down his god-scale ego in what feels like an onscreen avatar for Mary Shelley’s literary jam sessions with Percy Shelley & Lord Byron. Jacob Elordi plays Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous creation as a big scary baby who’s convincingly dangerous when provoked but angelic when properly nurtured. Oscar Isaac is feverishly manic as Dr. Frankenstein himself, so fixated on his mission to bring dead flesh back to life that he doesn’t consider what kind of father he’ll be once he succeeds (having only Charles Dance’s physically abusive patriarch as a default example to follow once the creature is in his care). It’s in that cautionary tale of what happens when you single-mindedly dedicate yourself to a passion project at the expense of your own humanity that del Toro’s Frankenstein starts to feel personal to the director beyond its surface aesthetics. This is a project he’s been fighting to complete for decades and, thus, it has partially mutated into a story about the madness of its director’s own grand-scale, solitary ambition. The result is not one of del Toro’s best works, but it’s at least a more heartfelt, refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life when he adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1994. After three or so decades of book-faithful Frankenstein adaptations, I’m excited that we’re approaching the point when Jack Pierce’s creature design will enter the public domain (in 2027) so that every new repetition of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but del Toro’s version still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk. I appreciated seeing it big & loud with a full horror nerd crowd, instead of alone on my couch the way Netflix intended.
In my previous dispatch covering this year’s New Orleans Film Fest, I previewed a few selections from the program before they premiered in-person, primarily focusing on documentaries about niche pop culture relics: the 80s house music scene in Chicago, the recurring 90s SNL character Pat!, and the bare-all story of the noise-rock circus act Butthole Surfers. Now that the festival’s in-person portion has concluded (with Virtual Cinema selections streaming online through Sunday, 11/2), I’m here to log some on-the-ground reporting to cover selections I caught on the big screen. The five titles reviewed below are all narrative features that screened during NOFF at various venues throughout the city (namely, The CAC, The Prytania, and The Broad) — some to ecstatic crowds, others to little fanfare. They’re loosely ranked from my personal favorites to my least favorites, but all are worth checking out if you have any interest in their reported style or subject. There will be one final dispatch covering this year’s NOFF in the form of a post-fest podcast with local critic Bill Arceneaux once the virtual portion has concluded in early November, and then the film festival department of the Swampflix newsroom will be furloughed until French Film Fest returns to The Prytania in the Spring, same as ever year.
The Plague
As NOFF coincides with my annual Halloween Season horror bingeing, I always find myself scanning the program for titles that fit both needs. This year, there were more horror-adjacent titles on offer than usual, including a few straight-up horror comedies about sex curses (see below), sexy zombies (see further below), and sex-obsessed Nice Guy puppets (Your Own Flavor). The scariest movie I’ve seen all month, however, was a coming-of-age drama about hazing rituals at a middle school-age water polo camp. I don’t know that Charlie Polinger’s debut feature The Plague fully qualifies as a proper Horror Film, but it neatly fits into a social-anxiety horror canon with titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. At the very least, it’s itchy & squirmy enough to register as a psychological thriller, and its lengthy scenes of slow-motion underwater cinematography offer it an otherworldly, nightmarish beauty that verges on the supernatural — a welcome break from the all-too-real dramatizations of school age bullying. A near-guaranteed moneymaker genre in recent years, horror offers up-and-coming directors the chance to take stylish risks audiences won’t sign on for otherwise, so it’s not especially surprising to learn that Polinger’s next project is going to be an adaptation of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” for A24, starring Mikey Madison (which was previously adapted by Roger Corman into what is comfortably one of the greatest horror films of all time).
The closest The Plague comes to having “a star” is Joel Edgerton in a supporting role as the water polo camp’s whistle-blowing sad sack coach, who’s scarcely present to supervise. The rest of the main cast are preteen boys who’ve been largely left alone to establish their own social hierarchy, with newcomer Everett Blunck playing Ben, the latest, gangliest addition to the crew. The title refers to a hazing ritual the boys have invented in which the most awkward kid among them has been socially diagnosed with a vaguely defined plague that manifests as a skin-shredding rash, banishing him from any direct interaction with the rest of the class. Ben is unsure how much he wants to participate in this ritual at first, but he’s ultimately willing to punch down as long as it means he’s not the lowest rung on the social ladder. That status doesn’t last forever, though, and the gradual, subtle ways he gets “infected” by the plague are horrifically familiar to anyone who remembers having an “awkward phase” at that age. The Plague hits especially hard for Millennials who suffered their worst social nightmares in the early 2000s, since its 2003 setting is consistently anchored by eerily accurate cultural markers like endless repetitions of the “Okayyy” Lil Jon punchlines from Chappelle’s Show, a forgotten mating call from the time. It’s remarkably well observed in depicting the gendered bullying that boys suffer at that age (with the neighboring girls synchronized-swimming camp being quarantined to a walled-off realm worthy of its own sister movie), with only the otherworld liminality of swimming underwater to offer any sense of relief. It’s an nerve-racking film about how all children are monsters, one that’ll make you glad you never have to be one again.
Fucktoys
The Plague will enjoy a Prestige Season theatrical rollout in hopes of landing on a few High Profile critics’ Best of the Year Lists, boosting its public profile. The future of Annapurna Sriram’s campy sex comedy Fucktoys is much hazier in the film-distro crystal ball, partly due to the expletive in its title (and the 100 minutes of depravity that ensues). Sriram herself stars as down-on-her-luck sex worker who learns in the opening scene that the reason she’s been going through it lately is that she’s been struck with a curse. When she asks her most trusted psychic (local legend Big Freedia, in a scene-stealing role) how this could’ve happened, the psychic shrugs it off with the explanation that sometimes “It be like that.” After consulting several other psychics around town for a second opinion the way cancer patients will desperately bounce from doctor to doctor, she quickly accepts that the curse is real, and starts working overtime to earn the money for a lamb-sacrificing ritual that will lift said curse, freeing her from the string of heartbreaks & rotten luck that has been derailing her life. Of course, this premise is mostly an excuse for Sriram to travel around town from john to john on her vintage moped as she gets her cash in order, providing the plot structure needed to justify flooding the screen with quirky side characters and one-off sex gags. Then, things get genuinely horrific as the threat shifts from vague supernatural curse magic to real-life john with drug & ego issues, consciously souring the mood in frank acknowledgement of the dangerous risks that come with regular sex work (i.e., men).
For a low-budget sex comedy filmed mostly on the industrial backroads of rural Louisiana, Fucktoys has an impressively stylish look to it. Shot on film and decorated with a self-driven dedication to Swinging 60s psychedelia, it looks like a dusty Polaroid found locked away in a box of antique sex toys. Sriram sets the film in a fictional, fantastic setting she calls Trashworld, made entirely out of what appears to be hand-built sets and thrifted vintage clothing. That setting and the over-the-top character work will likely earn Fucktoys a lot of convenient comparisons to the Mortville trash world of John Waters’s oeuvre, but in practice it hits a lot closer to Gregg Araki’s work: sincerely sexy & sensual while still remaining outrageously bratty & garish. The film certainly has a lot of harsh political messaging behind its flippantly slutty comedic antics, constantly calling attention to how the wealthy live by different rules than the rest of us, putting the servant class at constant risk. Sriram just works hard to make sure she’s not portraying the sex-worker lifestyle as a nonstop misery parade, seeking out the pleasure & humor in every scenario where money & hexes aren’t ruining the vibe. It’s the kind of bongripping comedy where the protagonist owns a full Doug Funny wardrobe of the same uniform outfit in multiple copies, and if someone writes down a phone number in lipstick, it’s almost certain to be 555-666-0420.
Queens of the Dead
The joke-to-laugh ratio in Tina Romero’s debut zomcom Queens of the Dead is not nearly as successful as Fucktoys‘, but it’s got a similar, admirable sense of political flippancy. George Romero’s daughter builds off her family name here by staging a standard zombie siege picture in the exact style pioneered by her father; the location under siege by the zombie horde just happens to be a drag club. A queer cast of misfit characters (played by the likes of Love Lies Bleeding‘s Katy O’Brian, I Saw the TV Glow‘s Jack Haven, Drag Race‘s Nina West, Pose‘s Dominique Jackson, and comedy legend Margaret Cho) hole up in a Brooklyn gay bar during a cookie-cutter zombie breakout, with one straight-guy straight man on hand to play their comic foil (Quincy Dunn-Baker). All the crew has to do is survive long enough to ride a Pride Parade float out of town at dawn without turning on each other under the pressure of the nonstop zombie invasion. Petty grievances about past professional betrayals, disrespected identity markers, and refusal to adapt to the new rules of drag bubble to the surface as they pass time at the nightclub’s open bar, but they repeatedly revert to the assertion that they’re Family, and all they have is each other in a world that would gladly tear them apart.
Queens of the Dead is heavy on jokes and light on gore. Sure, a character might suffer a nasty rat bite or axe wound here or there, but Romero never goes for the obligatory horde-hands disemboweling spectacle of the Living Dead series, tastefully choosing to keep her characters’ organs on the insides of their bodies. Instead, she nods to her father’s legacy with winking one liners like “When there’s no more room in Hell . . . there’s an app for that.” To that end, it’s amusing that much of the undead ghouls the central Family has to protect themselves from are the drag-enthusiast public, who continue to scroll & post for Insta clout well after they’re infected by the zombie plague. You’d think they’d be fighting off undead MAGA instead, but I suppose that supply would be short in Brooklyn. The overall effect is less gnarly or politically savvy than it is, simply, cute. I don’t know that it would’ve been made or widely distributed (soon, through Shudder) without the director’s connection to the larger Romero legacy, but it’s got a good heart and it easily passes the Mark Kermode-patented Six Laughs Test for determining whether a comedy qualifies for a passing grade.
The Testament of Ann Lee
The only film on this list that isn’t a debut feature is, thus, the one that bears the greatest weight of expectation, so I suspect it’s one I might’ve ranked higher had I been totally blindsided by it. Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee arrived at the festival with pre-packaged Awards Season prestige, complete with its own security guards scanning the audiences for smartphone pirates who might dare to leak a camrip before the film’s official late-December release. Fastvold is most prominently discussed on the prestige cinema scene right now in the context of her careerlong professional collaboration with husband Brady Corbet (with whom she co-wrote last year’s Oscar-nominated The Brutalist, as well as this immediate follow-up), but it’s her 2020 period drama The World to Come that most had me excited to see her back in the director’s chair. A historical lesbian romance with an unusually deep bleak streak, The World to Come set an expectation for dramatic heartbreak that The Testament of Ann Lee never comes close to achieving, despite the severity of its own story. Instead, Fastvold indulges in the stylistic experiment of making a deeply bleak movie musical, finding more fascination than resonation with her titular historical subject: the enigmatic founder of the American religious sect The Shakers. The most the two films have in common, really, is their casting’s assertion that Christopher Abbott would make a terrible husband.
In a way, The Shakers make perfect sense as the subject for a musical, given that their worship practices involve rhythmic dancing & chanting that could inspire captivating filmic spectacle. Think of the communal breathing/grieving ritual in Midsommar, repeated at feature length. The problem is that the Shaker hymns composer Daniel Blumberg extrapolates into full musical numbers don’t really go anywhere. When Shaker founder Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) is imprisoned for her heretical beliefs, she sings repetitions of the phrase, “I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst” with no lyrical variation for minutes on end, to the point where the audience is more exhausted than the character. It’s her belief system itself that saves the film from total tedium, though. Ann Lee was persecuted for daring to ask whether society would be better off if we all agreed to sing & dance instead of having sex, ever. It turns out the answer depends on how bad the sex you’re having is (i.e., whether you’re married to Hollywood hunk Christopher Abbott). The Testament of Ann Lee is most impressive in how it works as both a sincere depiction of its subject’s religious ecstasy and as a harsh criticism of religion as a mechanism for making one person’s sexual hang-ups everyone else’s problem. I have a feeling that if Blumberg’s songs were better realized and if Fastvold’s name didn’t carry so much weight from previous projects, I’d be singing its praises instead of downplaying its successes. As is, it’s a memorably strange anomaly, an indulgence I suppose Fastvold has well earned by working on knockout titles like The World to Come, The Childhood of a Leader, The Brutalist, and my beloved Vox Lux.
Mad Bills to Pay
A more reasonable person wouldn’t have any pre-screening expectations for The Testament of Ann Lee, but I have been made unreasonable by the year-long attention I pay to movie podcasts with the budget & access to send critics to international film festivals. Maybe the Oscar Buzz generators of Awards Season podcasts like Prestige Junkie & The Big Picture that put movies like Ann Lee on the radar for large audiences are a reasonable thing to listen to; I dunno. What’s really shameful is the close attention I pay to festival-coverage episodes of the NYC cinephile podcasts Film Comment & The Last Thing I Saw, which often get me hyped up for microbudget oddities that have no name recognition outside a small circle of obscurity-obsessed pundits who trade deep-cut titles as a form of social currency half a country away from where I live. Sometimes, my nerdy notetaking during those conversations pays off wonderfully, as it prompted me to catch The Plague as soon as it was available, one of the most rewarding theatrical experiences I’ve had all year — festival or no. Often, it’ll lure me into making time for the kinds of underplayed, subtle-to-a-fault indie dramas I have no personal interest in beyond their value to The Discourse. Again, I acknowledge that it is shameful. I’ll also acknowledge that I had no business watching Mad Bills to Pay in particular, which seems to have spoken to that NYC cinephile crowd specifically because it’s set in The Bronx, a lesser-filmed borough of the city (as opposed to the more often-seen Brooklyn & Manhattan).
Mad Bills to Pay is a summer-bummer indie drama about ill-prepared parents-to-be in The Bronx. It’s a very quiet movie about very loud people, a paradox from the Sean Baker School of Character Studies. Newcomer Juan Collado stars as the 19-year-old Rico, who sells home-mixed cocktails called “Nutcrackers” to people partying on the beach, drawing attention with the constant sales pitch, “Nutties, nutties, nutties, nutties!” A macho brat in a domestic world entirely populated by women, most of his non-“nutties” vocabulary consists of variations of “Babe, babe, babe,” and “Bro, bro, bro” as he whines like a toddler who’s not getting enough attention (or, more often, not getting his way). After getting accustomed to Rico’s daily rounds of video games, bong rips, junk food, and public displays of alcoholism, we’re confronted with the out-of-nowhere revelation that he’s going to be a father, having impregnated the 16-year-old Destiny (fellow first-time actor Destiny Checho). The two children are very obviously not ready to have children of their own, which inspires endless shouting matches as they struggle & fail to assert their maturity to mothers who know better. Those frequent top-volume arguments are in direct contrast with the docudrama filmmaking style, framed with the cold, impartial distance of a security camera. Every single scene is another indication that the parents-to-be should seriously consider adoption or abortion instead of introducing a baby into their volatile relationship, all the way to the very end when it’s far too late. Meanwhile, a seemingly authentic portrait of Dominican American communal life in The Bronx is sketched out in background detail. First-time director Joel Alfonso Vargas delivers a confident, competent version of a kind of festival-circuit movie I always struggle to personally connect with, as my tastes tend to drift towards the more abstracted, dreamlike end of the medium. Since I’ve also failed to connect with recent years’ other festival darlings like Past Lives, Janet Planet, and Aftersun, I’m willing to chalk this one up to the go-to critical quality markers like Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint just not being my thing. Your own mileage may vary, especially if you have any affinity for day-drinking in The Bronx.
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, and memorable horror films & thrillers in the festival’s lineup, many of which don’t otherwise reach local big screens before they get siphoned off to the cultural void of streaming platforms. In recent years, all films programmed have been corralled to the two locations of The Prytania Theatres, which allows you to form a weekend-long bond with fellow movie nerds you 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 or sleepover 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 living room TV.
This was the first year of the festival where I made some time in my schedule for a couple repertory screenings: the Corman-Poe classic The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and a block of David Lynch’s early short films (namely “Sick Men Getting Sick,” “The Grandmother, “The Amputee,” and “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed”). The Vincent Price campiness and costume drama fussiness of House of Usher made for a classically wonderful trip to the Prytania’s original location uptown, but the Lynch shorts made a much more significant impression on me. As a collective, they offered a glimpse into an alternate dimension where Lynch might have stuck to a full career as a Don Hertzfeldt-style outsider animator. More importantly, they also projected most of the scariest images I saw at this year’s festival, especially in the domestic blackbox-theatre artificiality of “The Grandmother.” There’s always something novel about watching challenging art films in a downtown shopping mall like Canal Place, and that Lynch block may have been the most abstract & challenging films ever screened there. It says a lot about Overlook’s sharp, thoughtful curation that they made room for films that academically rigorous alongside feature-length sex-and-fart-joke comedies like Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover (which, I might as well admit, was my favorite of the fest).
I see no point in rating or raking the works of recently fallen legends like Corman & Lynch here, since their contributions to the festival are so deeply engrained in genre cinema history, they’re beyond critique. Instead, I’m listing below the ten new-release feature films I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, 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.
Grace Glowicki follows up her freak-show stoner comedy Tito with a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback, filtering the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Some of the most gorgeous, perverted images you’ll see all year paired with the kind of juvenile prankster humor that punctuates its punchlines with ADR’d fart noises. If Glowicki’s filmmaking career doesn’t work out, she can always pivot to becoming the world’s first drag king Crispin Glover impersonator, bless her putrid heart.
Grief has been the major theme in horror for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.
An all-in-a-car, real-time thriller that reimagines 2013’s Locke as a dark fairy tale about irresponsible parenting. Extremely satisfying for anyone who loves to watch Rosamund Pike act her way through a crisis.
A self-deprecating meta doc about a true crime dramatization that fell apart in pre-production. Reminded me of a couple postmodern television series of my youth: Breaking the Magician’s Code – Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed (for spoiling the magic of how the true-crime genre works) and The Soup (for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to Get It).
The new Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no not that one, the other one) asks a really scary question: What if online flamewars became physical, literal, and consequential? Turns out they’d still be at least a little bit silly and a lotta bit pathetic.
Screenlife cinema that abandons horror in favor of the heist thriller, following the small-scale, laptop-bound schemes of four teens who steal a Bitcoin fortune from an Elon Musk-type dipshit. I personally preferred when this still-burgeoning subgenre was fully supernatural, but it’s nice to see a version of it where teens are actually having fun being online (even when in peril).
A documentary about To Catch a Predator as an aughts-era reality TV phenomenon. Felt like I was going to throw up for the first 40 minutes or so, because I had never seen the show before and wasn’t fully prepared for how deeply evil it is.
You’ve seen a haunted house movie from the POV of a ghost. Now, line up for a haunted house movie kinda-sorta from the POV of a dog! What a time to be alive.
A WWII-set creature feature stranded somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Continues a long tradition of unspoken homoeroticism in wartime dramas, now with a Roger Corman rubber-suited monster as lagniappe.
A sci-fi revenge thriller about a grieving mother who gets addicted to killing her child’s murderer in multiple alternate dimensions. It brings me no pleasure to act as the logic police, but the temporal shenanigans of this one make no sense. It’s like they wrote it as a time-loop movie and subbed in the word “multi-verse” instead at the last minute without cleaning up the implications of how time passes differently in that genre. The violence is effectively nasty, though, and there are a few tense set-pieces that almost distract from the quibbles.
Welcome to Episode #236 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, starting with Good Boy (2025), a haunted house story as seen from a dog’s POV.
00:00 Welcome
04:36 Good Boy 17:00 The Ugly Stepsister 30:00 It Ends 36:26 Predators 49:43 Zodiac Killer Project 1:00:53 Dead Lover 1:05:00 The Shrouds 1:16:05 LifeHack 1:20:20 Cloud 1:38:17 Hallow Road
There’s something infectious about the festival environment that distorts your usual critical markers for what makes a film Interesting or Good. After few days of watching nothing but low-budget, high-style independent films that stretch a short-form premise over a long-form narrative, you start to forget what watching a Real Movie feels like; you’re so acclimated to subprofessional cinema that the professional-grade stuff feels uncanny & alien. That’s why a lot of the buzzier titles out of Sundance or SXSW suffocate when they reach wide audiences at the multiplex. If you don’t watch them underslept & malnourished in a marathon of similar no-budget no-namers, you’re approaching them wrong. By that standard, the 2001 drama Lola entered my life two full decades after its expiration date, when it played at TIFF, Sundance, and Berlinale before being promptly, appropriately forgotten. Stuck somewhere between the anonymity of every festival since Barbara Loden’s Wandaprogramming one or two low-budget dramas about an aimless woman’s identity crisis and the anonymity of being the 11th most popular film titled Lola on Letterboxd, this film functionally does not exist. I only bought a DVD copy of it at a local thrift store because there was no way to legally access it online, affording it an exciting sense of scarcity even if the payoff was guaranteed to be mediocre – just like at a festival. There was a brief moment in time when critics & film snobs would have waited an hour in line for the chance to see Lola so they could rush out an early review or pad out the lower end of their Best of the Year lists. Now it’s just collecting dust at the Goodwill on Tulane Avenue.
Sabrina Grdevich stars as the titular Lola, a sweet but absentminded housewife who would likely be played by Melanie Lynskey in a slightly bigger production. Lola thinks of herself as a free spirit and an artist, but she’s really an anxious ditz who’s trapped in a loveless, hateful marriage that prevents her from fully maturing into adulthood. Her life takes its first-ever interesting turn when she saves an equally absentminded prostitute named Sandra (Joanna Going) from walking into ongoing traffic, and the two economically mismatched women become fast friends with potential benefits. The aimless, persona-void Lola is fascinated by the self-assured Sandra’s clear-eyed view of her own life’s story, and her attraction to the troubled stranger quickly escalates to a volatile mix of lust & jealousy. From there, the film borrows its cookie-cutter art film narrative beats from Bergman’s Persona (when Lola assumes control of Sandra’s identity along with her trademark blonde-bob wig) and Loden’s Wanda (when Lola completes Sandra’s mission of returning to her industrial hometown to reconnect with her grieving mother) without ever matching the purpose or potency of either reference. However, before the lost housewife crosses into a nightmare mirror-realm version of Vancouver by becoming her streetwalker friend, the film does have a visual & auditory style all of its own. The abrupt, rapid edits of Lola’s conversations & daily routine—intercut with sped-up images of Vancouver traffic—does just as much to convey the character’s anxiety & aimlessness as Grdevich’s personality-tics performance. It’s impossible not to long for that anxious energy in the back half when that tension unravels into rural peace of mind, even if the tonal switch is narratively justified.
Lola can be exciting, sexy, funny, or excruciatingly boring, depending on the sequence in question. The way its narrative structure forces it to trail off on the boring end doesn’t leave the audience on the most memorable note, but there are plenty of great images & ideas littered on the path to that letdown. It doesn’t help that Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar premiered at Cannes the same year Lola reached Sundance & Berlinale, steamrolling its attempts to craft a high-style identity crisis drama with much more powerful, longer-lasting impact. I was mostly fond of this forgotten festival relic, though, if not only because it reminded me of the many worthy, stylish dramas I’ve caught at New Orleans Film Fest that never scored official distribution: Off Ramp, Pig Film, Damascene, Three Headed Beast, My First Kiss and the People Involved, and the list goes on. Judging by that metric (as opposed to the Morvern Callar metric), Lola is a total success story. It was at least enough of a breakout to earn physical distro, which allowed it to stretch twenty years and one national border over to my TV screen. There are thousands of fellow forgotten festival selections that would’ve loved that kind of exposure and never got it, which is a shame whether or not they’d hit at-home audiences just as hard as they hit at the fests.
The term “horror” can apply to such a wide range of narrative, thematic, and aesthetic traditions that it’s almost too wide of an umbrella to be considered a single genre. I’m always especially impressed with The Overlook Film Festival’s interpretation of what qualifies as horror in its programming, which makes room for films as disparate in tone & intent as a when-spiders-attack creature feature set in a French housing block and an internal identity crisis triggered by obsessive television watching in the American suburbs. This breadth of curation was especially on my mind while attending a trio of films about psychic mediums at this year’s Overlook – three films that had little, if anything, in common beyond the shared subject of their premises. Not all horror films are interested in scaring their audience; some are interested in making us laugh, some in making us ponder the incompressible phenomena of daily life. It’s incredible that I saw all of that territory covered in three Overlook selections that all happened to feature spiritual mediums’ attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Horror is everything; everything is horror.
Look into My Eyes
Documentarian Lana Wilson sounded surprised by Overlook’s flexible definition of horror as well, introducing her film Look into My Eyes by saying she was “tickled” by its selection for this year’s festival. It totally makes sense in the context of the overall program, though, given its open-minded curiosity about spiritual mediums who claim to communicate with the dead. Look into My Eyes is an intimate documentary about the therapeutic powers and performative artistry of New York City psychics & mediums. It would be easy for a doc with that subject to find ironic amusement in the eccentric characters interviewed, but Wilson cares way more about the interpersonal communication & emotional healing of spiritual sessions than the legitimacy of the supposedly supernatural practice. Neither skeptical nor defensive, she focuses on what the psychics themselves get out of the sessions (beyond the obvious monetary compensation) instead of what they do for their clients. They’re real people seeking connection to realms of the unreal, which makes for a fascinating dissonance if you care to listen long enough to get to know them.
Within the context of a horror movie festival, it’s impossible not to notice the genre movie cinephilia of the psychics profiled here, something Wilson acknowledged in the post-screening Q&A. One interviewee hangs a poster of Jack Torrance on their bathroom wall, as if he were about to break into the room with an axe; another is a John Waters obsessive who’s transformed her apartment into a shrine honoring Divine (a woman after my own filthy heart). All seven of the psychics profiled are artistically creative, most of them having started as actors in the performing arts before settling into parapsychology as a side hustle. Wilson does not use this revelation as a gotcha to expose them as frauds, because it’s not something that her subjects see as shameful or disqualifying. They’re channeling the spirits of the dead the same way they’d channel a fictional character, and (most of the time) it feels real to them. They’re often just as haunted by grief & loss as their clients and both sides of the transactional divide find the practice therapeutic (an intimacy that’s heightened by the movie being filmed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic). It’s possible that out of the 150 or so NYC psychics Wilson contacted as potential subjects for this project, she subconsciously chose these particular 7 because they share her own interests in the creative act of filmmaking, so that it says less about the practice at large than it says about the director’s bias. Even if so, the reason the movie works is because she is genuinely curious about their professional & private lives; any curiosity about the spiritual world beyond our own is secondary.
Sleep
Like with Look into My Eyes, it’s also ambiguous as to whether the Korean horror Sleep is actually a ghost story, or just a story about people who believe in ghosts. Curiously, the answer to that open-ended question also hinges on whether a struggling actor is telling the truth when they appear to be communicating with the dead, or whether they’re performing for personal survival. The actor in question is played by Lee Sun-kyun, the Parasite performer who unexpectedly died shortly after this film’s international premiere last year. Lee’s real-life death is made even more acutely painful by how lovably charming he is in Sleep as a doting husband who feels immense guilt about his nightly sleepwalking episodes that torment his equally adorable but increasingly frazzled wife (Train to Busan’s Jung Yu-mi). Scared that the out-of-character violence of her husband’s sleepwalking episodes will threaten the health of their newborn baby, the normally skeptical wife allows her mother to bring a psychic medium into the house to help exorcise the evil spirit that’s supposedly taken root in his body. Whether the husband believes in the ghost himself is ultimately up for debate, since he may very well be play-acting with the superstition just long enough to be cured by modern medical science, hoping his wife doesn’t attempt to violently extract the “ghost” from inside him in the meantime.
Speaking of Parasite, Sleep is the debut feature of director Jason Yu, a young protegee of Bong Joon-ho (who recommended Lee take the lead role as the possibly-possessed husband). That professional connection is worth noting because it informs Sleep’s oddly prankish tone. Whether or not this is a legitimate ghost story, it certainly is an adorable romcom. Lee & Jung are super cute together, which makes it all the more tragic when the sleepwalking-ghost turns them against each other. It’s a romcom, sure, but it’s a romcom about how psychotically violent you can become if your partner disrupts your sleep for long enough, with the wife taking over most of the horror duties in the back half once she fully commits to believing in the presence of a ghost. Thinking back to the ice-cold humor of Bong’s own debut Barking Dogs Never Bite, Sleep is also notable for its willingness to go there in its onscreen violence against innocents. No one is safe here; pregnant women, newborn babies, and Pomeranians are all in genuine mortal danger. Whether they will be saved by prescribed medication or old-world prayer relics is a fight between husband & wife – a fight with surprisingly, viciously funny results.
Oddity
Of course, not everybody goes into horror movies looking to have a laugh or to feel empathy. Sometimes, audiences actually want to be scared. The scariest movie about a spiritual medium I saw at this year’s Overlook was the Irish ghost story Oddity, in which violent spirits are weaponized for revenge amongst the living. The only movie I saw on the program that had me more on edge was the one that featured spiders crawling all over people’s faces & bodies, which by comparison feels like cheating. Oddity has to take its time to build the reasoning & mythology behind its supernatural scares, which start when a blind psychic arrives uninvited to the home where her twin sister was allegedly murdered by an escaped mental patient. Armed with a psychic ability to read hidden personal truths in physical possessions, she seeks answers about her sister’s death in the widower’s home, then sets about righting past wrongs with the help of present ghosts. She also weaponizes the physical body of a gnarled wooden puppet she drags into that home, a consistently creepy prop that recalls the puppet reaction cutaways from the 80s horror oddity Pin.
Oddity is a consistent series of routine fright gags that follow a rigid pattern of getting super quiet right before cutting to a ghost with a loud soundtrack stinger, and yet it made me jump every single time. After the credits rolled, I was startled again by the physical presence of the wooden puppet, which the festival programmers had quietly propped up at the exit door mid-screening. Personally, I don’t always need horror films to be scary to be worthwhile. I mostly cherish the genre for the freedom it gives filmmakers to ignore the limitations of real-world logic, and I’m usually onboard for whatever they choose to do with that permission to imagine. I couldn’t have asked for a better ending to this year’s festival than Oddity, though, since it reminded me that the primary value most audiences seek in horror is its ability to scare, which is just as valid & rewarding as anything else the genre can achieve. After seeing a documentary about real-world psychics’ emotional lives and a domestic comedy about psychics’ superstitious opposition to modern science, being genuinely scared by a movie on the same subject was a necessary, grounding experience. That unlimited range in tone & purpose is exactly what makes the horror genre so rewarding, and it’s what makes Overlook Film Festival an unmissable yearly ritual on the New Orleans culture calendar.
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.
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