ghosts

Undertone (2026)

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Undertone apparently began life as a radio play when it was first conceived by writer/director Ian Tuason, and it shows. It was also born out of his experiences taking care of his parents, who were both diagnosed with cancer in 2020; this, too, is apparent in the final film. It is, in many ways, deeply personal in a fashion that makes me feel bad giving it such a rotten rating, but while I hope that crafting the film gave Tuason the opportunity to process some of his grief, in so doing he created a piece of art for the public that treads no new ground and ultimately failed to connect with me on an emotional level, or deliver on much in the way of fear beyond the sufficient spooky atmosphere. 

Evy (Nina Kiri) is the co-host of a podcast that she hosts with her friend Justin (an entirely offscreen Adam DiMarco), in which he plays Mulder to her Scully as they go through listener submissions of paranormal encounters. Having returned to her childhood home, Evy has spent a year caring for her terminally ill religious mother, with the 3 AM recording times of episodes of The Undertone serving as the only thing she has to look forward to, other than occasional visits to her non-helpful boyfriend, Darren. As Evy’s mother enters her final days, The Undertone receives ten audio files via email that begin with a man named Mike recording his pregnant wife Jessa’s sleeptalking, before those recordings escalate into aural terror. 

There’s probably a really, really good short film in here. David F. Sandberg produced a no-budget short entitled Lights Out in 2013, which opened up the door for him to eventually make a feature of the same name in 2016. Smile and Night Swim followed suit as features that expanded creepy shorts into theatrical releases that have a decently functional core premise but which doesn’t have enough real substance to warrant a feature length picture. I was positive that this would prove to be the case for Undertone, but once I got home and looked it up, not only was this not based on a short film with a premise that was perfect for a 20ish minute runtime and which had imperfectly inflated to fill 90 minutes, but it also wasn’t a COVID-era script that spent the last half decade circling the drain in production purgatory (my other hypothesis about the film’s origins). It’s just a movie that looks, feels, and exhausts like one. 

There’s plenty to praise here. Critics and audiences alike are agog at the sound design, which is admittedly exceptional. One would expect nothing less from a film about podcasting and which was originally planned as an audio narrative, but it’s praiseworthy nonetheless. Although the most recent Oscars ceremony has just passed, this is a strong early contender for a nomination in the sound category right out of the gate for next year. Kiri’s performance is likewise laudable, as she, like Rose Byrne in last year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is present in virtually every single frame in the film; other than her mother’s prone body, no other humans are ever visible on screen. While Legs spent most of its time in long close-ups of Byrne, Undertone balances that intimacy with long stretches in which the camera is distant from Kiri, isolating her at her desk in a third of the frame while the rest of the screen is filled with dark, empty space. That void invites the enlightened viewer, who knows about the subtle faces and figures in the edges of the frame in Hereditary and Longlegs, to lean in, searching for those subliminal demons here. The film foregoes the cliche of having something leap out of the darkness in a jump scare, which is also a strong point in its favor, instead opting for the audio equivalent by having Justin’s shattering of a glass play too loudly in Evy’s headset and other unexpected noises at unreasonable volumes. All of that’s good, and I again have to reiterate that this would likely make for a four star or higher short film, but as a feature, it just doesn’t work. 

Despite Kiri’s strong performance, there’s very little to Evy. We know that she has a boyfriend, that she loves her mother, and that she hosts a podcast. Other than that we know she feels guilty about her exhaustion from being her mother’s caretaker and that she feels disconnected from her mother’s devout Catholicism, there’s not much to contemplate about her inner life. Evy’s lapsed sobriety is given an offhanded comment that doesn’t amount to anything at all, a Chekov’s gun hanging over the mantle, frustratingly jammed. Maybe her skepticism about the apparent hoax nature of the recordings bleeds out slowly as she tips the bottle more frequently, so that the fever dream of an ending represents her descent; leaving the loop unclosed on this character choice means that her first drink, followed by lying to Justin about it, just takes up space in the screenplay, irrelevant and dangling. It’s one of the textbook tells that the film doesn’t have enough ideas to hit the minimum time to be considered for theatrical release, as does the podcasting duo’s decision to listen to only a few recordings at a time. Rather than get through them in a single session (or a maximum of two), the film artificially and illogically stretches the virtual listening party out to four different recording sessions. The film’s repetition of (a) spooky recordings listened to/played with in an audio compiler, (b) Evy talks to a doctor on the phone, (c) Evy administers to her unconscious mother’s needs, (d) Evy has a spooky dream, then back around to (a) is repeated so many times that, when my bladder was full, I knew I only had to wait a few minutes until the film would lull again and I could make a quick run for the theater restroom. 

Another thing that feels unsustainable about the premise is the inherent goofiness of following the narrative logic of “What if nursery rhymes contain secret evil messages?” to its conclusion. It’s not a secret that a great deal of folkloric melodies are based on schoolyard rhymes about historical events (or are retroactively diagnosed by later historians and critics as having been so) or that history is full of violence and ignorance, but the spooky, evil recording of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” really is a bridge too far into the absurd. Justin’s mind is frequently blown by reading the “origin and meaning” section of a Wikipedia page and acting as if he just got encrypted access to a declassified file, so when he downloads and sends the recording to Evy, he gets spooked by the coincidence that the version he found online is the same one that is playing in Jessa and Mike’s audio files. I don’t know, man, kinda seems like you and whoever is pulling this prank just landed on the same link on the first page of Google results for “spooky Baa Baa Black Sheep.” I know that I’m here to review the movie I saw and not rewrite it into the movie I wish it was, but when a film has this much potential only to squander it, I can’t seem to help myself. Imagine if Justin had masterminded this whole thing, that he had created Jessa and Mike’s recordings and sent Evy a version of an old song that he had deliberately backmasked in order to rattle her skepticism. From there, the story could delve into a more malicious reason for him to want to gaslight Evy (maybe her baby is actually his?), or keep it supernatural by having his audience-entertaining prank turn out to have actually summoned a demon. Instead, we get something that’s frustrating in just how much it’s held back by having too much imagination to dismiss as easy schlock and not quite enough to move the story in a less obvious, familiar direction. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bones (2001)

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In the documentary Horror Noire, legendary cinematographer-turned-director Ernest Dickerson claims that his 2001 film Bones failed at the box office because distributor New Line Cinema insisted on marketing it as “a Black horror film” instead of just “a horror film,” emphasizing its cultural stereotypes instead of what makes it an oddball genre exercise in its own right. Having since caught up with Bones myself, I think that philosophical divide started long before New Line got involved. The film’s two white screenwriters, Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe, originally pitched Bones as a kind of prototype for Black Dynamite: a 2000s era spoof of 1970s Blaxploitation relics, with a supernatural revenge premise borrowed from J.D.’s Revenge and in-dialogue references to titles like Three the Hard Way (when one character offers the conspiracy theory that fast-food fried chicken batter has been chemically altered to make Black men sterile). The movie got greenlit as soon as they attached Snoop Dogg to star, since he does look remarkably good modeling 70s hustler fashions as a walking-talking homage to classics like SuperFly & The Mack. Watching through the DVD’s bonus-feature interviews, I get the sense that Dickerson’s hiring changed the tenor of the project dramatically. While everyone else gushes about what a dream it was to work with Blaxploitation superstar Pam Grier in a throwback to that genre’s heyday (including a blushing Snoop Dogg, who was shy to kiss her on-camera), Dickerson instead goes on tangents about how excited he was to make a modern version of Mario Bava’s bug-nuts haunted castle movies like The Whip and the Body. The producers were thinking Blacula while the director was thinking Blood and Black Lace, muddling the central conceit beyond easy marketability.

Personally, I think the Bones marketing campaign failed because the title Ghost Dog was already claimed by Jim Jarmusch. The closest the film gets to a clear logline concept is in the earliest stretch when a hell hound with glowing red eyes is seemingly possessed by the undead spirit of a 1970s street hustler named Bones, played by Snoop Dogg in Blaxploitation-tinted flashbacks. It’s an easily digestible conceit that plays right into its star’s rap persona, and you can easily imagine how good it’d look on a poster if the core idea stopped there. Only, it turns out that Bones’s ghost isn’t only piloting the body of a rabid street dog; it’s also haunting an Old Dark House in the middle of the city, anchored there by the literal bones left behind after his murder in the 1970s. When the children of the traitors who stabbed him to death happen to discover this spooky mansion and plot to transform it into a hip nightclub, Bones is resurrected by feeding on their bodies one at a time, via his ghost-dog surrogate. However, even that conceit gets muddled by the time the house’s ghostly presence molests a sleeping teenager the audience knows to be Bones’s daughter. Is this a supernatural act of incest? Or is that heinous act carried out by one of the dozens of souls Bones has trapped in the house with him by adding them to his writhing, Cronenbergian flesh wall? Speaking of which, if he was only betrayed by several close friends, where did all of those extra souls come from to build that wall? And why is the dog still around after he gets his old body back? And what does it mean when that dog pukes a never-ending flood of maggots on the patrons of the underground nightclub that wakes him from his slumber? How does any of this work?

The answer to those questions might have mattered in pitch meetings and marketing strategies, but since Dickerson was pulling most of his inspiration from Bava-era Italo horror, no internal logic is required to propel the picture from scene to scene. Simon & Metcalfe establish a sturdily familiar structure to hang the film’s more impulsive ideas off of, marrying ghostly haunted-house revenge plots to a 70s Blaxploitation trope about the hero hustler who fights to keep hard drugs out of his community (seen both in classic titles like Disco Godfather and contemporary spoofs like Black Dynamite). Bones was murdered because he rejected a corrupt pig’s business pitch to poison his neighborhood with crack cocaine. So, when he gets his revenge from beyond the grave, he’s also fighting for the lost dignity of the community his former partners sold out for personal profit. What I don’t get the sense of here is that Dickerson cared about any of that while making the movie. He treats that familiar genre territory as a open playground where he can just try whatever surrealistic horror image comes to mind. In the earliest stretch, when Bones is still a disembodied spirit, Dickerson portrays him as a Nosferatu-style shadow creeping up the haunted nightclub walls in early-aughts CGI. Later, when he feeds on unsuspecting victims during that nightclub’s disastrous opening night, his body is rebuilt one layer of muscle at a time in grotesque stop-motion animation reminiscent of The Evil Dead. Once fully formed and walking around in his retro pimp gear, Bones starts making groaner quips about how he doesn’t need drugs because he’s enjoying “a natural high . . . a supernatural high.” There’s a uniform flatness to those one-liners’ delivery that again suggests the director was checked out from the written material, but you can also clearly see him having fun with Bones literally collecting heads during his quippy revenge mission, keeping his victims’ disembodied noggins alive & talking until they can be added to the flesh-wall soul collection in his inner sanctum.

There’s a glaring discordance between the playfulness of Bones‘s imagery and the going-through-the-motions drudgery of its dialogue, and that discordance is never more glaring than when we leave the haunted-house antics of the present to revisit the Blaxploitation homage of the past. The screenwriters had exactly one idea: casting Snoop Dogg as a vengeful ghost of a Blaxploitation hustler archetype. Inspired by free-for-all Italo horrors like Black Sunday, Suspiria, Burial Ground, Demons, Cemetery Man, and The Beyond, Dickerson put no limitations on his own ideas, throwing as many visual tricks and for-their-own-sake indulgences at the screen as the budget would allow. As a former cinematographer, you can tell he was having way more fun running around shooting the haunted house set from Bones’s ghost-cam POV than he was listening to anything Bones had to say. The movie would be a by-the-numbers bore without that gonzo anything-goes approach, but it is funny in retrospect to hear him complain that his distributor didn’t know how to market the resulting mess it left behind.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #254: Ghost Stories for Christmas (1971-2025)

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Welcome to Episode #254 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to investigate the paranormal British tradition of broadcasting ghost stories on Christmas, courtesy of the BBC.

00:00 Merry Spooky Christmas
23:49 Ghost Stories for Christmas (1971-1978)
1:04:54 Other BBC ghost stories (2005-2025)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: The Undying Monster (1942) & 13 Ghosts (1960)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss a double feature of high-style Gothic horror stories: John Brahm’s The Undying Monster (1942) and William Castle’s 13 Ghosts (1960).

00:00 Freaky Fridays at Double Trouble
10:00 Friday the 13th Part VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
16:53 Video Diary of a Lost Girl (2012)
23:45 Dial M for Murder (1954)

32:12 The Undying Monster (1942)
55:35 13 Ghosts (1960)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Podcast #236: Good Boy (2025) & The Overlook Film Festival

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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

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Presence (2025)

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There’s a playfulness in the basic tech and form of every Steven Soderbergh picture that invites us to wonder what new toy the director is going to be most excited to play with. However, there isn’t much time to wonder in his new haunted house picture, where his playful tech-tinkering is at its most immediately conspicuous. Shot in a single house over the course of eleven days, Presence is a ghost story told from the 1st-person point of view of the ghost. It’s a clever premise that frees Soderbergh to be as playful with the camera as ever, handling the equipment himself as he follows around his small haunted-family cast and constantly directs the audience’s attention to the act of observation through his wandering lens. The resulting image is a kind of supernatural found footage horror that leans into the improbability of the genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so we don’t question why the camera continues rolling once the violence starts; we only question why that camera operator is choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The last-minute answer to that question gave me a shock of goosebumps and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way that the best ghost stories do. It’s in the asking of the question where Soderbergh gets to have his fun, though, and it’s delightful to see a filmmaker this many decades into their career still excited by the opportunity to play with the basic tools of their craft.

Lucy Liu stars as the high-strung, wine-guzzling matriarch of a nuclear suburban family. She’s poured all of her hopes and self-worth into the athletic achievements of her jock teen son Tyler (Eddy Maday), whose burgeoning persona as an egotistical bully is directly correlated with the effort she puts into supporting his swim-team dreams. Meanwhile, her daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is treated as the mother’s genetic leftovers, molding in the back of the fridge while the father (Chris Sullivan) solemnly shakes his head in exasperation. It’s not an especially complicated family dynamic, but it’s one that becomes increasingly eerie & foreboding as it’s filtered through the security-camera eyes of a ghost. At the start of the film, the ghost is trapped in an empty, echoey suburban house, and what fills that void once its tenants arrive (with the help of a comically unprofessional real estate agent played by Julia Fox) are the typical horrors that haunt the modern American family: loneliness, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, the violent radicalization of young men, etc. As the most isolated member of the family, Chloe is the most vulnerable to those horrors, and so the ghost (and, by extension, the audience) spends the most time watching over her, eventually stepping in to protect her from whatever harm can be prevented by a noncorporeal force . . . since no one alive seems especially motivated to actively help.

Since it’s a formal experiment more concerned with what’s implied by every subtle movement of the camera than it is a mechanism for delivering routine scare gags, most audiences are going to be reluctant to engage with Presence as a horror film, likely likening it to titles like A Ghost Story, Nickel Boys, and Here. Personally, I found its icy, distancing approach to form to be effectively chilling, and the movie I most thought about during its runtime was the creepypasta novelty Skinamarink. Both films repurpose the filmic language of the found footage horror genre to coldly observe the isolation & cruelty of modern domestic life from an impossible supernatural vantage point, dwelling on an eerie mood that most people only feel when we’re alone in an empty home. Presence ultimately forms a more traditional narrative than Skinamarink thanks to the mainstream professionalism of screenwriter David Koepp, choosing to answer the question of its ghost’s mysterious identity in a final explanatory reveal instead of letting it hang in the air. I appreciate Soderbergh’s eagerness to bring distancing, arthouse abstraction into mainstream venues in that way, along with implied political commentary that reaches beyond the boundaries of his increasingly small, generic stories. Like other recent Soderbergh successes Unsane & Kimi, Presence is high-style genre pulp that only becomes complex & nuanced when you poke at the decisions behind its creation – most importantly, in this case, the decisions on where to point the camera and when to look away.

-Brandon Ledet

Ghost Ship (2002)

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A friend and I were recently in our local video store (boy, I sure do seem to be mentioning them a lot lately) this past Thursday night, having decided to have a nostalgic movie-and-pizza night. We checked out the director wall, and we had already pulled Dressed to Kill as a maybe before we sauntered over to the horror section, where we alighted almost immediately on Ghost Ship, which my buddy pulled out of the stacks while referencing the number of times that he had seen the film’s lenticular cover on the shelves at the Blockbusters (et al) of our youth. He assumed I had seen it and I admitted that I hadn’t, and the pact was sealed. 

The film opens on a 1960s transatlantic sea voyage aboard the Antonia Graza, U.S.-bound from Italy. It’s the night of the captain’s ball, and a lounge singer is performing. A young girl named Katie Harwood (Emily Browning) shares a dance with the captain before a metal cable snaps and tears through the entire dance floor, slicing people as it goes and sparing only Katie, owing to her short stature. Forty years later, we get a look into the lives of a ragtag team of salvagers, with Maureen Epps (Julianna Margulies) clearly taking center stage as the film’s protagonist as we see her perform a down-to-the-wire patch job on a sinking salvage job that manages to save their haul. Also part of the salvage crew are soon-to-be-married Greer (Isaiah Washington), religious mechanic Santos (Alex Dimitriades), and also Dodge and Munder (Ron Eldard and Karl Urban), who don’t even have a one-to-two-word character trait for me to cite. Their ship, the Arctic Warrior, is captained by Murphy (Gabriel Byrne), who has a parent-child relationship with Epps. While celebrating their latest haul, they are approached by a man named Ferriman (Desmond Harrington), a weather service pilot who offers them the location of an apparently derelict cruise liner, which could end up being a huge score, if they cut him in. He negotiates his way aboard for the expedition, and when they arrive at the vessel, they realize that it’s the notorious lost ship Antonia Graza, which is treated as a kind of sea legend like the Queen Mary. As the crew begins salvage preparations, Murphy insists that they not inform the Coast Guard despite maritime laws, and Epps is the first to witness something spooky aboard: the ghost of Katie Harwood. 

This is … not a very good movie, but there are things to praise about it. Never having really given the film much thought beyond picking it up at a video store twenty years ago, reading the back of the DVD, and then putting it back on the shelf, I was surprised that this had a more complex storyline than expected. One would assume that the people killed at the beginning of the film would be the ghosts haunting the ship, and that the rest of the plot would play out as yet another pale imitation of The Haunting, but on a ship. Surprisingly, this one goes the route of having more of a mystery; the resolution is very goofy, but at least it doesn’t play all of the cards in its hand by the end of the first half hour. The salvage crew finds evidence that there have been other people aboard since the ship was originally lost, as they discover a digital watch and encounter a few corpses that are too fresh to be the original crew. Not every member of the crew was at the ball, so shouldn’t someone have survived? Why is Katie’s ghost a child if she was spared from the horrible accident in the prologue? How long did she survive aboard? Other crew members beside Epps start to experience hauntings as well, with Greer finding himself being seduced by the specter of the lounge singer, but things only get further complicated when they discover crates full of gold bars in the cargo hold. 

Apparently, this began life as more of a psychological thriller, with Murphy as the lead instead of acting as (not very convincing) decoy protagonist to Epps. Instead, it became more of a supernatural slasher, with a twist that almost, but doesn’t quite work. Ferriman’s name ends up being a clue, as it turns out that he’s a kind of demonic soul reaper who specializes in damning maritime crews through appealing to their sinful instincts. The gold is cursed, so that vessels with it aboard are ultimately destroyed because of the intense greed it afflicts upon the crew(s), with it having been transferred aboard the Antonia Graza the same day that it first went missing. The accident in the prologue was intentional sabotage, and the ship has been pulling in new crews to find it, fight over it, and ultimately die while aboard so that Ferriman can add new ghosts to his hellbound coterie. This ends up becoming needlessly complicated by some half-baked additions to the lore, including that some of the souls are “marked” by Ferriman and as such are under his control, while other innocent souls are also trapped on the ship and thus able to act against him. The only ones we ever see are Katie and the ghostly captain, and his intentions are less clear, as he induces the long-sober Murphy to have a drink with him. You can see the underpinnings of a stronger narrative here in scenes like the one that the two captains—living and dead—share, which reduces a plot that was clearly meant to echo The Shining into a single sequence of resurgent alcoholism. The overly complicated haunting plot and the slapdash characterization end up making the film feel both overstuffed and incomplete, like there’s a cut of this film that’s 10 minutes longer and more coherent, but not necessarily better. 

Still, there are some campy laughs to be had here. I found myself thinking back to our podcast discussion of Wishmaster, and how the excessive, imaginative violence of that film’s opening scene overshadowed the rest of the film, as this one also put its best scene right at the beginning. The metal line cutting through the crowd at the ball isn’t a quick scene, as the film instead revels in exploring all the ways that this would be truly horrifying. A man cut completely in half at the navel first has all of the clothes from his midsection fall to a pile around his ankles, leaving him in only his underwear and formalwear from the midriff up; it would be surprisingly chic if it weren’t for his body falling apart seconds later. The captain is sliced open at the mouth, leaving him with a grisly Gaslow grin before the top half of his head slides off. It’s a remarkable bit of gore, and we watch it all happen through the eyes of Katie, which makes it all the worse. From here, however, none of the deaths are as creative, and none of the characters are sufficiently grounded for them to matter to us emotionally, either. Murphy is placed in an empty aquarium after he attacks one of the others, and Epps later finds him having drowned when the aquarium flooded. Santos is killed off early on in an engine room explosion, and Dodge is killed offscreen via methods unknown. The most comical death is Greer’s, as he justifies hooking up with the ghost of the lounge singer by saying that it’s not really cheating since she probably doesn’t really exist, right before she lures him into falling down an elevator shaft. Greer just falls right through her when attempting to cop a feel, and it’s terribly undignified. 

This is the only other film ever directed by Steve Beck following the release of his Thirteen Ghosts remake the previous year. That didn’t come as a surprise to me when looking up the production history. There are similarities between the two insofar as shallow characterization, inconsistently entertaining violence, and general preference for spectacle over insight. This is an artifact of a lost time, when a movie that could just as easily have premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel would sometimes get a theatrical release, when Dark Castle was barely putting out original content between pumping out remakes like the aforementioned Thirteen Ghosts, the 1999 House on Haunted Hill, and the Paris Hilton House of Wax in 2005. The DVD box even suggests you learn more about the movie using an AOL keyword search and half the film’s special features require you to put it in a DVD-ROM drive (good luck). Ghost Ship’s minimal swearing and nudity seem tailor-made to be chopped out so that this could air right in the middle of a Saturday afternoon block with Epoch and Bugs, the kind of movie that you can really take a nap to. Come for the holographic cover, enjoy the opening gore, and then drift off to sleep. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Quick Takes: Ghosts of Yule

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This hazy dead space between Christmas and the New Year finds the boundaries between this world and the next at its thinnest, even thinner than on All Hallows’ Eve.  That’s why Yule season is the perfect time to read, watch, and share ghost stories.  It’s a tradition most faithfully observed in annual retellings of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and in annual British television broadcasts that never fully cross over to the US.  While most households are streaming Hallmark & Lifetime Christmas schlock in their pajamas, we Yuleheads light a few candles and invite ghosts into our home through short story collections and the television set.  It’s become my favorite Yuletide tradition in recent years, and it’s one more traditionally Christmasy than a lot of people realize.  So, in order to help spread the undead Yule spirit before the holiday passes, here are a few short-form reviews of the ghost stories I’ve been chilling myself with this week.

The Uninvited (1944)

1944’s The Uninvited is the least Christmas-related film of this batch, but it’s ghostly & cozy enough to justify a Yule-season viewing.  More of a cutesy radio play than a tale of the macabre, it tells the story of a weirdly chummy brother & sister who purchase a dilapidated seaside home that’s been left empty for years because it’s very obviously haunted.  One local woman (a sheltered twentysomething who acts like a pouty teen) is especially distraught by the purchase, since her mother died there under mysterious circumstances that her new adoptive family must uncover before the ghost tosses her off the backyard cliff.  The answer to that mystery mostly plays out like a dinner-theatre staging of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but it’s worth sticking it out to see the film’s gorgeous, ethereal visualization of its cursed-real-estate ghost.  While its Criterion Collection packaging presents it as a kindred spirit of much chillier, statelier 1960s ghost stories like The Haunting or The Innocents, The Uninvited is much gentler & sillier than that.  It’s a mildly spooky amusement, which is perfect for this time of year.

Beyond Tomorrow (1940)

1940’s Beyond Tomorrow is even gentler & sillier than The Uninvited, with more overt ties to Christmastime besides its seasonal apparitions.  Often retitled as Beyond Christmas, this public domain B-movie is a cozy, zero-conflict ghost story about how there are still a few sweetie pies left in The Big City: some living, some dead but lingering.  It starts with a trio of Scrooges of varying grumpiness who are working late hours on Christmas Eve, when one decides to play a Christmas game.  They each toss a leather wallet onto the New York City sidewalk with their address and a $10 bill inside to see if there’s anyone left in the city honest enough to return them.  Two adorably naive youngsters return the wallets they find on the snowy pavement and the old-fogey roommates/business partners treat them to a Christmas meal as thanks.  Then they collectively play matchmaker for the young couple, mostly from beyond the grave.  The improbable trio of businessmen die in a plane crash at the end of the first act, then spend the rest of the movie acting as a ghostly Greek chorus.  They do everything together in life, in death, and beyond.

Nothing especially dramatic happens in Beyond Tomorrow until the last-minute appearance of a sultry Big City temptress who threatens to break the couple up with her hedonistic ways.  From there, it’s a minutes-long morality play that ends in gunshots and emergency surgery, but by then we’ve already seen three grumpy but kindly old men pass on to the next world without much of a fuss.  Dying is just not that big of a deal.  Mostly, the film is an excuse to hang around a Christmas-decorated luxury apartment with a small collection of ghosts in hopes that one of them might remind you of your own grandfather; or maybe one will remind you of a wealthy benefactor who baited you off the street with a prop wallet, whichever speaks closer to the life you’ve lived.

All of Us Strangers (2023)

2023’s All of Us Strangers is a much more dramatic Christmastime ghost story, although even its own sense of melancholy settles into an overall cozy mood.  Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott stars as a lonely Londoner who’s living in a brand-new apartment building that otherwise appears to be entirely empty . . . except for the tempting presence of Paul Mescal as his more outwardly social but equally depressive downstairs neighbor.  He staves off some of his loneliness by fucking that younger, livelier neighbor, but he mostly suppresses it by visiting his childhood home outside of the city, where he finds domestic comfort with the ghosts of his parents who died in a car crash when he was 12.  Being older than the ghostly couple who raised him is already a surreal enough experience, but things get even more complicated when he comes out to them as a gay man, having to explain that it’s not really such a big deal anymore to Conservative suburbanites who died at the height of the AIDS epidemic.  Then, the whole thing falls apart when he attempts to introduce them to his new situationship boyfriend, throwing his entire home/romantic afterlife balance into chaos.

Andrew Haigh’s low-key supernatural melodrama delicately touches on a lot of traditional ghost story beats in its grace notes, but it also loudly echoes how the isolation of modern urban living is a kind of ghost story that we’re all living every day.  Our protagonist is a quiet, reserved bloke with no chance of making meaningful human connection from the voluntary prison cell of his one-bedroom apartment.  All he can do is spin vintage New Romantics records and reminisce about the last few warm memories of his childhood, unable to fully enjoy the ways the world has gotten easier for gay men like him in the decades since.  As a prestige drama for adults, it’s a little too Subtle, Restrained, and Nuanced for my personal tastes, but I still felt swept up in its melancholy Yuletide mood.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is much louder, flashier Christmas fare than All of Us Strangers or any other title on this list.  It’s also not strictly a ghost story, so its inclusion here is kind of a cheat.  Geena Davis stars as a small-town middle school teacher who suffers from amnesia, unable to recall her life before her cookie-cutter Norman Rockwell thirties in the suburbs.  Her past comes back to haunt her, literally, after she appears in local TV news coverage of her town’s Christmas parade, where she’s featured waving from a float in an adorable Mrs. Claus outfit.  A subsequent head injury in a boozy Christmas Eve car accident shakes her past self loose in her mind, prompting it to appear to her in a dream, cliffside, with her red curls cut & dyed into an icy Basic Instinct blonde bob.  That eerie green-screen dream is a confrontation with the ghost of her former life – a supernatural showdown reflected in a magic dressing mirror that allows the two versions of herself to negotiate for control of her body.  While they fight it out, snarling supercriminals from her violent past—having seen her on television—invade her suburban home, and she goes on an emergency road trip with a sleazy private detective (Samuel L. Jackson, in a Shaft-era blacksploitation wardrobe) to retake control of her life.

It turns out that the blonde-bob Geena Davis of the past was a lethally trained CIA agent whose murderous skills come back to the red-curls Geena Davis of the present one at a time, scaring her but also arming her to fight back against her attackers.  During her road trip with her private dick, her trained-assassin ghost fully takes possession of her body, reclaims her preferred hairstyle, and sets up a precarious either/or decision where the Geena Davis of the future will either emerge a tough badass or an adoring mom.  The Long Kiss Goodnight was written by Shane Black, who is very likely the pinnacle of Tarantino-era post-modern edgelords, which means it’s overflowing with sarcastic quips and emptied gun clips.  It’s also very likely the pinnacle of Black’s work as a screenwriter, right down to his “written by” credit appearing over a pile of Christmas ornaments, celebrating his tendency to set hyperviolent scripts during the holiday. 90s action-schlock director Renny Harlan doesn’t entirely know what to do with Black’s excess of overwritten, flippant dialogue, but he’s at least smart enough to fill the screen with enough explosions that you hardly have time to notice.  As a result, the movie is most recommendable to audiences who are frustrated that Die Hard isn’t as Christmasy of Christmastime action-movie programming as annually advertised, more so than it is recognizable to audiences looking for a Yuletide ghost story.  There is a ghost story lurking in its DNA, though, because a Christmas traditionalist like Shane Black can’t help but acknowledge that essential but overlooked aspect of the holiday.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: House (1977)

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Boomer, Brandon, and Alli celebrate a Lagniappe Podcast milestone by discussing Nobuhiko Obayashi’s psychedelic cult classic House (1977).

00:00 Episode 100

07:00 No Country for Old Men (2007)
13:32 Challengers (2024)
20:55 The Beast (2024)
34:38 Dial M for Murder (1954)
45:33 The People’s Joker (2024)
49:06 Humane (2024)

55:48 House (1977)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Psychic Damage at The Overlook Film Festival

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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.

-Brandon Ledet