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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the psychedelic daylight horror Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), a New England ghost story.
The buzzy Aussie horror Talk to Me is being marketed & distributed by A24 in the US, which is likely setting misguided expectations for it as an “A24 Horror” film. The independently produced demonic possession flick does dabble in themes typical to A24 Metaphor Horror, but its scares are much more direct, brutal, and ultimately conventional than the atmospheric slow-burn creepouts audiences have come to expect from the studio. In truth, Talk to Me builds a solid bridge between two prominent horror trends of the moment: Grief Metaphor horror (Hereditary, The Babadook, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, etc.) and social media peer pressure horror (Unfriended, Truth or Dare, Host, Ma, etc.). It falls somewhere between the artsy atmospherics of A24’s tastes as a curator and the trashier gimmickry of the Blumhouse brand, with the only apt comparison point on the former’s roster being last year’s bloody Gen-Z satire Bodies Bodies Bodies – another tonal outlier. In either case, Talk to Me is novel enough in its mythology and brutal enough in its unflinching violence to earn a spot somewhere in the modern horror canon, even if it treads in the liminal waters between the genre’s artsiest & trashiest contemporary impulses.
Talk to Me‘s take on the horrors of social media is much more sharply defined than its demonic possession tropes or its ruminations on grief. It’s effectively a “TikTok challenge” horror, except instead of doing a silly dance or chomping on a Tide pod, teens pressure each other to communicate with the dead. Their doorway to the spiritual world is a ceramic hand: an instantly iconic prop that summons wayward ghouls when you shake it in greeting and say, “Talk to me.” Going a step further, the teens invite those ghouls to possess their bodies for the LOLs, with all of their friends and casual acquaintances filming their freaky behavior for short-term video content. So, the demons that sneak into the real world through this open doorway aren’t directly tied to the cultural menace of social media, but the youthful desire for attention from peers on social media is what keeps the door open long enough for things to get out of hand (literally). The way those house party seances are lit by the searing, hungry eyes of smart phone cameras is often way more chilling & upsetting than the grotesque gore gags that result from the teens encouraging each other to play with powers they don’t comprehend. There are much tighter stomach knots tied by the embarrassment of what the ghouls make the teens’ bodies do on camera than by the lethal torment they devise in private.
The social media peer pressure scares of Talk to Me are bookended by much more expected, routine methods of modern horror. On the front end, our doomed lead (Sophie Wilde) is given a standard-issue reason to push her communication with the dead a little too far, to her friends’ demise; she’s grieving the death of her suicidal mother. On the back end, the demons that grief unleashes act in the exact way you’d expect in a modern losing-grip-with-reality metaphor horror, give or take one standout hallucinatory vision inspired by The Shunt. There’s no reason to hold it against any horror film for following the pre-set beats of its genre, though, especially not when the central mythology is this concisely clever and the violence is this excruciatingly cruel. Talk to Me is clearly a step above recent by-the-numbers mainstream horrors about mental health crises like Smile or Lights Out, even if it’s not typical to the glacial abstractions synonymous with A24 branding. At the very least, director-brothers Danny & Michael Phillipou’s shared background as shock value YouTube pranksters shows in the film’s sharp eye for social media menace, and their commitment to making sure that menace results in some truly gnarly on-screen violence is exactly what makes this the feel-bad movie of the summer.
I never engaged much with the Harry Potter movies as they rolled out throughout the aughts, but from what I remember glimpsing in Dear Reader, Wizard People, Daniel Radcliffe was not an especially talented child actor. I couldn’t hear Radcliffe’s pipsqueak line-readings over the drunken growls of Brad Neely’s alternate narration track, but I distinctly remember him having a dazed, deer-in-headlights look in Wizard People that suggested even he didn’t know why he was helming the blockbuster franchise. It’s incredible, then, that Radcliffe was able to turn that early windfall into what’s now a decades-running acting career instead of just a passive, eternal source of royalty checks. What’s even more incredible is just how weird he’s committed to making that career. Radcliffe continually chooses projects where he gets to play absolute freaks: Dr. Frankenstein’s groveling hunchback lab assistant (and possible boyfriend), a computer nerd with guns surgically bolted to his hands, a farting corpse with a magical boner, any role he can land to distance himself from his association with Harry Potter – efforts I am cruelly undermining here. Much like the kids who headlined the Twilight series, Radcliffe has put his blockbuster blood money to great use in the years since he broke free. Only, while RPat & KStew are chasing high-brow critical prestige, Radcliffe is out there determined to be seen as the biggest weirdo to grace the screen since Nic Cage screeched about the bees. It’s been a truly magical transformation.
Radcliffe’s determination to let his freak flag fly recently reached its highest fever pitch in the Funny or Die sketch turned Roku Channel Original Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Weird is a mock biopic that sensationalizes the notoriously squeaky-clean polka musician Weird Al’s life to match the more traditional rock ‘n roll hedonism of his MTV-era colleagues, complete with Dr. Demento scouting talent at the local biker bar and Al’s father forbidding him to play “the devil’s squeezebox.” It’s a single-joke premise that might feel a little redundant for anyone who’s already seen similar music industry parodies like Walk Hard & Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, but its single joke is still—importantly—very funny. Weird is the kind of comedy nerd’s comedy where every character introduction has you muttering “Oh, that’s good casting” under your breath. It’s Radcliffe’s casting that really makes the film special, though. As much as the purpose of Weird is to contextualize Al Yankovic as an essential American pop culture icon—alongside fellow greats like Madonna, Elvira, Pee-wee, and Divine—it also completes the mission of contextualizing Daniel Radcliffe as a true weirdo himself (although a Brit). Radcliffe commits to the bit with full fervor, playing the raw, scuzzy, self-destructive sexuality of Weird Al as if he were starring in an Iggy Pop biopic instead, strengthening the over-the-top absurdism of the film’s only joke by playing it with a straight face unseen in the genre since Leslie Nielsen passed. Radcliffe has played much weirder characters than Al in the past—the titular Swiss Army Man chief among them—but I’m not sure he’s ever done so more convincingly.
Things weren’t always this way. A decade before The Al Yankovic Story, Radcliffe’s career appeared to be taking a much more pedestrian leading-man path, starting with the 2012 adaptation of The Woman in Black. A comeback production for the legendary Gothic horror studio Hammer, The Woman in Black is super scary, both as a traditional ghost story and as a worst-case-scenario vision of Radcliffe’s potential career as a bland leading man instead of an eccentric weirdo millionaire. Both Hammer and Radcliffe had a lot to prove in the otherwise low-stakes, low-profile production, and only Hammer scored high in that gamble. In its story of a vengeful ghost who targets rural village children, Hammer was able to prove they were ready to produce well-balanced, traditionalist ghost stories again – offering a mix of shameless jump scares and long stretches of atmospheric quiet where all of the spookery lingers in backgrounds, mirrors, and mist. It’s not an especially shocking nor inventive horror film, but it is an efficient & effective one, where every adaptive choice helps amplify its eerie scares . . . except for Radcliffe’s casting as the lead. Much like in the early Harry Potter films, Radcliffe is just kinda there. He’d be easily replaceable as the film’s lead if it weren’t for his box-office draw as a recognizable name on the poster, which would only lead to diminishing returns if his career continued down that path (especially as the Harry Potter franchise sunk further into the toxic muck of TERFdom). The Woman in Black was marketed as Radcliffe’s debut as a serious adult actor, a legitimate talent with real staying power beyond the franchise that made him famous as a tyke. Instead, he comes across as just some guy, totally replaceable by any number of BBC repertory players.
The curious thing here is that The Woman in Black is a much better movie than Weird; it’s just not a better Daniel Radcliffe Movie. I would much rather live in a world where Radcliffe is a walking, talking Nic Cagian meme than one where he’s a competent but unnoticeable leading man. Looking back at the ten years between The Woman in Black and Weird, it appears that Radcliffe also wants to live in that world. He’s a genuine weirdo, and I think that’s beautiful.
Swampflix 
