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.
There’s a long tradition of horror movies claiming to adapt Edgar Allan Poe stories while really only taking inspiration from those stories’ titles, from the Lugosi-Karloff classics The Black Cat & The Raven to David DeCoteau’s softcore beefcake take on The Pit and the Pendulum. For as long as horror cinema has existed as a medium, Poe’s name has been exploited for easy marketing appeal, due to its synonymous association with Gothic tales of “the macabre.” What makes the 1965 Italo schlock Bloody Pit of Horror stand out in that tradition is that it dares to imagine a world where rather than claiming to adapt Poe without any meaningful connection to his work, horror movies do the same to Marquis de Sade instead. I suppose that’s because de Sade’s name is synonymous with kinky smut the same way Poe’s is with Gothic literature. By slapping de Sade’s name onto Bloody Pit of Horror, American distributors weren’t claiming to directly adapt 120 Days of Sodom or Justine; they were merely conveying a whiff of sadomasochistic sleaze for those interested in watching buxom models get tortured in bikinis. They did, however, slap a direct quote from de Sade into the opening credits, citing him as saying “My vengeance needs blood!” Unsurprisingly, that quote only triggers results for Bloody Pit of Horror when you google it, either because the filmmakers completely made it up, or because de Sade’s smuttier material is what’s more typically associated with his name.
Bloody Pit of Horror is a low-budget haunted castle movie in which a small crew of horror-marketing advertisers are location scouting for a series of photographs meant to illustrate horror novels, mostly posing hot young women in old, rusty torture devices. There is some metatextual humor to that premise, given that the movie itself is just an excuse to pose the same images, but any semblance of purpose or subtext stops there. Mostly, the models & camera crew explore the castle’s crypts & hallways to low-energy lounge music, in no particular rush to do anything in particular between photoshoots. Their lackadaisical workday is violently interrupted by the resident castle freak, of course, who believes himself to be possessed by the restless spirit of a red-hooded vigilante brute known as The Crimson Executioner, dead for centuries before their arrival. In truth, he’s a former colleague – a professional muscle man who’s been driven mad by professional & romantic rejections to the point of an incel killing spree. From there, it’s a beefcake vs. cheesecake showdown, with the masked madman strapping the models into ancient, complex torture devices so they can sensually writhe in bondage before ritualistic death. Iron maidens, body stretchers, pulleyed-spikes, boobytrapped bondage ropes attached to loaded crossbows: he’s got an entire toy chest full of naughty lethal weapons, and he’s not afraid to bare his naked, oiled-up chest while operating them.
On the 1960s Italo horror spectrum, Bloody Pit of Horror falls somewhere between the literary Gothic staging of Black Sunday and the shameless porno-mag erotica of The Vampire and The Ballerina without ever matching the heights of either work. The villain’s insane, confessional rants in the third act are far enough over the top to make it worthwhile for schlock junkies, though, especially if you have an appetite for vintage nudie-cutie kitsch. Here’s where I’ll confess that I saw a censored, low-res American edit of the film on used DVD instead of tracking down a pristine, untouched copy of the original Italian cut. I am apparently so adverse to sitting through ads on Tubi that I’m willing to watch an ancient thrift store DVD where the VHS tracking of the tape it was copied from is more visible in-frame than the cheesecake models’ naked breasts. I’m ultimately glad I saw the slightly shortened American edit, though, since the Italian version did not include the unearned allusions to Marquis de Sade in the credits and on the poster. That was an American marketing invention meant to signal exactly what flavor of smut was being sold (slightly non-vanilla), which I’ll confess still worked on me six decades later when I plucked it out of a Minneapolis record store bin. I can’t say that Poe’s name on the front cover would’ve sold me on it in the same way, but that’s likely because his name’s too ubiquitous in the genre to maintain any novelty.
Because I’m such a glutton for screenlife horror films, my expectations when approaching each new entry in the genre are pitifully low. For every genius laptop-POV thriller out there like Unfriended, Host, and Spree, there’s ten times as many dull, uninventive imitators likeSearching,Safer at Home, and Untitled Horror Movie. Screenlife filmmaking is such an easily affordable, attention-grabbing gimmick that the genre has become overcrowded to the point where it’s no more of a novelty than carbon, oxygen, or tap water. I’m still always thirsty for more found footage chillers about cursed internet broadcasts, though, so I couldn’t resist the unassuming haunted house horror comedy Deadstream when I saw it on the program for this year’s Overlook Film Fest. I went into the movie expecting more post-Unfriended mediocrity, which is likely why I found it such a constantly surprising delight. It got huge laughs in a way that transported me back to Overlook’s joyous screenings of One Cut of the Dead the last time the festival was staged in-person in 2019. It’s easy to roll your eyes at the simplicity & tardiness of its premise in a market overcrowded with so much screenlife #content, but Deadstream is a verified crowdpleaser.
Deadstream essentially does for Blair Witch what Host did for Unfriended: borrowing its basic outline to stage a chaotic assemblage of over-the-top, technically impressive scare gags. A found-footage horror comedy about an obnoxious social media influencer getting his cosmic comeuppance while livestreaming his overnight tour of a haunted house, it also functions as a kind of internet-era tech update for the vintage media nostalgia of the WNUF Halloween Special. The influencer in question is a smartass YouTuber with a popular channel named Wrath of Shawn and a sub-Ryan Reynolds sense of humor. He’s occasionally funny but relentlessly grating, not to mention casually sexist, racist, and classist. Hot off six months of “cancellation” for an “insensitive” YouTube stunt he’s reluctant to sincerely discuss, he attempts to earn back his audience & sponsors with a night spent in the aforementioned haunted house. There, he runs afoul the ghost of “Odd Duck Mildred”, a Mormon-raised poet and victim of suicide who violently hijacks his livestream to promote her own poetry. Even while being supernaturally tortured for his sins against humanity & good taste, Shawn remains brand-conscious in his self-referential catchphrases and shameless audience engagement tactics – a true heel to the end.
The shitheel YouTuber’s way of delivering frat boy one-liners in a Steve from Blue’s Clues voice is dead-on in its parody of social media celebrity. He’s so heavily weighed down by his camera equipment & brand-awareness duty to his sponsors that it’s impossible to get him to interact with the world outside his tablet screen with any semblance of sincerity. Thankfully, Mildred is there to slap him around as an undead audience surrogate, throwing exponentially absurd, gross-out scares in his path until the entire house is crawling with spooks & ghouls who’ve joined her cause. The movie itself never feels like a mess, though, despite its potential to devolve into the found-footage equivalent of Spookies. It’s very careful to explain the camera angles, editing tech, and audience input that makes its live-feed broadcast plausible, down to Shawn visibly pressing play on his Walkman’s pre-loaded “Shawn Carpenter” soundtrack to build tension. There’s an ambition in thoroughness & scale here that represents the very best of what the screenlife format can do for filmmakers with little funds but plenty imagination. Deadstream is an excellent argument that the genre is still thriving even as it’s become more pedestrian. More importantly, it’s a very funny, effectively scary horror comedy where the worst things happen to the worst kind of person.
The movie is just alright, but Rebecca Hall is great: a tale as old as time. I always hear that Hall is a powerhouse performer, but I’m used to seeing her play low-key, anonymous roles in genre movies like The Gift, Transcendence, and Godzilla vs Kong, where she tends to support instead of outshine the ooky-spooky monsters & ghouls at centerstage. That likely says more about me than it says about Hall, though, since her fan-favorite performance as the titular role in the 2016 biopic Christine is widely available and I’ve yet to make time for it. Luckily, The Night House is willing to meet me halfway by casting Rebecca Hall as the dramatic lead in a straight-forward horror film about a haunted house, wherein she’s the central focus of every single scene. The movie itself is just okay, but her performance is fantastic, so I at least appreciated that it dragged me kicking and screaming into the Rebecca Hall fan club.
Viewed purely as a haunted-house movie, The Night House is only so-so. It’s overloaded with exciting ideas, teasing tangents of Lovecraftian blueprints for a dark-magic home, silhouettes of ghosts formed by the negative space in architectural details, erotic foreplay with said negative-space ghosts, and a cursed netherworld that can only be accessed through lucid dreams. Unfortunately, it’s frustratingly restrained in its execution of its most out-there concepts, only indulging in each for mere seconds before dragging the audience back to the dramatic reality they disrupt. That dramatic core is yet another It’s Actually About Grief metaphor that has become so standard in modern horror, with Rebecca Hall being both physically & emotionally haunted by her recent suicide-victim husband. In a decade, academics will have something smart & concise to say about why so many of our contemporary horror films are so fixated on the subject of grief, just as we’ve since explained away the early-aughts’ obsession with onscreen torture as a way to process American war crimes during the War on Terror. In the meantime, there’s very little room for individual entries in the Grief Horror canon to have anything novel to say on the subject, so all The Night House can really do is create a spooky mood while repeating images & concepts you’ve already been exposed to many times before. It is spooky, but I question if that’s enough of a draw considering how familiar its themes are.
The Night House is much more impressive as a showcase for Rebecca Hall’s screen presence, encouraging to flex her acting muscles in the same way the Grief Horror genre has already spotlighted Toni Collette in Hereditary, Elizabeth Moss in The Invisible Man, and Essie Davis in The Babadook. Hall plays a wonderfully prickly, sardonic widow who refuses to wallow in the aftermath of her husband’s suicide, instead choosing to prod at who he was and why he decided to stop being. She’s haunted both by the gun violence that ended his life—often finding herself hearing, touching, and Googling guns whenever her mind drifts—and by a spiritual presence in her now empty home, seemingly rekindling their doomed romance from beyond the grave. Weirdly, the movie often excels most when it’s not indulging in supernatural phenomena at all, chronicling Hall’s investigation into her husband’s secretive life outside their marriage and her wonderfully icy responses to the polite but condescending rituals of communal consolation that accompany all funerals. She’s hurt, she’s hurtful, and she’s fiercely opposed to the idea of fading away quietly after her marriage’s violent end, despite that feeling like the only path offered in her empty, cursed home. The movie asks a lot of Rebecca Hall as its emotional anchor, and she holds it all down with ease. It’s just a shame the movie around her couldn’t quite match her virtuoso performance with something memorable enough to make it a must-see entry in its genre.
There are plenty of recent horror gems that indulge in reverent nostalgia for the genre’s VHS era – from Censor to Rent-a-Pal to Beyond the Gates to the aptly-titled anthology series V/H/S. I doubt any could match the detailed authenticity of the found-footage horror anthology WNUF Halloween Special, though, which goes far beyond the tape-warp filters and Tim & Eric quirk humor that usually define the limits of modern horror’s VHS throwbacks. Inspired by the real-life War of the Worlds-style hoax broadcast Ghostwatch, the WNUF Halloween Special carefully simulates a local news broadcast from Halloween Night in 1987, complete with all the commercial breaks, fashion faux pas, and technical flubs you’d expect from that time & setting. Smartly, it sets its spooky news show in a fantasy world where only a couple commercials are miserably repeated every ad break instead of, you know, all of them. It also helps speed along the proceedings (and helps justify its wear-and-tear VCR tracking) by making its found-footage framing device a taped-off-the-TV VHS cassette instead of a live broadcast, allowing us to fast-forward past the more tedious, redundant segments that plague local news shows. More importantly, that POV choice helps underline the creepiness of its on-screen violence by raising uneasy questions about who is holding the remote control.
As its title suggest, WNUF Halloween Special is most satisfying as Halloween Night programming. It doesn’t have a plot so much as it has a last-minute reveal, well after its regular news segments bleed into a special investigative report inside a local haunted house. Until its sub-Geraldo reporter-on-the-street is tormented by murderous ghosts in the third act, the film is more about ~vibes~ than it is about story. There’s an eeriness to the way its supernatural terror (with a horrific history of familial tragedy) is treated as a cutesy human interest story by the news anchor hosts, but that unease is counterbalanced by adorably costumed locals and Halloween-themed commercials Until the film is ready to reveal what’s really going on inside its cursed suburban home, it almost plays like mood-setting background fodder for a Halloween house party; you can get away with chatting over beers with friends while only keeping one eye on the screen and not miss any of its core substance. It’s basically the movie equivalent of one of those Halloween sound-effects cassettes that used to come with spooky-season Happy Meals. I mean that as a compliment, as so much of what it’s trying to achieve is a time-warp nostalgia trip to Halloweens past. Mood & atmosphere are its entire point.
Even though the WNUF Halloween Special delays all progress of its narrative until the last possible minute, it does end up justifying its 1980s setting by actually having something to say about that era beyond how cool its ephemera looks in retrospect. A lot of the more inane, throwaway news segments in the early broadcast stoke the Satanic Panic moral craze of that era with a polite, irresponsible smile. As nostalgic as it can be for the look of 1980s cultural leftovers, it’s also sharply critical of the regressive, reactionary politics lurking under the surface of that microwaved nostalgia. If you’re looking for a purely goofy, reverent VHS nostalgia trip to vintage home video recordings, its recent spiritual successor VHYes wrings out just as many found-footage scares from its own sketch-comedy parodies. The WNUF Halloween Special is more honest about the real-world evils & idiocies of its temporal subject (even if it does spare you from having to watch the same local commercial more than twice). There are plenty of modern novelty horrors with a nostalgic eye for VHS tape warp & tacky 1980s fashion, but they’re rarely this fun to watch with friends or this thoughtful about what horrors really haunted our culture in that era. Plus, thanks to a (currently sold-out) home video release from Camp Motion Pictures it’s also one of the only examples you can actually view on its ideal VHS format.
Back in our early days of film blogging (five whole years ago!), I found myself a little baffled by the ecstatic critical reception of the indie horror pic We Are Still Here. It was a decent enough genre exercise, one that indulged in the exact kind of 1970s nostalgia that would make its surface aesthetics immediately attractive to horror nerds. Still, it was excessively faithful to the structure & tropes of A Haunted House Movie to the point where I wasn’t sure what distinguished it as anything special. I wrote: “Every haunted house cliché you can think of makes an appearance in its brief 84-minute runtime. Strange noises spook new homeowners. Photographs move seemingly on their own. An old town of creepy local yokels conspire against haunted newcomers. A skeptical husband doubts his legitimately-spooked wife’s concerns. A séance backfires. A monster appears in the backseat of a moving car. Innocent house guests are possessed by demons. Creepy children get involved. The film even has the nerve to show a baseball slowly rolling down basement stairs. It’s all here.”
I’m looking back to that early Swampflix review because I am once again confronted with a critically beloved indie horror that’s rigorously faithful to the tropes of the haunted house genre. His House does not repeat every single haunted house cliché from We Are Still Here, but it comes pretty damn close. In terms of tone & narrative its payoffs are familiar to that genre tradition going at least as far back as 1927’s proto-Old Dark House horror The Cat and the Canary. However, I did find it much easier to determine what makes this movie special within that larger tradition than I did back when this happened in 2015. When thinking about the going-through-the-motions scares of We Are Still Here, I asked “Are there any ways left for the haunted house genre to surprise us?” His House answers that question decisively, with the same tactic that titles likeBlood Quantum, Zombi Child, and The Girl With All the Giftsused to reinvigorate the similarly overworked tropes of the zombie genre: by shifting the cultural POV and the purpose of the central metaphor. You’ve seen these exact story beats & jump scares before, but never in this exact cultural context.
His House repurposes the basic components of A Haunted House Movie by recontextualizing them within a Sudanese refugee story, something I’d be surprised to learn has been done before. Two Sudanese victims of civil war (Sope Dirisu & Wunmi Mosaku) seek asylum in England, where they’re treated like prisoners on parole before they’re fully allowed to assimilate into the culture of their new “home.” They’re restricted by the government in where they can work, how they can publicly behave, who they can associate with and, most importantly, where they can live. The shitty, vermin-infested apartment they’re assigned by the government isn’t haunted by the colonialist crimes of their new homeland, but rather by the horrors that they narrowly escaped in their journey to asylum. Fellow refugees who didn’t complete the voyage violently haunt the couple, both as an expression of general survivor’s guilt and as revenge for undignified betrayals they committed along the way out of desperate self-preservation. They arrive in England with everything they own in a couple gnarled trash bags, hopeful that the horrors of their journey are behind them. Instead, their recent past haunts them in vicious, unrelenting stabs; and they’re expected to smile through the pain when in public so as to appear affable to their new, xenophobic neighbors.
To be clear, His House is not only thrilling for its purposeful application of Haunted House tropes to a newfound metaphor. Its scares are genuinely, consistently effective throughout, offering up some of this year’s most memorably creepy horror imagery as the couple is tormented by visible, persistent ghosts. It’s just that applying those traditional scares to a clear thematic anchor really does set the film apart from fellow traditional Haunted House exercises like We Are Still Here. I never had to ask myself what the purpose of repeating & reshaping those well-worn genre tropes was here, because the film is open & explicit about what it’s doing from the start. I don’t know that it’s one of my personal favorite horror titles of 2020 or anything, but I do understand its thematic purpose & critical reception this time around. At the very least, it’s got to be one of the best films to date that addresses the cultural horrors of Brexit-era immigration bigotry. It’s right alongside Paddington 2in that regard, at least in terms of delivering something much more emotionally & thematically potent than what you’d expect given the recency of its subject and the familiarity of its genre’s tones & tropes. Unlike Paddington 2, however, it’s also scary as fuck.
The 1963 adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House is, in a word, a masterpiece. Even with its sterling reputation preceding it, I was shocked to immediately recognize it as such, as its genre and its source material are so overly familiar half a century later that I assumed I’d be numb to its wonders. Jackson’s novel has been both directly adapted and mined for indirect inspiration so many times over that I was skeptical there was anything left to discover in its pages. This MGM-distributed realization of that well-tread source material is also a by-the-books participation in the Old Dark House tradition that was intensely oversaturated in its own era even beyond adaptations of Jackson’s work. And yet I was impressed, captivated, and chilled from start to end – even more reenergized by this traditionalist approach to Jackson’s milieu than I was by Josephine Decker’s revisionist biopic Shirley earlier this year, something I did not at all expect.
It helps that former Val Lewton-collaborator Robert Wise directs the absolute shit out of this movie. The Haunting is shot in early Panavision on what had to be intimidatingly clunky equipment, but you wouldn’t know that judging by how incredibly active the camera is. Even in the opening sequence that explains the history of how the central haunted house “was born bad”, Wise pummels the audience with overachieving visuals. The camera swoops in ghostly, seemingly handheld maneuvers. It tumbles down the stairs in dizzying thuds. It emphasizes its format’s already drastically wide aspect ratio with fish-eye lenses out of a 1990s skateboarding video, drinking in as much ornate detail of the haunted house set as it can possibly cram down its gullet. Much of the in-the-moment action of The Haunting consists of people calmly talking in chilly, hollow rooms, but the film’s visual language is explosively alive throughout – matching the way the environment itself is quiet but teeming with ghosts.
I’m surprised this film isn’t brought up more often when people are heaping praise on classics like Psycho& Carnival of Souls in particular. It could be that its bulked-up budget scale obscures the common ground it shares with those leaner works, but it achieves a similarly eerie mood, especially in mapping out the inner life of its central, doomed protagonist, Eleanore. In a lot of ways, The Haunting is a seduction story. Eleanore is wooed by Hill House both in a romantic sense (its ghosts often play matchmaker between her and other visiting guests of various genders & vital stats) and in a residential sense. She begins the film haunted by her own mediocrity and her lack of a place in the world—dismissed by everyone around her (give or take her lesbian roommate) as a nervous, difficult woman—but the house accepts her flaws and all, beckoning for her to become a permanent fixture among the resident ghosts. It’s an unusually internal, intangible struggle for a genre built around haunted house scares – a delicate, elegant approach to horror that matches the care Wise takes with the film’s visual delights.
The Haunting is impressively smart, funny, and direct about even its touchiest themes (lesbian desire, generational depression, suicidal ideation) while remaining consistently gorgeous & creepy throughout. I’d be shocked to learn that there’s a more effectively scary G-rated horror film out there; and if there were, I doubt it’s this visually imaginative or exquisitely staged. This is clearly the pinnacle of the Old Dark House tradition. The only question is how many other Best Of __ horror lists it belongs at the top of.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss the haunted house creeper A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) and where it fits in with the modern wave of internationally exported Korean genre films.
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