horror

Backrooms (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

At last! A freshman feature from a filmmaker who made their bones on YouTube that I actually enjoyed! When I walked out of Obsession, I texted Brandon to let him know that, alas, I had hated it. He replied that this meant that “the Talk to Me curse has not lifted,” and I responded that I had loved Bring Her Back, and he astutely noted that this was a different thing: “That one’s elevated Grief Is The Monster horror; the other two are YouTube pranks for the children.” At long last, Backrooms feels like an appropriate synthesis of the two; it clearly takes inspiration from the recent horror trend of using monsters as metaphors but isn’t completely preoccupied with that conceit, while its use of jumpscares, muffled voices from distant rooms, and eerie imagery taken straight from internet creepypasta means it has an appeal for viewers of a younger generation. 

It’s June of 1990, and failed architect Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is living in his struggling furniture store after being kicked out of his house by his wife following a nasty, drunken argument. He’s seeing Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), a therapist, about his drinking problems and his belief that he’s “wired” to be confrontational and unpleasant. In one session, they role play the night of the marriage-threatening argument, which reveals that Clark is resentful of having to manage Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire while his wife fumbles her way through law school. When an electrician is unable to find the source of issues that are causing the store’s bills to skyrocket, he and Clark discover a couple of extra switches haphazardly added to the store’s breaker box. Investigating the box again late one night, he finds an invisible portal through the wall of the store’s basement into a seemingly infinite series of fluorescent-lit, white-walled, beige-carpeted rooms. When he tries to tell Mary about this discovery, he can tell that she doesn’t believe him, so he sets out to get proof, enlisting store employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), who has access to recording equipment via his college. They enter the titular backrooms to document their discovery, only to find that they’re not alone down there. 

While having coffee with a friend recently, the topic of the upcoming X-Files reboot came up. We each agreed that it’s hard to imagine a functional version of that franchise in a post-9/11 world, specifically that the concept of mostly-for-fun conspiracy theories is difficult to play with in a world where fringe lunatics run our government. There already is a functional post-9/11 X-Files, and it’s called Fringe, and we briefly discussed what that meant on a level beyond the textual. Specifically, the strange and paranormal encounters that the various innocents on The X-Files always occur in remote areas: deep in the woods, out in the desert, or in vast fields of crops that seem to have no end. On Fringe, the horrible things that happen to people mostly occur in urban environments: diners, downtown Boston, and, fairly often, on airplanes. The safety of a metropolis is not a given after 9/11, and Fringe took that to a logical end. I thought about that a lot during Backrooms, specifically in how it managed to feel as fresh and new to me as The Blair Witch Project must have seemed in 1999, and that with time and distance, we no longer need to send Heather and her crew out to the woods to find something spooky. The backrooms are already here, in urban environments that contain them and camouflage them to the naked eye. You can make sure you never encounter the Blair Witch by making sure that you avoid her forest; but you might wander into the backrooms completely unaware, which is more immediate and spookier. 

I’m not really that into the current state of creepypasta. Jenny Nicholson made a Patreon video last year in which she effectively delineated something that had occurred to me conceptually but hadn’t put into words: things are usually creepier the less defined they are, and because creepypasta and SCP appeal to a very specific kind of online nerd, what used to be a story about some evil, inexplicable stairs in a state park or a basketball that caused psychic nosebleeds started to get more and more lore, to the point that the premise of the object or place becomes more important than the mystery. The concept of liminal spaces has become a matter of no small niche internet interest in recent years, as the prevalence of computer imagery rendering software has given rise to the ability to easily make creepy, Escherian office spaces for internet consumption. (I also think that there’s an argument to be made that omnipresent GPS mapping has made people generally less able to orient themselves without outside assistance, which makes labyrinthine spaces more frightening to people who have poor directional sense.)That influence has already leaked into the film world at large, as it inspired the creator of the game on which Exit 8 was based, and that’s what director Kane Parsons has been up to online. The film’s opening sequence appears to have been made entirely in Blender, and even though that means that some of the seams show through (there’s an audiocassette on a desk that’s as thin as a 3.5 inch floppy disk), it’s still effective. 

For a film set in the nineties, the fact that this was made by a director who’s only just barely able to legally drink means that it eschews a lot of the nostalgia factor that one would expect to be a huge part of a film set decades earlier. Artifacts of the time period are limited to the use of a camcorder for the documentation of the backrooms themselves, inexpensively produced local commercials, and self-help audiocassettes, and the only direct nostalgia bait is that we find a mysterious researcher at home with his family watching The Neverending Story on TV (the finale also features audio lifted directly from Star Trek IV, but I don’t think that will be noticed by many). The VHS camcorder quality of the found footage style segments of the film is extremely well done and effective at creating a feeling of the nineties without needing to rely on cheap “I remember that!” moments. After several years of nostalgia-poisoned period pieces like Stranger Things, this is a welcome relief. 

The performances here are very strong as well. One would think that a young director would take an easier route and focus his storytelling on characters closer to his own age, but either he or screenwriter Will Soodik made the wise choice to instead focus the film on characters of a more mature age. Ejiofor and Reinsve are two extremely competent performers, with multiple Oscar and BAFTA nominations between them, and there are several powerful scenes between the two of them that have no bearing on the eldritch location in Clark’s store at all. Reinsve’s Mary is haunted by a childhood raised by a mother who slowly lost her battle with schizophrenia, and Ejiofor’s Clark is a man whose psychology leads him to deflect all blame for his life and circumstances onto others. The latter of these two is a little weaker than the other; we only get Clark’s side of the story, but if he gave up his career for something more stable in order to support his wife through an extended education, and she really did quit for no real reason and still isn’t working, his resentment isn’t entirely unfounded. Still, whether one feels that Clark is an awful man before the backrooms start to exert their influence over him or if it’s only their evil that pushes him to a point where we can no longer sympathize, Ejiofor manages to play it well. Still, neither of these past griefs is so predominant in the film’s narrative that this feels like a retread of similar elevated horrors of recent years. The backrooms recreate things that it “remembers,” with each recreation becoming less and less like the thing that it’s supposed to represent, and in that way it’s like the imperfection of memory, but this works perfectly well as a variation on a haunted house as conceived in a digital age without needing to use “the apparition is a metaphor” as a crutch. 

This is probably the best straightforward horror that I’ve seen so far this year. It’s creepy, effective, disorienting, well-directed, and nicely acted. Finally!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scream 7 (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I was recently in Illinois, and the flights to and from O’Hare gave me the opportunity to catch up on some new releases I had missed. I had intentionally avoided (read: boycotted) seeing Scream 7 in theaters because of what happened to Melissa Barrera and the utter cowardice with which her morally correct opposition to the Palestinian genocide resulted in her being let go from the franchise. I must offer thanks to United Airlines for offering the chance to legally and ethically see the film; now having watched it, I can confirm: it fucking sucks. 

After sitting out Scream VI, Neve Campbell returns in this one as Sidney Prescott, now living in Pine Grove, IN and running a cafe called The Little Latte. This means that she’s hundreds of miles away from Woodsboro when a new Ghostface murders a couple who have rented out Stu Macher’s old house, which has been turned into an AirBnB experience themed after the real-life Woodsboro murders and the Stab film franchise that mythologized them. Ghostface torches the place, symbolically burning down the old. In Indiana, Sidney’s daughter Tatum (Isabel May), named for her best friend who was killed all the way back in Scream, is dating a boy named Ben, who recreates the “Billy sneaks into Sidney’s window” scene from that film, although Sidney isn’t fooled for a moment. Despite what we all inferred (and the previous production teams confirmed) about Sidney’s husband being the Mark from Scream 3, we learn here that she’s married to Pine Grove police chief Mark Evans (Joel McHale). 

In addition to Tatum’s boyfriend Ben, we also meet the rest of her friend group: Hanna (Mckenna Grace), Chloe (Celeste O’Connor, who hasn’t aged or changed their hair style since Madame Web), and creepy next door neighbor Lucas, whose mother Jessica (Anna Camp) is Sidney’s only real adult friend that we meet. Sidney begins to get FaceTime calls from none other than the presumed long-dead Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) just as a new Ghostface appears in Pine Grove to terrorize Sidney, her daughter, and her daughter’s friends. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) appears on the scene, with more recent franchise additions Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding) in tow; her show has been cancelled, and she’s trying to climb her way back into relevance with the twins as her crew. Campbell’s fellow nineties mainstream teen actor Ethan Embry also appears as an employee of the mental institution where Stu has apparently spent the past three decades as an amnesiac John Doe before being released, just a couple of weeks prior to the events of the film. 

Scream is my favorite horror franchise, but it’s been well established that my favorite overall media empire is Star Trek, and there’s a quote from one of the producers of the ill-fated 2001 series Star Trek: Enterprise that I couldn’t stop thinking about all throughout Scream 7. I’ve been unable to relocate it, but I think it was Brannon Braga who said, in essence, that Enterprise failed because the shepherds of the franchise failed to consider that they needed a better reason to produce the series than “it’s time to go back to the well again.” The reason that Scream 4 and the two more recent sequels work so well is because they let the ground lie fallow for a while. Scream 3 (which was the worst of the franchise until this one, and even then was not without its inspired moments) ran everything into the ground, and by the time of Scream 4, there were all new elements of the horror genre to deconstruct. 5cream and Scream VI, likewise, justified their existence by playing with the relationship between legacy sequels, toxic fandom, and copycat killings. The franchise’s central conceit—that Ghostface is a mask anyone can wear and attracts people who are obsessed with horror media—is barely paid lip service here. Mindy mentions that this time, the killer is all about nostalgia, and Chad immediately shuts her down by saying that they’re not doing “the rules” this time because the idea is played out, which is the perfect microcosm of just how little care, thought, or effort mattered in the creation of Scream 7. This exists solely because it was time to go back to the well again, and boy, does it show, and it also does little to assuage accusations that this was an attempt to launder the franchise’s image in the wake of the Barrera controversy. 

The characters here are half-baked at best, and the performances are nothing to write home about, either. Isabel May is, as politely as I can put this, not a very good performer, and learning that Mckenna Grace was cast as early victim Hanna after auditioning for Tatum means that the producers passed on having Grace, who gives consistently strong performances, as Sidney’s daughter. That’s inconceivable! An unjustifiable whiff if ever there was one. When Mindy and Chad gather Tatum’s friend group to tell them that, statistically, one of them is likely a party to the killings, every person present is so thinly drawn that the audience knows they must all be red herrings (ironic, given that the actual killers are somehow even less developed, to the point that one of the actors portraying them had to beg for a couple more scenes of character development). Ben is a computer guy, so he might be able to pull off the potential deep-faking of Stu Macher; Lucas is deep in the “true crime lexicon” and is overly invested in the Woodsboro murders; and Chloe, um, has a crush on Lucas. That’s it! In 1996, Scream up-ended what had become the de facto slasher formula of having a bunch of interchangeable teenagers dying at the hands of an implacable killer; in 2026, Scream 7’s teenaged characters are those interchangeable kids. The most memorable new character here is Jimmy Tatro’s ill-fated AirBnB guest who’s dead by the title card. 

It’s impossible to say where the overreliance on nostalgia in this franchise first entered as the series’ original sin. Scream VI could be argued to have started this, given that the killers in that film were recreating kills from the previous movies using actual collected murder weapons. 5cream addressed nostalgia and its effect on toxic fan culture in its text with relation to the in-universe Stab franchise, but the first Stab film was referenced all the way back in Scream 2, so it’s been a part of this narrative for a long time. Scream 3 may have been the first to take it too far, with the narrative revolving around the shooting of a Stab film. A case can be made for any of them, even the original film, but it is undeniable that there is now a clear winner for the film in which this is the most poisonous. Scream 7 has a moment in which Tatum comes downstairs wearing Sidney’s leather jacket from Scream 2, and the music swells in a way that makes it apparent that we’re supposed to have some kind of emotional investment in this piece of apparel. Not even the biggest Screamhead could make a rational argument that this was a look that needed to be inscribed alongside the actual iconic outfits from the franchise (which are, in order, Rose McGowan’s Tatum’s bosomy sweater, Drew Barrymore’s blonde bob and cozy fleece, and Courteney Cox’s horrible bangs in Scream 3). We have dug through the bottom of the barrel for things to reference. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the killer’s deepfake of Stu isn’t the only one that we see of a prior Ghostface. It makes sense that the AI Stu would be made to look as if he had continued to age since 1996, because he’s supposed to be Stu, or close enough to convince Sidney. Why the hell they didn’t bother to de-age Laurie Metcalf or Scott Foley for their cameos at the end would be a riddle for the ages, were it not for the fact that we know the answer: the film-makers were lazy, and they just didn’t care. 

Every interpersonal conflict here is contrived and unrealistic. The idea that Sidney would try to shield her teenage daughter from all of the horrors she faced at the same age, it absolutely holds no water that this would mean that she’d fail to protect her daughter from the reality that their family will never not be in potential danger from various legacy Ghostfaces. Tatum should be strong, fierce, and self-sufficient, not whining to her mother about her over-protectiveness. This might have worked had Grace been in the Tatum role, but May doesn’t have the chops for it, although she’s not alone in the crop of teen actors when it comes to having talent that fails to pass muster. Original Tatum showed more character and imagination in the garage scene alone than new Tatum does in this entire film. Gale and Sidney go live on TV at one point to try and draw “Stu” out, and Gale gets a rise out of Sidney by asking questions about her offspring, which causes Sidney to get defensive and rip off her microphone. This scene doesn’t feel like the culmination of a long-awaited reunion between characters we’ve known for decades, and instead feels like forced conflict, one that’s immediately dismissed when Sidney gets a call from an under-attack Tatum. Chad and Mindy barely even have a reason to be present, and Mindy’s sudden desire to be the new Gale Weathers is baffling. 

Scream 7 has precisely three good ideas. The first is the opening sequence; that the Macher house has become a bit of a shrine that is of interest to true crime obsessives is a fresh concept, and having a new Ghostface murder a couple of them on the spot is such a good opening that I’m surprised it wasn’t already used before. The second good idea is that the film features the death of one of the Ghostfaces in the middle of the second act, catching the characters and the audience off guard. It was such a refreshing change that I was pleased with it, until I remembered that this was just a variation on the opening from Scream VI. Even one of its few good ideas is just a rehash. Finally, what this return to the well brings to the table is the discussion of AI and deepfakes. Having Stu Macher return and there be a question as to whether it’s really him or someone using his likeness to torment Sidney is perhaps the only bold choice that Scream 7 makes, although it ultimately amounts to little more than the nostalgia bait equivalent of dangling keys in front of a baby. There were countless different ways that this could have been incorporated, and better fit the Scream concept. Why not have the lead Ghostface pose as Stu Macher online to indoctrinate other would-be Ghostfaces, with the question of whether or not Stu remaining alive is the same? If you’re going to go to all the trouble of bringing Lillard back, why not have a plot point about members of the younger generation finding something that he pre-recorded, “movie rules for killers” on some VHS that a true crime collector discovers? It’s as bad a fumble as casting the lead of The Daily Wire’s Run Hide Fight as Sidney Prescott’s daughter instead of Mckenna Grace. 

As a Scream fan, my nomination is that we all agree that the series ended with Scream VI. Sidney was safe and far away, there was a decent capstone of using all of the previous films without retroactively making them “connected” in an unbelievable way, and Kirby got her redemption. Gale was never going to be able to get direct vengeance for Dewey’s death since “Ghostface” is only an idea and not a being, but she got the closest she was ever going to. Sam and her sister put an end to their family’s killer legacy and walked off into the sunset. That’s more than good enough for me. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Universal’s silent-era adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), starring Lon Chaney as The Phantom.

00:00 Welcome
03:30 Forbidden Planet (1956)
11:34 The Drama (2026)
23:55 Blue Heron (2026)
30:08 Mother Mary (2026)
40:14 Erupcja (2026)
45:22 The Beekeeper (2024)
51:08 Ronin (1998)

58:15 The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

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

Mother Mary (2026)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Mother Mary is a film that’s probably going to be a miss for a lot of people. It’s a bit messy, with a gossamer thin narrative that’s more gestural than structural, but it’s nonetheless very beautiful, a high concept two-hander that gives both of its leading ladies something to really sink their teeth into. The film takes place over the course of a single night when internationally famous pop diva Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) goes to the fashion house of her former best friend and stylist, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). For the first act, the film seems like it’s going to be a fairly straightforward drama, a kind of stage play about a woman seeking out the one person in all the world who despises her more than any others but who also has the most unique perspective to understand her. Sam’s resentment for Mary is clearly deep, while Mary’s public image has been tarnished by a very public embarrassment that there’s some evidence might have been a suicide attempt, and the first thirty minutes set up the promise that these events will be teased out over the rest of the runtime. 

I was perfectly content to watch the film that I thought I was going to get, watching two powerhouses bare their souls and their grief to one another and to those of us in the audience. The film caught me off guard when it took a turn toward the spooky as the second act opens, as each woman reveals that in the wake of their schism, both had an experience with something inexplicable. The same night that Sam realized she had come to be on the outside of Mary’s life, looking in from a distance, she witnessed some kind of phantasm that seemed to have left her body via an open wound; later, when Mary hires an occultist to do some sleepover witchcraft on the night of her birthday, that same ephemeral thing makes contact with her, setting her literal and metaphorical fall in motion. Visually, the film was beautifully shot and sumptuous from the beginning, but as Mary and Sam relate these anecdotes, things get a little more surreal and we get to see the imagery thereof elevated and re-enacted in real time. Sam opens the doors of her “Mrs. Haversham” barn/studio, and the camera pushes in to follow her into the crowd at Mary’s show; Mary and Sam walk over to a lavish hotel room that has appeared like a giant set in Sam’s space, and then the fourth wall closes around the action. It’s wonderful stuff, very stylish in a way that feels theatrical but effortless. 

David Lowery, who wrote and directed the film, has proven to have a masterful hand at this kind of thing. The final act of A Ghost Story (as much as that film could be said to have “acts”) was similar; as the point of view ghost loses touch with all his earthly ties, time “skips” so that he moves from the house we’ve been haunting with him to a lonely office building that eventually rises on the same place. Brandon wasn’t a fan, but I was; it remains to be seen whether the implementation of this same transitional environmental storytelling technique will be more effective this time around for other viewers. At the very least, Mother Mary is a film about dwelling in a way that doesn’t try one’s patience the way A Ghost Story did (for others). Where I expect this film to lose most general audience members is in just how literal the metaphorical ghost becomes while the film itself leaves the metaphor itself rather ambiguous. No one gets up and gives a big speech about what trauma the amorphous ghost represents; no one names “grief” or “resentment” as monsters that can be overcome with forgiveness and reconciliation. The film’s choice to leave one with questions and different potential interpretations is going to raise the dander of people who can’t abide ambiguity in their art and need something concrete and easy to grasp. Some of the people for whom that element is a feature and not a flaw may find the way that the metaphor becomes explicit off-putting. 

I was on board for all of that, utterly caught up in the whole thing. The only thing that didn’t quite work for me was the music. Thrillers centering around major pop acts have become a bit of a trend lately (see: Smile 2, Trap, Lurker), and I often find the musical acts therein to be virtually indistinguishable from the radio pop hits that I hear at the club (or, more common at my old age, the grocery store). We get to hear a few of Mother Mary’s hits, and none of them really have any staying power; there’s a not-quite-fully realized bit of religiosity to her music, as her stage name evokes Catholicism (as does Sam’s surname), one of her songs is called “Holy Spirit,” and she has a stigmata-like wound at one point, but it never comes together in a meaningful way. The connection I found myself thinking of most while watching this wasn’t Madonna or Lady Gaga, but last year’s The Testament of Ann Lee, because Mother Mary’s body of work was as monotonous and repetitive as that film’s hymnal remixing. When we talked about Lurker on the podcast last year, there was some dismissal of the film’s bedroom lo-fi tracks as forgettable, but I’ve found myself returning to “Snakes in the Garden” quite a lot since last September, and I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to revisit Mother Mary’s “Burial” or “Dark Cradle.” 

The songs were written by FKA Twigs (who also appears in the film) with some arrangements by celebrity producer Jack Antonoff. I’m ambivalent about FKA Twigs (if I’ve ever heard more than one of her songs to completion, I wasn’t aware of it) and generally positive about Antonoff’s work with his band Bleachers, and Hathaway has demonstrated a lovely singing voice in the past. Nevertheless, whatever their individual talents, what coalesced on screen was unremarkable. The scene in which Hathaway, in a modest space, performs the silent interpretive dance of her stage choreography for her newest song blows every one of the on-stage performances out of the water. What really makes this movie shine is Coel. She’s absolutely excellent here, delivering my favorite performance of the year so far. It’s nuanced and layered, and worth the price of admission alone. It won’t work for everyone, but will definitely resonate with some.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Married a Vampire (1987)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

You’re not going to get a lot of butts in seats for a movie in which a woman marries a vampire without titling that film I Married a Vampire, but that reveal would be a little more fun if you were able to go into a screening without that knowledge. Of course, the fact that marriage to a bloodsucker is the inevitable outcome of this story is made clear from the outset, when young Viola (Rachel Golden) picks up her parents from the airport in an unnamed city; they’ve arrived in town after learning secondhand from Viola’s sister that she’s gotten married, and are insistent on meeting her new husband. Of course, before she brings mom and dad home, she’s got to give them the whole story of how she met her undead husband …

Two months earlier, Viola lands in not-New York (the end credits thank the city of Boston, but no notable landmarks of any kind are seen in any of her exploration montages) and is ready to start her life anew, far from Iowa. Unfortunately, she falls victim to all of the various swindles that eighties metropoles had to offer; she ends up in a disgusting apartment after getting swindled by a shady landlord, is robbed and grifted by her supposed poet neighbor Portia, gets stiffed for a heavy retainer by a lawyer who promises to help her get her money back from the landlord, gets pressured into giving up her last bit of savings to the cult of Muhammad Buddha Christ, and can only find work as a night cleaner for a man who sexually assaults her. All of this finally starts to change when her co-worker Olivia introduces Viola to her “brother” Robespiere [sic] (Brendan Hickey). Viola, to her credit, immediately cottons on to the fact that they’re vampires, but she later laughs off her suspicions as the result of too much beer and the lingering effects of a horror movie double feature. When she returns to Robespiere when she’s run out of options, she finds herself a new woman, charged with the confidence she needs to get her savings back from the grifters, and if they put up a fight, her new beau can take them out. 

There are some genuinely wonderful performances and sequences in I Married a Vampire, even if the film gets off to a sluggish start. Viola’s parents, Morris and Doris, are an interesting pair, since they’re both grumps who are blind to their poor parenting in different ways. Morris, for his part, is quite funny, while Doris’s haranguing of her wayward daughter is less fun. The script is pretty sharp from the get-go, and one gets the impression that writer/director Jay Raskin had a vision that he came close to fulfilling here, but was ultimately restrained by the budget provided him as a result of this being a Troma-level production. Once we get the framing device set-up out of the way, the actual narrative gets underway, and we get to meet a fantastic cast of awful characters. First, Viola encounters Mr. Gluttonshire, who tries to pick her up under the impression that she’s a sex worker. Then, she meets Mr. Keeper, the landlord who tells her that she won’t be able to find a place for $300 a month, but sets her up with an infested shoebox studio for $400… plus a finder’s fee and the deposit ($1000 total, or about $3300 in 2026), eating up a third of the money she worked hard to save for her move. When night falls, she learns that her unit abuts a loud rock venue that also fills her entire apartment with flashing lights. 

It’s in this sequence that we meet Portia (Temple Aaron), who all but steals the show. She’s exactly the kind of street-savvy gutter-dweller that you’ve met before, in the movies if nowhere else. She tells Viola that she’s a poet, and that she writes song lyrics for rock bands, and that she can get Viola a great deal on a stereo, only $50! She also explains that the reason they have no water is because they’re connected to the club next door, and they only have water pressure when there’s a good band (when the music is good, no one’s using the bar bathroom, so they’re not competing with the constant flushing for water), which happens every two or three months. Only someone as naive as Viola would be capable of falling for Portia’s obvious bullshit, but it’s charming in its way, and Portia is a tragic figure in her own right. I genuinely believed that she was going to end up on the business end of Robespiere’s fangs once Viola gets her understated revenge later, but she’s the only one who gets off relatively easy, as the vampire merely hypnotizes her to stop lying to and stealing from her friends. 

It’s here, in this circumvention of the expectation of how violent this will be, that this stands out for a Troma release. They’re never classy movies, and this one certainly isn’t that, but it demonstrates restraint in areas that other Troma-branded flicks don’t. It’s notable in the quiet, non-bloody, non-gory story resolution that Portia gets, but also in the understated nature of the revenge Robespiere enacts for Viola. You hear “Troma” and think that you’re going to get some geysers of blood or at least some viscera, but most of the violence occurs offscreen, with no gross-out bits at all. Even more shockingly, although Viola is violated by Mr. Gluttonshire, there’s no titillation factor and the film doesn’t use it as an excuse to force the lead actress’s top off. I’m not saying that the N.O.W. should be giving Jay Raskin an award or anything, but for a flick from the studio that brought you Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator, it’s almost admirable. There’s no real violence, we don’t see any of it, and when it’s over, Viola is still fully clothed; it feels almost modest.

The romance between Viola and Robespiere is dreadfully dull, unfortunately, and the sequences wherein she goes to all of her antagonists and asks for her money back, is laughed at, and then gets her revenge via supernatural husband gets a little repetitive. The film runs out of steam once it stops being about all of the nasty urbanites who prey on naive farm girls and watching Viola tolerate it all like she’s the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Normally, the revenge portion of these films is supposed to be where all the fun happens, but I Married a Vampire is a little frontloaded with scuzzballs, which means that it doesn’t quite finish as strongly as it ought to, which is likely why it’s mostly forgotten. It’s still well worth checking out, however; just know you’re likely to get distracted in the back half. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Overlook Film Festival 2026, Ranked & Reviewed

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

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

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

Buffet Infinity

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

The Furious

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

Obsession

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

New Group

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

Buddy

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

Hokum

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

Boorman and the Devil

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

Leviticus

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

Faces of Death

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

Mārama

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

-Brandon Ledet

Buddy (2026) & Adult Swimming at Overlook Film Fest

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

Hokum (2026) & Ghostless Hauntings at Overlook Film Fest

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

The Mummy (1999)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Recently, Brandon wrote a piece about the unfortunate position of The Mummy as Universal’s most side-lined classic horror character, and how the general public’s association of the title The Mummy with the 1999 action-adventure film directed by Stephen Sommers rather than the Karl Freund original cements The Mummy as a second-tier hanger-on. During the umpteenth viewing of the trailer for the upcoming release of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a friend of mine leaned over to me in the theater and asked me a question about the frequency of these remakes, and I mentioned my own framework of the understanding about why The Mummy (the character) rarely works. Namely, you can make a movie about Wolfmen, Invisible Men, reanimated Promethei, and Dracula (et al) without the text being, necessitated by its nature, inherently racist. The Northern Hemisphere positively plundered Egypt and its historical sites, and the ongoing behavior of the British Museum acting in miniature on behalf of the colonialist experiment demonstrates that they are pathologically unable to comprehend the extent of the evil and shame inherent in their “expeditions.” Mummies were ground up into powder and used for paint pigmentation, medicine, and countless other things, again with Britain nationally acting as the microcosm of colonialist enterprise by rushing headlong into turning other people’s ancestors, a finite resource indeed, into a monetized enterprise. That’s why no big-budget mummy movie in the 21st century has actually been about a mummy; they’ve been about death gods creating avatars for themselves (the 2017 Tom Cruise film) or a child being possessed by something after spending some time in a sarcophagus (the new Lee Cronin film, at least based on the trailer). 

The last time that a Mummy was about a mummy was in 1999, when Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz memetically lit the libidos of bisexuals worldwide ablaze. Fraser plays Rick O’Connell, an American in interbellum Egypt for unknown reasons, whom we meet making a final stand against presumed locals while defending(?) some ruins. It’s a big guns-blazing action sequence that doesn’t really want you to ask questions about why Rick’s there, whose territory is rightfully whose, or other questions about the “veiled protectorate” period. Meanwhile in Cairo, Weisz’s Evelyn clumsily destroys a lot of priceless texts before her gadabout brother Jonathan (John Hannah) presents her with an artifact he pickpocketed that supposedly came from the lost city of Hamunaptra, a legendary treasure repository as well as “the city of the dead.” Evelyn, Rick, and Jonathan set out to find the city again, and find themselves in a race to the lost city with Beni (Kevin J. O’Connor), a cowardly man who was previously at Hamunaptra at the same time as Rick, and the American cowboys he’s guiding along the same path. Upon arrival, the Americans almost immediately release the undead ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), who was mummified alive as a punishment for touching the Pharaoh’s concubine, from his tomb, unleashing plagues and the potential to end the world. 

I used to love this movie. I was in middle school when both it and its sequel were released, and as a kid who had grown up obsessed with Indiana Jones and with an interest in Egyptology, this was an exciting mash-up of horror and action-adventure that really hit my sweet spot. It also didn’t hurt that there were large swathes of time when it was on cable almost constantly, so it really left a mark on me. Going back to it now, however, I can’t help but find it a little distasteful, and a product of its time. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the person of Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr), a character descended from a long line of secret defenders of the pharaonic order. Despite living a life that implies an ongoing belief in the Egyptian pantheon of old, Ardeth praises Allah, something that was uncommon but unremarkable among heroic characters in films of the period but would become contentious just a couple of years later during the era of kneejerk American Islamophobia. Ardeth is also not played by an Egyptian actor (Fehr was born in Tel Aviv), nor is Imhotep (Vosloo is white South African), nor are the pharaoh (Aharon Ipalé is Israeli) or his Anck-su-namun (Patricia Velásquez is Venezuelan). The casting of the roles in the film outside of our white leads is classic Hollywood “brown is brown” racism of a bygone era, and watching this as an adult who is fully conscious of all of the implications greatly dulls one’s enthusiasm for what is, otherwise, an adventurous romp. 

A lot of the CGI here will look dated to the modern eye, even to those of us who remember this as being an extravaganza of realist effects. A lot of it still works because its uncanniness can be excused as a matter of course for a horror flick, but the CGI Thebes stands out as particularly video game-esque. The rewatch of this was prompted by the upcoming release of the aforementioned Lee Cronin Mummy, but the timing happened to align with Passover having recently happened, and I realized I had always thought of this as a kind of Passover movie, a secular alternative to The Ten Commandments that also happened to contain the plagues. (Toads and frogs are one of the ones that are left out, presumably because every amphibian wrangler in Hollywood was working on Magnolia at the time.) Preteens, like I was when I first saw it, are really the best demographic for this film, as its overwritten corny dialogue and telegraphed acting choices read like a throwback to old-timey pictures, until you’ve watched as many of them as I have and realize it’s more shallow parody than homage. Weisz and Fraser are sexy, yes, and they have great chemistry together, but Rick is much more of an asshole than I remember, and Evey, with her clumsy awkwardness and frustration at Cambridge’s rejection of her despite her outsized genius, feels like a fanfiction character, right down to her being a nepo baby. 

I wish that I could love this one as much as I did when I was younger, but most of the enjoyment that can be derived from it now comes at the film’s expense. If you have fond memories of it, let that sleeping dog lie; don’t go disturbing the sarcophagus of your memory.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #262: Habit (1995) & Overlook Film Fest 2026

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Welcome to Episode #263 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, including Larry Fessenden’s hipster NYC vampire flick Habit (1995).

00:00 The Overlook Film Festival
01:34 The Boulet Brothers
10:26 Hokum (2026)
18:55 Buffet Infinity (2026)
25:40 Buddy (2026)
36:01 Faces of Death (2026)
39:46 Obsession (2026)
43:10 Leviticus (2026)
44:48 The Furious (2026)
47:33 New Group (2026)
49:15 Boorman and the Devil (2026)

52:35 Habit (1995)

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