Boomer, Brandon, and Alli celebrate a Lagniappe Podcast milestone by discussing Nobuhiko Obayashi’s psychedelic cult classic House (1977).
00:00 Episode 100
07:00 No Country for Old Men (2007)
13:32 Challengers (2024)
20:55 The Beast (2024)
34:38 Dial M for Murder (1954)
45:33 The People’s Joker (2024)
49:06 Humane (2024)
55:48 House (1977)
You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.
– The Podcast Crew
All of David Cronenberg’s children are now out there making Cronenberg movies. Eldest daughter Cassandra has several assistant-director credits that include the Cronenberg classic eXistenZ, and a slow trickle of high-style, high-concept sci-fi horrors have established son Brandon as a buzzy provocateur of his own right over the past decade. Now, Caitlin Cronenberg has entered the family business with her debut feature Humane. Set in a near-future America that’s struggling to keep its remaining citizens alive after Climate Change disaster, Humane‘s central hook relies on a government program that incentivizes voluntary euthanasia as a means of population control. The government has rebranded suicide as a heroic act of “enlisting” in “the war” against humanity’s extinction, littering the streets with propaganda posters that valorize impoverished parents who sacrifice themselves to brighten their children’s future with a hefty payout. It’s the kind of post-Twilight Zone thought experiment where the characters are more symbols than people, representing various social ills and grotesque points of view that help flesh out the central thesis more than flesh out their internal lives. In that way, Humane is maybe more indebted to the Canadian horror tradition of the Cube series than it is to the Cronenberg family legacy, give or take a couple last-minute indulgences in dental & bodily gore that cater to the true Cronheads out there. However, the film is surprisingly juicy if you’re invested in the larger Cronenberg nepo baby project, given that one of its major driving forces is catty, extratextual humor about spoiled brats who live in their famous father’s shadow.
Because it is a relatively cheap, made-for-streaming production, Humane cannot afford to depict the wide-scale Climate Crisis devastation that has accelerated America’s violent disdain for its own citizens. Instead, the movie shoehorns all of the political hot topics its premise touches on (class, racism, immigration, MAGA populism, COVID denialism, environmental collapse) into rushed conversations during a single-family dinner, only hinting at the wider scale misery of the world outside their home in gestural images (UV-deflecting umbrellas, bureaucratic death squads, newscasts warning of an imminent draft for the “war”). Peter Gallagher stars as the family figurehead: a retired, wealthy news anchor who invites his children to his home for dinner, where he announces that he and his wife plan to enlist as an act of self-sacrifice. His children loudly rebel, squabbling with their father about the narcissism of his decision as an act of familial PR and squabbling amongst each other about who deserves what share of their imminent inheritance. The movie takes a fun turn at the top of the second act that further isolates & escalates the fervor of that familial argument, and I refuse to spoil that twist here even though it arrives fairly early in the runtime. What’s much more important is the obliviousness & selfishness of the nepo babies who both loathe and profit from their father’s legacy, weaponizing phrases like “What would Dad think?” to knock each other down in their vicious fight for dominance. It’s darkly funny enough on its own merits to make Humane worth seeking out when it hits Shudder this summer, but it feels even more essential once you start extrapolating what it indicates about Caitlin Cronenberg’s home life (as filtered through collaboration with producer & screenwriter Michael Sparaga).
Not everyone will be interested in watching a feature-length subtweet about Cronenberg family gatherings, but I appreciated how Humane‘s rich-people-problems humor lightened up its political speculation about our planet’s grim future. I felt similarly about Brandon Cronenberg’s latest film Infinity Pool, which balanced out its broader satirical sci-fi premise about wealth-class privilege with the director’s extratextual nepo baby handwringing about imposter syndrome and writer’s block. Cronenberg’s kids could be making exact photocopies of their father’s legendary body horrors, but they’re instead undercutting that impulse with some acknowledgement & self-interrogation of their own creative, privileged circumstances. They’re also just having fun. I found Infinity Pool perversely hilarious and Humane surprisingly playful, especially in scenes featuring Enrico Colantoni as a bloodthirsty bureaucrat who interrupts the family dinner with plans to collect the bodies the government was promised. It’s a small film with big ideas, not allowing its Canadian TV production values to get in the way of its thematic ambitions. It’s also self-consciously silly, though, affording comedic actors Jay Baruchel & Emily Hampshire equal opportunity to play morbid court jesters alongside Colantoni as Gallagher’s rotten, ungrateful children. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I hope Caitlin Cronenberg gets to leverage her last name for more high-concept satires in the near future. The only shame, really, is that we weren’t privy to the real-life dinner conversations that likely resulted after her family saw an early cut. They’re fun to imagine, at least.
-Brandon Ledet
It took a couple weeks of diligent blog posts & podcast recordings to review all thirteen screenings I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, of which the major highlights were local premieres of Don Hertzfeldt’s Me, Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, and Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow. Overlook recaps are never complete if you only cover what movies you saw at the fest, though; it’s just as important to report on the movies you took home from the fest, thanks to the consistent, essential presence of boutique Blu-ray distributor Vinegar Syndrome as an on-site vendor. I pick up killer genre obscurities from the Vinegar Syndrome table every year, mostly because I’m prompted to select titles I’ve never heard of before by their striking cover art and by the curational nudging of a knowledgeable sales rep. I’ve left past Overlooks with blind-buy purchases of Nightbeast, The Suckling, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street – all bangers. This year’s highlight purchase was a recent in-house restoration of the 1990 Greek sexploitation thriller Singapore Sling, a movie that jumped out at me through the striking black-and-white S&M iconography on its slipcover and that over-delivered on the debauchery that graphic promises. Equal parts horror, noir, and pornography, it’s gorgeous high-art smut: the exact qualities Vinegar Syndrome regulars search for in the label’s extensive catalog. It’s almost unbelievable that it’s a new release for the company, since it feels just as perfectly calibrated to their brand as early, signature VS titles like The Telephone Book.
There are three separate narrators in this sordid domestic drama, all of whom directly address the audience in stage-play soliloquy. One is the titular Singapore Sling (named after a cocktail recipe, the only scrap of identification that can be found on his person); he’s a macho noir archetype who’s taken hard to alcoholism as his years-long search for his beloved, vanished Laura has proven fruitless. Tracking Laura’s ghost to a mysterious, remote mansion, he meets our other two narrators: the dominatrix owner of the estate and her childlike nympho daughter – a mother-daughter duo who are introduced to the audience roleplaying as the missing Laura and engaging in incestuous, fetishistic sex with the aid of a strap-on dildo. You see, they most definitely killed the missing woman, along with dozens of unnamed servants buried in a mass grave under their home’s flower garden, because they are wealthy and thus depraved. Like all noir protagonists, our POV character is doomed as soon as he stumbles into the web of these femmes fatales. They immediately beat him into concussion, tie him to a bedframe with ropes & leather straps, and take turns raping him while teasing out whether he’s aware of their similar abuse of the mysterious Laura. Speaking of which, the name “Laura” is repeated by all three players with feverish, orgasmic frequency, and it eventually proves to be a direct allusion to the classic 1940s Otto Preminger noir, complete with out-of-context references to Laura’s broken lake house radio. Whether you ever thought the noir genre could use a little sprucing up with proto-torture-porn sensibilities is dependent on your personal interests as an audience, but I can at least say I’ve never seen that exact combination before.
Singapore Sling is incestuous femdom erotica filtered through the filmmaking aesthetics of classic Universal monster movies. The father figure of the family home is dressed up like the Boris Karloff version of The Mummy and stored in the attic as an artifactual sex object. The women of the house keep some traditional BDSM restraints & tools lying around, but they also incorporate perplexing electrical equipment seemingly borrowed from the set of James Wale’s Frankenstein into their “play” (i.e., rape & torture). Its black-and-white horror sensibilities are warmly familiar, but its rape-fantasy logic feels genuinely dangerous outside the context of privately read erotic fiction, which is only slightly eased by it being played as a taboo freak-out instead of a pure turn-on. I haven’t felt this shameful while falling in love with a movie since I first watched The Skin I Live In, and its cheeky provocations don’t feel all that out of line with Almodóvar’s general schtick. I haven’t yet seen any other features from director Nikos Nikolaidis, but it appears that shock & provocation are constant in his work, evidenced by the 2011 documentary of the Vinegar Syndrome disc that features a montage of his actresses pissing & vomiting in a wide range of violent, sexual scenarios. Here, pissing & vomiting are their versions of cumshots, and their concussed captive has no choice but to lie back and take it until there is a chance to escape. I have no reference for where Nikolaidis was positioned in the Greek cinematic imagination in his time, but I do see direct evidence here that he was at least influential on currently ascending Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos, from the outlandish incest of Dogtooth to the fruit-flavored masturbation and classic-monster visual cues of Poor Things.
There’s almost no way to recommend Singapore Sling without sounding like a carnival barker luring rubes into a geek show. Indeed, the film does have a Spider Baby quality to its “Get a load of these freaks!” premise, which never expands beyond hanging around a decrepit mansion with sexual deviants until everyone involved is fucked to death. For all of its kink & gore, though, it’s a strangely calm, quietly eerie affair, mostly scored by the soft meditation-app rain patter of the “sick and sad” world outside the mansion walls. It’s not the kind of kill-a-minute splatstick horror that punctuates every sequence with an active disemboweling; it’s the kind of off-putting, degenerate horror that collects the organs from a disemboweling to arrange into sensual tableaux, decorated with victims’ jewelry for perverse beauty. That stomach-turning disorientation is better experienced than described, which makes this an ideal blind-buy home video experience. It’s easily my favorite film I’ve picked up from Vinegar Syndrome’s merch table at Overlook, where I consistently gamble on titles without the hive-mind knowledge of the internet informing my purchases. Relying only on the box-cover artwork and the guidance of Staff Picks at that table is the closest I get to the vintage video store experience in this post-Blockbuster Video world (at least until Future Shock Video gets a storefront going in the not-too-distant future, many many bus rides away). I look forward to it every year almost as much as I look forward to the official selections on the Overlook program.
-Brandon Ledet
I’ve never had much enthusiasm for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s two signature films—the notoriously brutal acid Western El Topo & the psychedelic tableaux The Holy Mountain—despite the immense visual beauty both films convey as a collection of still images. Jodorowsky is undeniably impressive as a visual stylist, but whenever he asserts full auteurist control over a picture, the visuals just kinda sit there, purposeless and without clear progression. I suspect, then, that the reason Santa Sangre stands out as the director’s best work is because he did not have that authorial control as the sole writer-director. The project was brought to Jodorowsky as an already fully formed idea by two Italian filmmakers: schlock giallo screenwriter Roberto Lioni and, more notably, Claudio Argento, who’s most famous for producing films directed by his older brother Dario (including the Argento classics Inferno & Tenebre). Those two external voices do little to rein in Jodorowsky’s wildly expressive, surrealistic visual style, but they do help anchor it to a more familiar, generic narrative structure that gives it a much sturdier shape. The imagery in Santa Sangre is just as gorgeous as anything you’ll see in The Holy Mountain, but it’s driven by a feverishly perverse Italo horror sensibility that gives it a much more satisfying sense of momentum.
Santa Sangre is a fine-art sideshow that finds ecstatic melodrama in the backstage lives of traveling carnies. In the early flashback sequence that establishes the dramatic stakes, there’s little stylistic difference from what might happen if Werner Herzog attempted a 1980s remake of Tod Browning’s Freaks (a possibility you can only effectively imagine by watching Herzog’s forgotten 2000s melodrama Invincible). Strongmen, clowns, strippers, dwarves, and trapezists are shot with a confrontational, near-documentary candor that walks just up to the line of “Get a load of these freaks!” gawking, but invests in the sincere, scene-to-scene drama of their humanity enough to mostly get away with it. The modern-timeline scenes set in a mental institution are even shakier in the tightrope they walk between honesty & exploitation. It doesn’t help that horror is an inherently exploitative medium in the way it others the mentally ill and physically disfigured for cheap scares, a tradition this particular title leans into by mirroring the plot of Hitchcock’s Psycho. In the flashback timeline, a young circus-performer child watches in horror as his mother’s arms are severed by his brutish, drunken father. In the present, he escapes from an insane asylum to act as his mother’s phantom arms, wearing painted nails and voguing like Willi Ninja as part of her new, altered stage act . . . and, of course, violently murdering anyone she singles out as a target, despite his squeamishness for violence. This perverse pantomime of Mommy Issues psychosis culminates in an all-timer of a twist ending that I will not dare spoil here.
There’s something deeply, spiritually honest about movies that act as circuses. Both artforms are a kind of cheap-entertainment spectacle that can convey pure, illusionary magic if the audience is willing to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the show. Some of the best scenes in Santa Sangre are just straightforward documentation of circus performers’ acts, costumes, and bodies, with Jodorowsky’s eye searching for ethereal beauty in their makeshift D.I.Y. glamor. It’s Argento & Lioni who provide a linear structure to support that beauty, though, and you can feel their influence in Santa Sangre‘s many Italo horror cliches. First of all, you don’t get much more giallo than borrowing your plot structure from Hitchcock – Psycho or Rear Window especially. Then, there’s the intense color gels & neons that mark the modern timeline of Santa Sangre but are not present in Jodorowsky’s previous works. The real signifier, though, is the framing of the first modern-day murder, in which a woman is stabbed to death by a disembodied arm wielding a knife, the killer’s identity obscured just off screen. It’s all classic giallo fare, right down to the awkward English dubbing and the sensational but nonsensical answer to the central mystery of the murders. I’m not exactly sure why Argento sought out Jodorowsky to direct this film instead of collaborating with Dario or Umberto Lenzi or Michael Soavi or whatever Italo schlockteur was around & looking for a paycheck. It was a smart choice, though, as the director’s attempts to elevate the carnival setting into a fine art gallery show combine with the producer’s assembly line horror filmmaking rhythms to craft something truly special that neither collaborator would ever achieve again on their own.
Generally, Jodorowsky movies are more interesting to think about in the abstract than they are to actually watch, which is why the unfinished-project documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune is the context where his name is most often repeated in modern discourse. Santa Sangre is the major exception to that conundrum. It may be just as exploitative & ableist as an actual carnival sideshow, but it’s also a work of tremendous beauty & emotional sincerity. It would be difficult to claim that a movie that goes out of its way to include depictions of forced prostitution, elephant dismemberment, and child torture via tattoo needles is not on some level mining empty shock value out of its setting & drama. The characters’ pain through surviving that outrageous violence is heartfelt, though, and the beauty of Jodorowsky’s photography protects the story from devolving into pure miserablism. Besides the narrative similarities to Psycho & Freaks, the movie also includes direct allusions to the James Wale classic The Invisible Man, another example of horror filmmaking’s highwire balancing act between cheap visual spectacle and sincere emotional torment. It’s a shame Jodorowsky didn’t work with by-the-numbers horror producers more often. The genre’s readymade narrative familiarity & eternal marketability might have really bulked up his relatively small filmography, both in quantity and in quality.
-Brandon Ledet
Welcome to Episode #210 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, Hanna, and guest Bill Arceneaux discuss a selection of horror films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, starting with the gory slow-cinema slasher In a Violent Nature.
00:00 Welcome
04:47 In a Violent Nature
23:43 Moviegoing with Bill
32:16 ME
46:12 Dream Factory
53:47 Hypoxia
56:54 The Influencer
1:04:03 Red Rooms
1:24:58 Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
1:35:46 Infested
1:41:07 Oddity
1:44:54 Cuckoo
1:48:46 I Saw the TV Glow
1:55:20 Abigail
Overlook 2024, Ranked and Reviewed
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
The earliest press releases for the Universal Pictures horror Abigail reported it as a reimagining of the 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter, citing Leigh Whannell’s 2020 remake of The Invisible Man and last year’s Nic-Cage-as-Dracula comedy Renfield as similar examples of what the studio is currently doing with its Classic Monsters brand. Technically, Abigail does feature a vampire’s daughter in its main cast, but that titular, bloodsucking brat’s similarities to Countess Marya Zaleska end there. No matter what the original pitch for Abigail might have been in first draft, it’s clear that the final product was more directly inspired by last year’s killer-doll meme comedy M3GAN than anything related to the original Dracula series. Anytime its little-girl villain does a quirky, TikTok friendly dance in her cutesy ballerina outfit, you can practically hear echoes of some producer yelling “Get me another M3GAN!” in the background. The Radio Silence creative team kindly obliged, churning out another M3GAN with the same dutiful, clock-punching enthusiasm that they’ve been using to send another Scream sequel down the conveyor belt every year. The movie is less a reimagining of a 90-year-old classic than it is a rerun of a novelty that just arrived last January.
To juice the premise for as many TikTokable moments as possible, Abigail never changes out of her tutu. The seemingly innocent little girl (Alisha Weir) is kidnapped after ballet practice and held ransom in an old dark house to extort millions out of her mysterious, dangerous father. She naps for a bit while her captors bicker & banter downstairs, so that each of the likeable, sleepwalking stars (Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton, the late Angus Cloud, etc.) can all get in their MCU-style quips before they’re ceremoniously slaughtered one at a time. Then Abigail wakes up, reveals her fangs, and throws in some pirouettes & jetés between ripping out throats with her mouth. The violence is bloody but predictable, especially if you’ve happened to see the movie’s trailers, which plainly spell out every single image & idea from the second hour while conveniently skipping over the tedious hangout portion of the first. There is no element of surprise or novelty here beyond your very first glimpse of an adolescent vampire in a tutu, which you already get just by walking past the poster in the lobby.
In short, Abigail is corporate slop. The best way to enjoy it is either chopped up into social media ads or screening on the back of an airplane seat headrest, wherever your attention is most often held hostage. I attended its world premiere at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, which likely should have heightened its fanfare through pomp & exclusivity but instead had the opposite effect. Screening in a festival environment among dozens of no-name productions with much smaller budgets and infinitely bigger ideas really highlighted how creatively bankrupt this kind of factory-line horror filmmaking can be. Using the legacy of something as substantial as Dracula’s Daughter to rush out a M3GAN follow-up before a proper M3GAN 2.0 sequel is ready for market conveys a depressingly limited scope of imagination in that context, especially since horror is the one guaranteed-profit genre where audiences are willing to go along with pretty much anything you throw at them. At the very least, Universal & Radio Silence could have better capitalized off the production’s one distinct, exciting idea by flooding the house with dozens, if not hundreds, of ballerina vampires instead of relying on just one. That way, it wouldn’t be so boring to wait for her to wrap up her nap.
-Brandon Ledet
The term “horror” can apply to such a wide range of narrative, thematic, and aesthetic traditions that it’s almost too wide of an umbrella to be considered a single genre. I’m always especially impressed with The Overlook Film Festival’s interpretation of what qualifies as horror in its programming, which makes room for films as disparate in tone & intent as a when-spiders-attack creature feature set in a French housing block and an internal identity crisis triggered by obsessive television watching in the American suburbs. This breadth of curation was especially on my mind while attending a trio of films about psychic mediums at this year’s Overlook – three films that had little, if anything, in common beyond the shared subject of their premises. Not all horror films are interested in scaring their audience; some are interested in making us laugh, some in making us ponder the incompressible phenomena of daily life. It’s incredible that I saw all of that territory covered in three Overlook selections that all happened to feature spiritual mediums’ attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Horror is everything; everything is horror.
Look into My Eyes
Documentarian Lana Wilson sounded surprised by Overlook’s flexible definition of horror as well, introducing her film Look into My Eyes by saying she was “tickled” by its selection for this year’s festival. It totally makes sense in the context of the overall program, though, given its open-minded curiosity about spiritual mediums who claim to communicate with the dead. Look into My Eyes is an intimate documentary about the therapeutic powers and performative artistry of New York City psychics & mediums. It would be easy for a doc with that subject to find ironic amusement in the eccentric characters interviewed, but Wilson cares way more about the interpersonal communication & emotional healing of spiritual sessions than the legitimacy of the supposedly supernatural practice. Neither skeptical nor defensive, she focuses on what the psychics themselves get out of the sessions (beyond the obvious monetary compensation) instead of what they do for their clients. They’re real people seeking connection to realms of the unreal, which makes for a fascinating dissonance if you care to listen long enough to get to know them.
Within the context of a horror movie festival, it’s impossible not to notice the genre movie cinephilia of the psychics profiled here, something Wilson acknowledged in the post-screening Q&A. One interviewee hangs a poster of Jack Torrance on their bathroom wall, as if he were about to break into the room with an axe; another is a John Waters obsessive who’s transformed her apartment into a shrine honoring Divine (a woman after my own filthy heart). All seven of the psychics profiled are artistically creative, most of them having started as actors in the performing arts before settling into parapsychology as a side hustle. Wilson does not use this revelation as a gotcha to expose them as frauds, because it’s not something that her subjects see as shameful or disqualifying. They’re channeling the spirits of the dead the same way they’d channel a fictional character, and (most of the time) it feels real to them. They’re often just as haunted by grief & loss as their clients and both sides of the transactional divide find the practice therapeutic (an intimacy that’s heightened by the movie being filmed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic). It’s possible that out of the 150 or so NYC psychics Wilson contacted as potential subjects for this project, she subconsciously chose these particular 7 because they share her own interests in the creative act of filmmaking, so that it says less about the practice at large than it says about the director’s bias. Even if so, the reason the movie works is because she is genuinely curious about their professional & private lives; any curiosity about the spiritual world beyond our own is secondary.
Sleep
Like with Look into My Eyes, it’s also ambiguous as to whether the Korean horror Sleep is actually a ghost story, or just a story about people who believe in ghosts. Curiously, the answer to that open-ended question also hinges on whether a struggling actor is telling the truth when they appear to be communicating with the dead, or whether they’re performing for personal survival. The actor in question is played by Lee Sun-kyun, the Parasite performer who unexpectedly died shortly after this film’s international premiere last year. Lee’s real-life death is made even more acutely painful by how lovably charming he is in Sleep as a doting husband who feels immense guilt about his nightly sleepwalking episodes that torment his equally adorable but increasingly frazzled wife (Train to Busan’s Jung Yu-mi). Scared that the out-of-character violence of her husband’s sleepwalking episodes will threaten the health of their newborn baby, the normally skeptical wife allows her mother to bring a psychic medium into the house to help exorcise the evil spirit that’s supposedly taken root in his body. Whether the husband believes in the ghost himself is ultimately up for debate, since he may very well be play-acting with the superstition just long enough to be cured by modern medical science, hoping his wife doesn’t attempt to violently extract the “ghost” from inside him in the meantime.
Speaking of Parasite, Sleep is the debut feature of director Jason Yu, a young protegee of Bong Joon-ho (who recommended Lee take the lead role as the possibly-possessed husband). That professional connection is worth noting because it informs Sleep’s oddly prankish tone. Whether or not this is a legitimate ghost story, it certainly is an adorable romcom. Lee & Jung are super cute together, which makes it all the more tragic when the sleepwalking-ghost turns them against each other. It’s a romcom, sure, but it’s a romcom about how psychotically violent you can become if your partner disrupts your sleep for long enough, with the wife taking over most of the horror duties in the back half once she fully commits to believing in the presence of a ghost. Thinking back to the ice-cold humor of Bong’s own debut Barking Dogs Never Bite, Sleep is also notable for its willingness to go there in its onscreen violence against innocents. No one is safe here; pregnant women, newborn babies, and Pomeranians are all in genuine mortal danger. Whether they will be saved by prescribed medication or old-world prayer relics is a fight between husband & wife – a fight with surprisingly, viciously funny results.
Oddity
Of course, not everybody goes into horror movies looking to have a laugh or to feel empathy. Sometimes, audiences actually want to be scared. The scariest movie about a spiritual medium I saw at this year’s Overlook was the Irish ghost story Oddity, in which violent spirits are weaponized for revenge amongst the living. The only movie I saw on the program that had me more on edge was the one that featured spiders crawling all over people’s faces & bodies, which by comparison feels like cheating. Oddity has to take its time to build the reasoning & mythology behind its supernatural scares, which start when a blind psychic arrives uninvited to the home where her twin sister was allegedly murdered by an escaped mental patient. Armed with a psychic ability to read hidden personal truths in physical possessions, she seeks answers about her sister’s death in the widower’s home, then sets about righting past wrongs with the help of present ghosts. She also weaponizes the physical body of a gnarled wooden puppet she drags into that home, a consistently creepy prop that recalls the puppet reaction cutaways from the 80s horror oddity Pin.
Oddity is a consistent series of routine fright gags that follow a rigid pattern of getting super quiet right before cutting to a ghost with a loud soundtrack stinger, and yet it made me jump every single time. After the credits rolled, I was startled again by the physical presence of the wooden puppet, which the festival programmers had quietly propped up at the exit door mid-screening. Personally, I don’t always need horror films to be scary to be worthwhile. I mostly cherish the genre for the freedom it gives filmmakers to ignore the limitations of real-world logic, and I’m usually onboard for whatever they choose to do with that permission to imagine. I couldn’t have asked for a better ending to this year’s festival than Oddity, though, since it reminded me that the primary value most audiences seek in horror is its ability to scare, which is just as valid & rewarding as anything else the genre can achieve. After seeing a documentary about real-world psychics’ emotional lives and a domestic comedy about psychics’ superstitious opposition to modern science, being genuinely scared by a movie on the same subject was a necessary, grounding experience. That unlimited range in tone & purpose is exactly what makes the horror genre so rewarding, and it’s what makes Overlook Film Festival an unmissable yearly ritual on the New Orleans culture calendar.
-Brandon Ledet
One thing I’m always searching for at New Orleans French Film Fest every year is French-language horror films: the kinds of artsy genre titles that premiere in the Midnight or Un Certain Regard programs at Cannes and then quietly seep onto streaming platforms like Mubi & Kanopy years later with no wide theatrical distro. This year’s French Film Fest lineup delivered the familial sorcery drama Omen and the bestial body horror The Animal Kingdom, which where both solid but left me wanting more. Thankfully, Overlook Film Fest came through town just a few weeks later, screening a surprising number of French-language titles that would have been just as worthy of New Orleans French Film Fest proper. Partially sponsored by Mubi, the international programming at this year’s Overlook was impressively robust, and I made the most of what French-language horrors I could cram into my schedule . . .
Hood Witch
Like the aforementioned Animal Kingdom, Hood Witch is more of a fugitive-on-the-run thriller than a proper horror film. Like Omen, it’s also an attempt to reconcile old-world witchcraft practices with modern cultural sensibilities. Golshifteh Farahani stars as Nour, a single mother who exploits her Parisian neighborhood’s religious superstitions so she can financially support her young son. This mostly manifests in a smuggling operation that sneaks dangerous, exotic animals into the country for elaborate healing rituals and in developing an app that connects users to the faith healers who practice them – like Uber for exorcists. Her schemes blow up in her face when one of her customers suddenly dies, having relied on old-world sorcery where modern medicine should have intervened. She’s blamed for the tragedy by the most conservative zealots of her community, which leads to a literal witch hunt through city streets. It’s an exciting clash of modernized, urban witchcraft and old-fashioned, tried and true cultural misogyny – a clash that’s telegraphed by an opening montage of witchcraft documentation through the ages, from Häxan to TikTok.
Hood Witch is most inventive in its weaponization of smartphones on both sides of the witches vs mob justice divide. The mob uses their phones to broadcast the fugitive witch’s live location to fellow vigilantes, stirring up paranoia in the ability to turn anyone with an internet connection into a Matrix-style sleeper agent; they also use their phones’ flashlights as makeshift torches. The so-called witch uses her social media feed to antagonize her legion of anonymous enemies with broadcasts of spells & curses they don’t need to be physically present for to suffer. In some ways the movie pulls its punches in constantly teasing the audience about whether Nour is an atheist or a believer (and in occasionally shying away from onscreen gore), but Nour herself relies on that ambiguity to survive. It also wouldn’t be a modernization of old-world witch hunts if she wasn’t wrongly accused of practicing sorcery, so it can’t fully commit to the supernatural implications of its premise without completely undermining its thesis. Omen does a much better job of fully satisfying both sides of that believer-skeptic divide, but that’s about the only way the two films can be compared.
Red Rooms
The reason I’m specifying “French-language” so much here is that there are always a few French-Canadian titles that sneak onto the French Film Fest lineup, which means I’m also going to sneak one onto this list. Like Hood Witch, Red Rooms is more of a thriller than an outright horror film, and it’s also one of that generates a lot of its tension through online misbehavior. Set in Quebec, it’s a Fincherian cyberthriller about an edgy fashion model who’s romantically obsessed with a tabloid-famous serial killer.
The film opens in the sterilized white void of a Quebecois courtroom, where one long shot follows the opening arguments of the obviously guilty killer’s crimes, floating between the horror on the faces of his teen victims’ parents and the perverse attraction on the faces of his doting fan club. Later, the screen glows red as our fashion model anti-heroine watches direct evidence of the gruesome crimes in question: dark web snuff videos purchased with Bitcoin currency she earns through shady video poker transactions & Neon Demon-style photo shoots. This bizarre, improbable collection of character details never gets any easier to understand or to stomach. Red Rooms is mostly just a chilling character study of an absolute weirdo, one who’s only one or two dark web searches beyond the average true crime junkie. Nothing especially shocking happens in the movie, but every new detail about our POV fashionista is revealed as a twisty Event, while the world around her breaks down into pixelated digital waste.
Infested
In a way, the when-spiders-attack horror Infested is the perfect crossroads between typical French Film Fest & Overlook programming, where Shudder meets Mubi. Since the sensation of venomous spiders crawling all over your body and hatching eggs inside it is so automatically, reflexively freaky, the movie has a lot of free time for bonus details like character development & emotional stakes. Another Parisian horror in which a well-meaning exotic animal smuggler whose personal-survival hustles result in a body count, it’s a story about the breakdown of community in a time of supernatural crisis. Our boneheaded sweetheart protagonist is introduced specifically in the context of his relationships with his housing block community, so that later there’s genuine emotional heft to his friendships & family bonds being tested by selfish survival instincts once his escaped specimens mutate into supernatural arachnid monsters. It’s like one of those semi-documentary film festival dramas about life on the poverty line in French housing projects (Girlhood, Gagarine, Cuties, etc.), except with way more gigantic, pissed off spiders than usual.
If there’s anything especially nuanced about Infested‘s scares, it’s in the way the cops outside the housing block are just as dangerous as the killer spiders inside. There’s a deep, valid mistrust of the armed brutes who are supposedly quarantining residents for their own safety that not only informs characters’ desperate decision making here, but also illuminates some of the mob justice mentality of Hood Witch in retrospect. That’s not what makes the movie scary, though. It’s the constant flood of CGI spiders that invade the homes & bodies of that community that makes the movie so effectively upsetting. All told, I attended thirteen screenings at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, and without question Infested was the scariest theatrical experience of the weekend. It didn’t have to try all that hard to earn that accolade (at least not when compared to more inventive, cerebral horrors like I Saw the TV Glow or Cuckoo) but it more than made up for that easy layup by investing in its characters, taking care to make sure each of their deaths matter to the audience.
-Brandon Ledet
I saw I Saw the TV Glow at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, a five-day horror marathon that’s held in New Orleans every Spring. In an attempt to put my festival pass to full use, I crammed my schedule with new releases, spending noon to midnight at a downtown shopping mall for a four-day stretch of the fest. I skipped sleep, meals, and parties so I could disappear into The Movies, only seeing friends in passing if they happened to catch me in line for a screening. It’s likely no coincidence, then, that the Overlook title that has stuck with me most was the one about the self-destructive distraction of niche media obsession. Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to the isolation-of-the-internet drama We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is about the corrosive isolation of obsessively watching television instead of living a real, authentic life. It felt absurd to immediately get in line for another movie right after its credits rolled, but I found myself doing it anyway, refusing to wake up from my self-induced screen rot stupor. It didn’t exactly change my life, but it did make me sincerely question some things about how I’m living it.
Justice Smith stars as a socially petrified suburban nerd who’s afraid to fully express himself to anyone, including himself. The closest he gets to breaking out of his shell is in watching The Pink Opaque, a 90s kids’ fantasy show about two psychically linked summer camp friends who are geographically separated but still fight supernatural evil as a team. Styled after retro Nickelodeon programming like Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Adventures of Pete & Pete, The Pink Opaque is the kind of deceptively complex children’s programming that roots itself in a young audience’s brains for a lifetime, immediately triggering dormant memories & feelings with just a couple still images or a few notes of a theme song. It’s also a show specifically marketed to girls, so our timid protagonist is afraid to be caught watching it, both out of fear of his homophobic brute father (an unrecognizable, terrifying Fred Durst) and out of fear of what it might awaken in his own psychology. He finds refuge in an older, lesbian student at his school (Brigette Lundy-Paine) who sneaks taped episodes of The Pink Opaque into his possession, so that their real-life relationship mirrors the psychic link between the distanced besties of their favorite show. When his only friend asks him to join her in breaking out of the oppressive social & familial ruts of the suburbs, he’s too scared to go. The show is then abruptly cancelled, reality breaks, and the parts of himself he refuses to confront devour his soul while he suffocates in isolation.
I Saw the TV Glow is the melancholy dark side of the Brigsby Bear moon. It’s specifically targeted at Millennial nostalgia for vintage, tape-warped 90s media, but like Brigsby Bear it’s clear-eyed in its messaging that disappearing into that media is not a healthy substitute for a real-world social life. It’s impossible not to read this particular version of that story as a cautionary tale for would-be transgender people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, to the point where Shoenbrun practically reaches through the screen to shake that specific audience awake with the handwritten message “There is still time.” Even if you don’t need to be encouraged to embrace your true, hidden gender identity, the movie still hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, or community by disappearing into niche media consumption instead. Like World’s Fair, it’s an emotionally heavy film that touches on themes of suicide, loneliness, and parental abuse. No amount of Pete & Pete visual references or prop Fruitopia vending machines can ease the pain weighing on its heart. If anything, its nostalgia for vintage 90s media only gets more sinister the more it’s used as an emotional crutch; the Trip to the Moon-styled villain of The Pink Opaque becomes a stand-in for suicidal depression and his on-the-ground moon minions become gender dysphoria demons who go away if you stop thinking about them but never die if you never confront them.
The most frequent complaint about We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was that it was mismarketed as a horror film when really it’s just a melancholy drama about a terminally-online teenager who’s so lonely she deliberately loses her grip on reality. It was bold of Overlook to screen Schoenbrun’s next film alongside the program’s more recognizable ghouls, ghosts, and ballerina vampires, then, since their customer base can be vocally opinionated about what does or does not count as Horror; I can still hear echoes of bros in black t-shirts grumbling after their 2019 screening of Jennifer Reader’s Knives & Skin. I Saw the TV Glow has a much stronger case for being programmed in a horror genre context than World’s Fair, though, since it depicts a full supernatural breakdown of reality after the cancellation of The Pink Opaque. Tape warp TV static and monster-of-the-week villains invade the real world of our emotionally-closed-off protagonist with escalating violence the longer he ignores who he really is. The static even invades his body, literalizing the dysphoric sensation he describes of having his insides dug out with a shovel. Maybe it’s more of a nightmare drama in the way Ari Aster pitched Beau is Afraid as “a nightmare comedy,” but it’s a goddamned nightmare either way – one that the volatile combination of rigid social norms and insurmountable personal anxiety make countless people suffer every day. It made me so sad I felt physically ill, and then I immediately disappeared into another horror movie so I didn’t have to think about it for too long.
-Brandon Ledet
Do you think becoming known as a scream queen is a blessing or a curse? Both? Australian actress Samara Weaving is only a household name among horror nerds, but she’s been a must-see performer for that tattoos-and-black-t-shirts contingent since she starred in Ready or Not & The Babysitter a half-decade ago. Watching her latest star vehicle Azrael at Overlook Film Festival this weekend, I wondered whether her career was stalling there rather than starting. Watching Weaving go on another one-woman revenge mission that soaks her gorgeous face & blonde hair in buckets of her enemies’ blood & viscera made me question how satisfying it is for her as an actor to return to the exact same beats that have already made her horror-convention-famous. It’s likely comforting to know she can always fall back on consistent paychecks by starring gimmicky, gory horror flicks, but she shows just enough talent in them that you have to wonder why no one is sending her scripts for anything else (give or take a metatextual gag in Babylon that jokes about her striking resemblance to Margot Robbie).
At least Azrael offers Weaving an acting challenge to maintain her scream queen status in a role where she’s technically not allowed to scream at all. Set in an apocalyptic future where Rapture cults have renounced the sin of Speech (whatever that means), Weaving’s mute protagonist attempts to live a quiet, domestic life in the woods outside society with her doting romantic partner. The nearby cult has other ideas, kidnapping those lovers with plans to feed them to the charred-flesh Rapture zombies who hunt left-behind humans whenever the wind blows the wrong way. There are vague gestures towards explaining the mythology behind this convoluted set up, mostly spelled out in the cult’s crude finger paintings and in the rhythmic breathing rituals that summon the woodland demons. However, writer Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest, Blair Witch) has said in interviews that the idea for the film came to him in a recurring dream, so let’s just assume you’re supposed to feel it more than understand it. It’s all just background dressing for an adorable Samara Weaving to descend into hideous, cathartic violence, something she’s now proven she can do credibly while not uttering a sound. Next time, she’ll do it with her eyes closed, and then backwards in heels.
Between this film, last year’s No One Will Save You, and the ongoing Quiet Place series, it appears horror filmmakers are now actively combating the second-screen viewing habits of the streaming era, stubbornly making sure the audience watching along at home has to put down their phones to fully follow the plot. Azrael director E.L. Katz doesn’t bring much new to the table within that burgeoning Hey Pay Attention horror subgenre, except maybe in the extremity of the scene-to-scene violence (something he already proved cruel enough to deliver in the pitch-black comedy Cheap Thrills). Elderly and pregnant women are vulnerable targets; Weaving’s final showdown with the evil cult leader is a machete vs. meat cleaver fight; and the camera is always willing to linger on the painful aftermath of a fresh wound. Still, there’s nothing especially novel about the doomsday-survival cult setting or the burn-victim zombies who lurk at its edges. The movie’s main hook is for horror nerds who want to watch Weaving go through it one more time in their own perverse cult ritual. Admittedly, I am one of those nerds, but I’m still hopeful that she’ll soon break free from our captivity.
-Brandon Ledet
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