horror

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

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When watching Last Stop in Yuma County last year, my viewing companion mentioned that he had quite enjoyed The Wolf of Snow Hollow, another vehicle for Yuma lead Jim Cummings. Cummings first gained recognition for his feature film Thunder Road, which was an extension of his earlier short film of the same name. I remember seeing the trailers for Thunder Road at the Alamo Drafthouse during that summer that MoviePass was acting as a real-life free movie hack, but its time in theaters was relatively brief and I still have not managed to check it out. Per some contemporary reviews citing Cummings’ character in Snow Hollow as merely a variation on the one that he portrayed in Thunder Road (negatively), that may be for the best, as I came into Snow Hollow with no expectations. 

The film opens on the arrival of a young couple to a short-term rental in Snow Hollow, Utah. After the two relax for a bit in the hot tub, PJ (Jimmy Tatro) goes into the house to shower (and grab the engagement ring with which he is about to propose) while his girlfriend turns off the hot tub, but she’s attacked by someone or something that tears her to pieces. The local police arrive, and it becomes clear that deputy John Marshall (Cummings) is covering for the failing health of Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster in his final film role), who also happens to be his father. John’s dealing with other issues in his family life as well, as his ex-wife serves as a thorn in his side in his relationship with his teenage daughter Jenna (Chloe East), who is set to start college early that January on a gymnastics scholarship. Further, he’s an alcoholic in recovery, having been in AA for six years and sober for three. His fellow law enforcement officers are largely inept and lazy, pleading to let state or federal officials take on the investigation, and the only other person on the team with any real interest in stopping the killer is Officer Julia Robson (Riki Lindhome). Matters only get worse when another body pops up, this time with evidence that the victim was killed by “a wolf the size of a Kodiak bear,” and the local citizens start to wonder if there’s a werewolf in their midst. 

This is a neatly constructed little mystery, although I would have preferred if some elements of the mystery were played a little closer to the vest, or for longer. Early on, there are a lot of potential suspects for who might be the werewolf (or the serial killer, as John forcefully reiterates time and again). There’s a local dudebro (Marshall Allman) with whom PJ got into an altercation at a local watering hole over the former’s use of the f-slur; Sheriff Hadley’s medical complications may bely that his body is undergoing changes, as poor health can often be an indicator of lycanthropy in horror; the owner of the short term rental (Will Madden) is suspicious since we saw that the AirBnB had all of its knives removed at the start of the film, as if setting up a victim to have no way of defending themself; even John himself could be the “wolf,” since we see that he’s short-tempered, and lycanthropy could be used as an effective shorthand for the complete personality change that alcohol abuse brings on. Subversively, the film shows us a potential suspect whose name we never learn and only ever see from a rear or ¼ rear profile, and who mostly resembles PJ, whom we know can’t be the killer since we saw him in the shower while the first murder is committed. Later, this character dies of an overdose and, because of feasible but circumstantial evidence, the werewolf’s killings are pinned on him, but by this time we’ve seen enough of the actual killer to know that he’s still out there, even if we have yet to identify him. I was expecting the film to get a little more mileage out of the “Which characters have we met could the killer be?” a little longer, but this is still a mostly elegantly constructed mystery regardless. 

What doesn’t quite work is the way that John’s alcoholism is portrayed. After his AA self-intro that functions as his character exposition scene/thesis statement, every time that we see him afterward, he’s clearly a hothead. He pops off at the first crime scene, berates his subordinates (who, since they’re all deputies, are really his peers) at a diner, and screams at Deputy Chavez (Demetrius Daniels) at the second site where a body is discovered. We understand why he’s so stressed, but he’s not a man that’s barely holding it together in the face of tending to his ailing father while facing pressure to find a killer, and is a man who’s already experiencing outbursts of anger long before he falls off the wagon. In the midst of these pre-relapse tantrums is a sequence that actually works, when John meets his ex-wife and Jenna at a diner and the former works to elicit a promise that John will be able to be present at their daughter’s college orientation, and he remains calm and speaks directly to Jenna while clearly struggling not to lose his temper at his ex at the same time. After a second body is found, John finally digs out the beers he has stashed away in the top kitchen cupboard, but there’s very little change in the way John treats the people around him. 

Cummings has the face of a movie star from a different era; when you look like he does, you don’t have much choice but to put it up on a screen somewhere. When it comes to this particular performance, however, it remains pretty flat from start to finish, which makes it seem like he only has one setting, and that static nature of this character takes a little shine out of the movie’s luster. Where we do see some escalation from his drinking comes as he falls completely off the wagon. After collapsing on his oven door and shattering it before passing out in the detritus, there’s a scene in which Jenna comes home to find John passed out on the living room floor, and after some struggle she manages to get him upstairs and into his bed. John, completely inebriated, breaks down into barely coherent sobs about his failures while Jenna stands in the hallway begging and pleading through her own tears for her father to just go to bed, screaming that he’s scaring her. It’s harrowing, even more so than any of the murders or crime scenes we’ve witnessed. More than that, it proves that Cummings does have more than one performance style in him, and it just makes me wish that I had seen a greater degree of difference between John before and after his demons got the better of him. 

This is a fun little horror comedy (with occasional heaving helpings of drama) with a talented cast and good inspiration. There are elements of Jaws at play here as the police force finds itself under intense scrutiny and pressure in order to make sure that the town doesn’t miss out on its annual cash injection from ski tourism. There’s great ambiguity throughout about whether there really is a werewolf in Snow Hollow or if there’s a seven-foot serial killer using folklore and superstition to cover for their compulsions. There’s some fun misdirection throughout, as it at first seems that the connection between the victims has something to do with the elementary school that they attended, but this is either a subplot that was dropped or it’s an intentional red herring, and I’d say that the scaffolding of the story is otherwise solid enough that I’d vote it’s the latter.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

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One of the more uninspired trends in recent mainstream filmmaking has been the villain origin story, wherein cinema’s greatest monsters get the chance for the world to see their personal plights from the most empathetic angle possible. Maleficent, Cruella de Vil, Willie Wonka, The Wicked Witch, and the Wizard of Oz have all had their early-years sob stories told over the past decade or so, and now it’s Cinderella’s ugliest, meanest stepsister’s turn. The Ugly Stepsister retells the Cinderella story from the vantage point of the heiress-turned-servant’s cruelest sibling-by-marriage, under the wicked guidance of her stepmother (and the more general wickedness of European beauty standards). First-time director Emile Blichfeldt finds genuine thematic & visual inspiration in the exercise where its far more expensive Hollywood studio equivalents have failed, revising Cinderella to be a woman-on-the-verge story about a teenager driven mad by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. While Cinderella’s homeliest stepsister, Elvira, strives to replicate the beauty of her more famous & desired sibling, her own empathetic origin story quickly devolves into feminist body horror of the Substance, Raw, and Teeth variety, delivering something much more visceral & politically impactful than the empty CG spectacle of films like Wicked or Oz, The Great and Powerful.

Like in all variations on the fairy tale, Cinderella and her stepsister are both competing for marriage to the same bachelor prince. However, in this version the prince is a horndog jock who’s only desirable for the wealth that comes with nobility. Naively mistaking his published sex limericks for sincere romantic poetry, Elvira desires the prince’s heart, while the once-pampered, down on her luck Cinderella more shrewdly desires his coin. They start the competition as relative equals, but the matriarch of the household tips the scales in her biological daughter’s favor by banishing Cinderella to a servant’s life while working day & night to pretty up Elvira through cosmetic enhancements. As this is a body horror take on an otherwise familiar story, those cosmetic enhancements manifest as painful methods of torture on the young Elvira: 18th century braces, 18th century nose jobs, 18th century false eyelashes sewn directly to the lid, sans anesthesia. Then, there’s the timeless weight loss tactic of swallowing a Tremors-scale tapeworm to curb her appetite. Each “improvement” makes Elvira more conventionally attractive but also visibly injured & ill. They also make her more conceited & crueller to Cinderella, whom she once looked up to as a role model. It turns out “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become (literally) monstrous in the process.

The question of empathy is slippery in The Ugly Stepsister, as is the definition of the word “ugly.” We obviously pity poor Elvira at the start of her journey as the most awkward girl at her local Finishing School, where her chubby cheeks and steampunk nose guard make her a target for mean-girl whispers & side eye. Despite her dopey face & even dopier babydoll curls, however, (or maybe even because of them) we find her to be cute. Her main fault is that she’s naively obedient to the older women in her life, who are willing to break her in order to reshape the raw materials into something more presentable for the douchebag Prince. Even those women aren’t the villains of the piece, necessarily, nor is the naturally, effortlessly beautiful Cinderella who drives Elvira insane with jealousy. It’s the larger patriarchal courting ritual and the impossible beauty standards that need to be maintained to participate in it that drive most of the film’s cruelty. Where things get slippery is that Elvira is willing to adopt that cruelty once she claws her way to the top of the social hierarchy, when she gets outright ugly to her now-impoverished stepsister in a way that goes above & beyond obeying her mother’s wicked demands. In most iterations of this story, Cinderella has two ugly stepsisters to deal with in this cutthroat competition for the Prince’s heart, but Elvira’s younger sibling seems to opt out of gender completely as a personal safety measure — hiding their menstruation from their mother and hiding their body from everyone else under increasingly baggy clothes. Given what the cosmetic rituals of femininity does to their sister, who could blame them?

It’s likely not fair to compare this film to Disney’s empathetic-villain revisions of its own fairy tale IP. The Ugly Stepsister has a lot less in common with Maleficent & Cruella than it has with other recent low-budget, high-concept horrors of ultra-femininity like Paradise Hills, Lisa Frankenstein, and Hatching. Blichfeldt fights as hard as possible against the camera’s flattened digital textures to find some genuine magic in her grotesque tableaux. She mostly succeeds, leaning into the soft dissolves of Elvira’s romantic daydreams and the oil-painting decay of Cinderella’s visitations with her father’s corpse to reach for an Old World fairy tale feel. Mostly, though, what makes The Ugly Stepsister visually distinct is Blichfeldt’s fearlessness in depicting grotesque bodily detail. The blood, puke, cum, breaks, and bruises of the human body anchor this traditionally magical story to the real world, which helps its political themes of cosmetic self-torture land with forceful, tangible impact. It’s the kind of thoughtful, artful genre film that premieres at prestigious European film festivals (Berlinale in this case) before heading straight to Shudder once it reaches the US, since unsuspecting audiences tend to barf & faint at those fancy premieres. I don’t remember Wonka getting that kind of enthusiastic ovation.

-Brandon Ledet

The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

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As I noted in my Tales of Terror review, I’ve been skipping around in these Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe features based on what I can get my hands on most immediately at any given time. I didn’t have very high hopes for The Tomb of Ligeia, as it’s not a title that I think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about, and its position as the Corman/Poe flick that was the least financially successful (and which thus was the last of these to be made) didn’t bode well. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to see that despite being the last trip to this particular well, the cast and crew clearly still had the juice. 

Verden Fell (Vincent Price) lives alone, save for a single servant, in the attached vicarage of a dilapidated and overgrown abbey. Years before, Fell insisted that his late wife Ligeia be laid to rest on the abbey’s grounds, despite the fact that the priest claims that interring Ligeia among the Christian dead is an insult to them and that her very presence beneath the soil will deconsecrate the holy ground. This seems to have been the case, and Fell lives a solitary life alone amidst a be-cobwebbed rectory, surrounded by recreations of Egyptian archaeological finds and tomb sculptures. That is, until the day that his brooding is interrupted by the sudden arrival of the beautiful Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd), the daughter of a neighboring lord, who became separated from her father’s fox hunt when she was distracted by the abbey. Unfortunately, the sudden appearance of Fell from behind a tree spooks her horse, landing her in a bed of asphodels that grow atop Ligeia’s grave. Despite seemingly being engaged to lifetime friend Christopher Gough (John Westbrook), Rowena is immediately drawn to Fell, and begins seeking him out, slowly drawing him out of his protracted mourning until the two finally wed. When they return from their honeymoon, they find that Fell’s plan to sell the abbey and move on with his life with Rowena has hit a snag; it seems the abbey and the property are both in Ligeia’s name, and because the land straddles two counties, certification of her death fell between the cracks. Legally, Ligeia is still alive and is the owner of the abbey, but Fell is insistent that her body not be disinterred to confirm her death, as he cannot tolerate her tomb being disturbed. 

Now that they’re back at the abbey, Fell begins to behave strangely. Multiple nights, Rowena seeks him out (the two appear to be living in separate quarters since the validity of their marriage may also face legal scrutiny, with Ligeia’s lack of a death certificate potentially annulling their union), only to find his bed empty and Fell himself nowhere to be found. Throughout the film, there has been some implication that Ligeia’s spirit may inhabit a black cat that lurks around the property, as it has on separate occasions slashed Rowena’s face when she was flirting with Fell, lured Rowena into the belfry and then attempted to make her fall by ringing the bell, and generally behaved as if acting upon an unknown motive. At one point, Rowena awakens to find a dead fox in her bed, presumably brought there by the cat, as it had previously made off with her father’s slain fox in an earlier scene, and she finds a saucer of milk next to the bed as well. When she seeks Fell, she finds him on his balcony, with no real sense of where he is, seeming to indicate that he has some kind of sleepwalking issue. What’s really happening in that abbey? 

I didn’t expect to be expressing this, but Tomb of Ligeia is easily the equal of Masque of the Red Death. Whereas that film drew its production value from its elaborate sets and huge crowds of revellers, Corman knew what he had on his hands when he got the opportunity to film at Castle Acre Priory, some of the best preserved monastic ruins following the dissolution of most monasteries in the 1500s by Henry VIII. As a shooting location, this place lends Tomb of Ligeia an immediate sense of gravitas. There are no in-studio “moors” full of machined fog and spindly little trees here, but a real, tangible sense of something manmade being reclaimed by nature, something historical but decayed. Scenes take place at Ligeia’s graveside, dialogue scenes are shot dynamically as the camera follows participants walking the grounds with columns passing in the foreground, and one particularly lovely shot finds Christopher and Rowena dining outside, framed by one of the priory’s arches. It lends the whole proceeding a real air of class and distinction that is often lacking. The interior scenes are likewise a departure, as the main chamber of the rectory features a large stained glass window at the rear of the stage, which allows for several atmospheric shots that feature Rowena appearing behind a meditative Fell in the middle distance, the light from the window giving her the appearance of an otherworldly beauty. It’s top notch stuff. 

Screenwriter Robert Towne would go on to quite the career after this, winning an Oscar ten years later for Chinatown, being nominated again for Shampoo (with co-writer Warren Beatty), and co-writing both the John Grisham adaptation The Firm and the script for the first Mission: Impossible film. There’s a great economy of narrative in this one (which clocks in at a scant 81 minutes), and Towne, like other Poe adaptors under Corman’s direction before him, draws in elements from other short stories to give this one a little more punch. In the original story, titled simply “Ligeia,” we find ourselves receiving the story via narration from a typically unlikeable character. The unnamed man upon whom Fell was based was truly and deeply in love with his deceased wife and married his second wife, Rowena, apparently out of social obligation rather than any real interest. Our narrator is a self-confessed opium addict who barely tolerates his second wife, who herself is not terribly fond of him, and thinks her family foolish to have married her off to a kook who lives the way that he does. When she dies of some withering disease or other, he watches as she seems to struggle to revive herself. With each revival, she appears more and more to be Ligeia rather than Rowena, before his first wife appears to overtake his young bride entirely, with the last lines of the story being his horrified revelation of this change. Towne makes Fell much more likeable from the outset; he’s the platonic ideal of a Poe hero, longing for his lost love, but instead of having him resent or dislike Rowena, we get to see him change over time. When the two first meet, he’s cold and indifferent, clearly unpracticed in the maintenance of conversation, but as she refuses to leave him, there’s a kind of Beauty and the Beast story happening here wherein she gains his trust and ultimately wins his heart. 

Another major contributor to the success of this change is Shepherd, whose performance as Rowena is very strong. In most of these, the actresses who have appeared as the love interest (or leading lady) in these movies haven’t risen to the occasion. Myrna Fahey’s Madeline Usher in House of Usher had very little to do other than faint and try and act off of Mark Damon’s stiff and lifeless Philip and every single wife featured in Tales of Terror was completely forgettable, with only Hazel Court’s appearances as the treacherous duo of Emily in Premature Burial and Juliana in Masque of the Red Death being the strongest showings. Shepherd really demonstrates a lot of depth and subtlety here, which is not something that can be said about a lot of Corman productions. Notably, she plays Rowena as fully hot and heavy for this weird, gloomy neighbor from the moment that she meets him. It’s worth noting that Price’s Fell appears first in head-to-toe black, including top hat, coattails, and leather gloves, and wearing a pair of sunglasses that he attributes to a particular malady that renders sunlight unbearable; he’s a full on goth lord living in an abandoned church and Rowena is into it. I love that for her, and I appreciate her desire for this handsome, brooding widower as being something that makes him slowly defrost. If it weren’t for the machinations from beyond the grave, the two of them could really be happy together. 

That’s another point in Tomb’s favor; a lot of these end in death but don’t have a real sense of tragedy, while Tomb does. Of course, the film ends with the vicarage going down in flames (you didn’t think Corman would miss an opportunity to reuse that same burning house footage from Usher and which reappeared in Tales of Terror one last time, did you?), but it’s different. We’re not sad to see the titular House of Usher crumble to the ground, especially not when the last man standing is the aforementioned wooden Philip, and when Leonora rests at peace in her father’s arms in the “Morella” segment of Tales, we’re more relieved than anything else. In Tomb, Towne makes Fell so much more likeable and more pitiable that we’re actively rooting for him and Rowena to make it work, and that he ultimately dies as his house falls down around him, is a truly downbeat ending. Rowena’s survival is a nice change as well, but the film ends with her having been carried to safety and escaping in the carriage of Christopher, sending her off into a potential happy ending that makes the whole thing feel bleaker. 

Another Poe text from which Towne borrows is “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which was previously adapted in Tales of Terror. Specifically, the dubious science of mesmerism plays a major role here as it did in that original text and its adaptation. In Tomb, we learn that Ligeia was a mesmerist and that, on her deathbed, she bewitched Fell into never having another wife, which has fractured him so completely that he’s essentially two different people depending upon whether it’s day or night. Mesmerism comes into play early on when the film is still playing coy with just how much supernatural business is happening around the place, as the cat is still behaving suspiciously and Rowena, in a hypnotic trance, is able to recall a song that her mother sang to her as a child despite having no distinct memories of the woman. Still entranced, she then begins to recite Ligeia’s dying words, which she has no reason to know. It’s a bit of a cheat to explain Fell’s apparent split mind, but it works well enough as a plot device that I won’t complain. How can I when the text is also giving us other surprisingly subtle little bits? When Rowena and Fell first meet, as mentioned above, he’s clad in all black, while Rowena wears a bright red dress that reflects the color of the fox from the hunt she’s peeled away from. At the end of that scene, the hunted fox is presented and then disappears, with Fell saying that the cat must have made off with it, just as Fell himself has already captured the fox-colored Rowena. It’s not Tolstoy, but you don’t normally get that much to really sink your teeth into in these Corman pictures, and I really appreciated the sweat that went into this one. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Tales of Terror (1962)

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As I now find myself approaching the tipping point of having seen more than half of Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe, at which point it only makes sense to see them all, right? And since I’m already watching them completely out of order (having watched the third, the seventh, the first, and now the fourth), why not just hack away at them in whatever order I happen to be able to get my hands on them? The next logical step after House of Usher would be to move on to The Pit and the Pendulum, but the video store didn’t have that one in stock when I swung by, so instead I picked up Tales of Terror, which is at some points quite good and at others fairly mediocre, averaging out fairly positively. The film comprises three segments that adapt four Poe short stories, opening with an adaptation of “Morella” and ending with an adaptation of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” with a mash-up of “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” in the middle. 

Tales of Terror opens on a beating heart, the camera’s eye approaching it as Vincent Price intones an introduction. A pastel image of a seaside manse fades into a matte painting of the same, with waves crashing upon the shore. It is to this place that the heroine of the piece arrives. Her name is Leonora (Maggie Field), and she has come to the home of her estranged father (Price) after spending her whole life, virtually since birth, not knowing him. At first her expressed desire to visit him once before she’s “out of [his] life forever” seems to mean that she’s tying up loose ends before marrying, but it eventually comes to light that she’s dying. Her father, who had sent his daughter away because of the dying wish of his wife Morella (Leona Gage), who died in the middle of a party that she attended by her own demand despite being too weak following a difficult childbirth. Leonora and her father bond over the fact that they are both fading away, and when she is murdered by her mother’s spectral spirit, Morella takes over her bodily, while Lenora appears in place of her mother’s corpse. Morella then strangles her terrified husband as the mansion catches fire (reusing footage from the destruction of the house in Usher) and the body swap reverses, with Leonora smiling peacefully in death knowing that her mother has been vanquished. 

Skipping ahead to the final segment, the adaptation of “Valdemar,” Price appears as the title character, who has invited family friend Dr. James (David Frankham) to visit the Valdemar home. Valdemar has a strong relationship with his wife Helene (Debra Paget), but his recent interest in the growing “science” of mesmerism has led him to invite a hypnotist named Carmichael (Basil Rathbone) as well. Valdemar expresses his wish to be placed under hypnosis at the moment of his death, so that some manner of “scientific” inquiry can be made about the potential of life within a lifeless man. His wish is fulfilled, and some months later, he’s now begging for Carmichael to release him from his undeath by ending the trance, but Carmichael’s designs on Helene mean that he refuses to do so unless she marries him. Dr. James attempts to force Carmichael to free Valdemar and Helene enters the fracas. When Carmichael attacks her as well, Valdemar’s corpse rises from his deathbed and kills the villain. Upon the moment of doing so, the hypnosis is released, and Valdemar instantly putrefies upon Carmichael’s prone body.

Both of these segments are fine. As noted in past reviews of other Corman/Poe ventures, Corman’s modus operandi was to pick a Poe story and then treat that as the third act of a screenplay, then craft the first two acts to lead into the adaptation of the original text. There’s a lot less room for that when you’re making an anthology of three short films with a total runtime of roughly ninety minutes. As such, there’s much less room for deviation here. Of the shorts, the adaptation of “Morella” strays the furthest from the original text; there, the primary focus of the story is on the unnamed narrator’s relationship with his wife, an infirm woman who teaches her husband all about her study of the philosophy of the mind, and that her hyperfixation on this was unsettling. She dies in childbirth and bears a daughter that the narrator never names, and whom he raises with a loving affection that he never had for his wife. She’s a strange child, however, preternaturally gifted and wise beyond her years in a way that discomfits the narrator. He never gives her a name, but upon the day of her christening, some compulsion drives him to speak the name “Morella” to the priest, causing the daughter to cry out “I am here” and then die in his arms. It’s not a story that readily lends itself to adaptation, and screenwriter Richard Matheson took the bare bones of it—mother died in childbirth, may possess said child in the moment of their death—and make it something that works better on the screen. That Price’s character has kept his dead wife’s corpse in a bedroom in the manor gives it a touch of the macabre, and having Leonora raised away from her father creates an opportunity for some character exploration between the two, and it works, even if it feels so “of a piece” with both Usher and Premature Burial as to feel derivative. It’s also helped by its brevity. 

The segment based upon “Valdemar” hews fairly closely to the source material, adding only a couple of characters to give the piece some breathing room. The original short story was narrated in the first person by the mesmerist, who is Valdemar’s friend, rather than the villainous Carmichael. In fact, the very format of the title “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and the way that names are redacted within it have led most critics to believe the piece to be a bit of a hoax on Poe’s part mocking the gullibility of the public. Matheson adds a wife and the family friend who is to be her suitor in her incoming widowhood (at Valdemar’s direction before he dies, mind you) so that there is some manner of conflict that the story’s epistolary “dispatch from the frontiers of science” form lacked. The make-up work done on Price to turn him into a corpse that’s failing to rot properly is very good, and it’s a moment of genuine shock when he rises and attacks the man who is forcing him to remain in an unpleasant state of undeath. The instant deterioration of the corpse as seven months of decomposition catch up to it is also a gruesomely fun image, as it appears that Rathbone has been covered in skeletal bones and peanut butter slime. 

Where this one really shines is in its “Black Cat” segment. A drunken character played by Peter Lorre comes home and harasses his wife, Annabel (Joyce Jameson), for some money that he can drink away at the tavern, in between berating her, calling her a liar, and complaining about her beloved cat. She claims there is no more and calls her husband Montresor, which will automatically sound familiar to anyone who has read “The Cask of Amontillado,” but which might be chalked up to being one of those Poe adaptation easter eggs. After all, the narrator of “The Black Cat” and his wife are both unnamed, yet here she is called Annabel, and when Dario Argento had to give the narrator a name in his adaptation, he came up with “Rod Usher.” (Perhaps in reference to Tales of Terror, the wife in Argento’s “Black Cat” adaptation was likewise given the name Annabel.) Unable to come up with a penny to get back to drinking, Montresor takes to the streets and begs for change, until he comes upon a meeting of wine retailers and sneaks in. The guest of honor at the little convention is Fortunato (Price), sealing that this will be a combination of the explicitly named source material and “Amontillado.” Fortunato’s claim to fame is that he is a perfect palate and can name any vintage, which Montresor mocks as he claims to be able to do the same, without any airs. This leads to a drinking contest in which Montresor, surprisingly, is able to go toe to toe with Fortunato when identifying estates, vineyards, and vintages (he can even tell when one bottle came from “the better slope”). 

Of course, as his ultimate goal is to get sloshed rather than prove himself, he succeeds, and Fortunato reluctantly escorts/supports him home. Annabel and Fortunato immediately hit it off, and he begins to see her while Montresor is out drinking, with him little realizing that the reason his wife suddenly has money to give him to go out drinking is because Fortunato is paying to get him out of the house. When this is made clear to him, he returns home and sees Fortunato departing, then he enters the house, where he confronts and kills his wife, then chains her body in an alcove in the crypts below the house. Later, he lures Fortunato there and likewise chains him up, then bricks up a wall to conceal their bodies (in “Cat,” the narrator cites as inspiration “the monks of the middle ages [who] are recorded to have walled up their victims,” while the narrator of “Amontillado” just gets to work). From there, the story plays out just as in “The Black Cat,” with Montresor content that no one will ever find his wife or Fortunato, whom he claims ran off together, until, while allowing the police to inspect the place, he arrogantly slaps the wall that he built and is greeted by the growl of the cat he errantly bricked up inside, causing the police to discover the makeshift tomb. 

This one is a pure delight from beginning to end. Price is playing stoic men in both of the other segments, but here he gets to fop it up real good, and it’s pure magic. The scene in which he dandily polishes a small silver cup that he wears around a chain on his neck and makes a great show of tasting the wines, complete with swishing and hammy fish faces, is priceless. Lorre is no slouch, either, as he plays Montresor with a hapless impotence that makes him pitiable despite his role as the villain of the piece. The two on screen together make for an immediately comedic pairing, as the short and stout Lorre next to the tall and lean Price (Lorre was 5’3” and Price 6’4”) look like they’re two cartoon characters drawn in distinctively different styles. The film does still manage to include the spooky dream sequence that appears to have been all but contractually obligated to be in these films, and instead of using a distinctive color saturation, the film’s image is just “squashed” from the top and the bottom, such that the already vaguely turtle-walking-upright stature and body language of Montresor becomes even more pronounced and humorous. Although it’s bracketed by two other stories that I would label as decent but forgettable, this one makes the price of the whole worthwhile. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Devil Fetus (1983)

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Of course, no Overlook Film Festival experience is complete without stopping by the Vinegar Syndrome table to peruse their annual selection of vintage-genre-cinema Blu-rays. I find the ritual both exhilarating and overwhelming, especially without the guidance of Letterboxd & blog-post reviews that help make sense of the boutique label’s catalog when shopping online. As a result, I usually end up buying the discs that most inspire me to think “What the fuck am I looking at?” when browsing those horizontal stacks — a method that has rewarded me with past genre gems as varied and as extreme as The Suckling, Nightbeast, and Singapore Sling. My blind-buy Vinegar Syndrome purchase at this year’s Overlook was no different: the Category III demonic possession title Devil Fetus, the most “What the fuck am I looking at?”-est title I could find on the table. Having now seen the movie a couple times at home since the festival concluded, I still cannot answer that question with any confidence or clarity, which may be its greatest strength as a vintage genre curio.

The narrative structure of Devil Fetus makes no logical or thematic sense as a work of commercial screenwriting, but it does create plenty of open, ambiguous space to stage a wide range of gore effects & carnival sideshow gross-outs. The story opens with a young woman entertaining herself at a local Hungry Ghost Festival while her husband is out of town on business. Mesmerized by a jade vase that the festival auctioneer promises will see “all her desires fulfilled,” she makes the impulsive purchase and takes the vase home . . . to immediately have sex with it. Disastrously, the absentee husband arrives home to catch his wife and the vase mid-coitus, where he sees the vase personified as a “Tibetan sex demon” and attacks the adulterous couple. The vase is smashed in the struggle, quickly leading to both spouses’ deaths (one by poisonous gas, one by housecat) and the demon is safely imprisoned in a Buddhist temple by a helpful priest. That magic doesn’t hold forever, though, and the woman’s nephew is the next body the demon possesses, much to the sexual peril of everyone around him.

Actually, it’s not entirely clear if the nephew is possessed by the demon or by the aunt’s undead spirit, given that at one point the mud-bodied “Tibetan sex demon” that seduced his aunt bursts out of his skin and, at another, he’s shown primping himself with lipstick & blush in a vanity mirror as he’s possessed directly by her spirit instead. Either way, the sins of the aunt being passed down to her nephew doesn’t make a ton of thematic sense beyond a generalized discomfort with sexual pleasure & aberration. In the aunt’s segment, the vase is presented as a kind of supernatural dildo, one she flips out to discover is being played with by her young nephews who went snooping in her room. In the now-grown-up nephew’s segment, the discomfort lies somewhere in the feminized traits that have been carried over from the demonically-corrupted  aunt, which raises a political eyebrow by the time the demonically-possessed teen starts attempting to rape all women in his immediate vicinity. It’s doubtful either of these implications were thoroughly considered in the writing stage, though, rather than bubbling up from the subconscious while quickly hammering away a script at the typewriter to meet a deadline.

Something I’m not writing about much in this recap of Devil Fetus is the titular devil fetus itself, which appears in exactly one shot, emerging from the dead aunt’s pregnant belly like an Alien chestburster. It’s just one of several copyright-testing images that recall famous horrors like The Exorcist & Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, none with any more thematic or stylistic importance than another. The movie is mostly a collection of gross-out gags involving puked-up birthday cake, worms crawling out of rotted faces, dog-on-human cunnilingus, semi-documentary animal slaughter, and whatever other disgusting image came to the production crew’s mind as they improvised new hellish horrors from day to day. It takes the cowardly Possession over an hour to work up the courage for a monster-fucking scene that this Cat III freak show delivers in the first ten minutes, and it’s followed by a nonstop assault of out-of-nowhere sight gags that had me shouting variations of “Wow!”, “Whoa!”, and “Ewww!” every few minutes while I was trying to make sense of the plot.

Like every Vinegar Syndrome disc I’ve ever purchased, this Blu-ray issue of Devil Fetus is a gorgeous, high-quality scan that adds a new layer of aesthetic beauty to the picture that cannot be discerned from the grainy VHS prints screenshotted elsewhere online. The movie was directed by cinematographer Lau Hung-chuen, whose consistent attention to color-gel lighting and visual illusion affords it a genuinely supernatural feel. Even when the plot spins its wheels during go-nowhere kendo tournaments, dance parties, and swimming pool horseplay, I was never bored thanks to the beauty & unpredictability of Lau Hung-chuen’s imagery, even when it was objectively, abhorrently disgusting. Usually the “What the fuck am I looking at?” question leaves my mind once I leave the Vinegar Syndrome table, but this year it continues to linger.

-Brandon Ledet

The Overlook Film Festival 2025, Ranked & Reviewed

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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, and memorable horror films & thrillers in the festival’s lineup, many of which don’t otherwise reach local big screens before they get siphoned off to the cultural void of streaming platforms. In recent years, all films programmed have been corralled to the two locations of The Prytania Theatres, which allows you to form a weekend-long bond with fellow movie nerds you 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 or sleepover 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 living room TV.

This was the first year of the festival where I made some time in my schedule for a couple repertory screenings: the Corman-Poe classic The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and a block of David Lynch’s early short films (namely “Sick Men Getting Sick,” “The Grandmother, “The Amputee,” and “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed”). The Vincent Price campiness and costume drama fussiness of House of Usher made for a classically wonderful trip to the Prytania’s original location uptown, but the Lynch shorts made a much more significant impression on me. As a collective, they offered a glimpse into an alternate dimension where Lynch might have stuck to a full career as a Don Hertzfeldt-style outsider animator. More importantly, they also projected most of the scariest images I saw at this year’s festival, especially in the domestic blackbox-theatre artificiality of “The Grandmother.” There’s always something novel about watching challenging art films in a downtown shopping mall like Canal Place, and that Lynch block may have been the most abstract & challenging films ever screened there. It says a lot about Overlook’s sharp, thoughtful curation that they made room for films that academically rigorous alongside feature-length sex-and-fart-joke comedies like Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover (which, I might as well admit, was my favorite of the fest).

I see no point in rating or raking the works of recently fallen legends like Corman & Lynch here, since their contributions to the festival are so deeply engrained in genre cinema history, they’re beyond critique. Instead, I’m listing below the ten new-release feature films I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, 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.

Dead Lover

Grace Glowicki follows up her freak-show stoner comedy Tito with a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback, filtering the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Some of the most gorgeous, perverted images you’ll see all year paired with the kind of juvenile prankster humor that punctuates its punchlines with ADR’d fart noises.  If Glowicki’s filmmaking career doesn’t work out, she can always pivot to becoming the world’s first drag king Crispin Glover impersonator, bless her putrid heart.

The Shrouds

Grief has been the major theme in horror for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought.  Only Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.

Hallow Road

An all-in-a-car, real-time thriller that reimagines 2013’s Locke as a dark fairy tale about irresponsible parenting. Extremely satisfying for anyone who loves to watch Rosamund Pike act her way through a crisis.

Zodiac Killer Project

A self-deprecating meta doc about a true crime dramatization that fell apart in pre-production.  Reminded me of a couple postmodern television series of my youth: Breaking the Magician’s Code – Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed (for spoiling the magic of how the true-crime genre works) and The Soup (for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to Get It).

Cloud

The new Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no not that one, the other one) asks a really scary question: What if online flamewars became physical, literal, and consequential? Turns out they’d still be at least a little bit silly and a lotta bit pathetic.

LifeHack

Screenlife cinema that abandons horror in favor of the heist thriller, following the small-scale, laptop-bound schemes of four teens who steal a Bitcoin fortune from an Elon Musk-type dipshit.  I personally preferred when this still-burgeoning subgenre was fully supernatural, but it’s nice to see a version of it where teens are actually having fun being online (even when in peril).

Predators

A documentary about To Catch a Predator as an aughts-era reality TV phenomenon. Felt like I was going to throw up for the first 40 minutes or so, because I had never seen the show before and wasn’t fully prepared for how deeply evil it is.

Good Boy

You’ve seen a haunted house movie from the POV of a ghost. Now, line up for a haunted house movie kinda-sorta from the POV of a dog! What a time to be alive.

Orang Ikan (Monster Island)

A WWII-set creature feature stranded somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Continues a long tradition of unspoken homoeroticism in wartime dramas, now with a Roger Corman rubber-suited monster as lagniappe.

Redux Redux

A sci-fi revenge thriller about a grieving mother who gets addicted to killing her child’s murderer in multiple alternate dimensions. It brings me no pleasure to act as the logic police, but the temporal shenanigans of this one make no sense. It’s like they wrote it as a time-loop movie and subbed in the word “multi-verse” instead at the last minute without cleaning up the implications of how time passes differently in that genre. The violence is effectively nasty, though, and there are a few tense set-pieces that almost distract from the quibbles.

-Brandon Ledet

House of Usher (1960)

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In this Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, the first character that we see approaches a decrepit old house across a foggy, desolate moor. Upon arrival, they are greeted by a servant who tells them that, although they have come to see their betrothed, they are forbidden from entering the house based on the orders of said betrothed’s protective sibling. They insist upon being allowed entry and, once inside, they are reunited with their love, in spite of the sibling’s interference. From there, they learn that all members of the family who dwell in the house suffer a particular hereditary malady, which includes a tendency toward catalepsy. Beneath the house lies the family crypt, and the newcomer learns about the family’s sordid history. A character has an oversaturated dream and awakes in a start, and the betrothed is buried alive, before rising from their premature grave to wreak havoc on those who have betrayed them. 

Wait, that’s Premature Burial. Except that it’s also a plot description of House of Usher. The unnamed narrator of the original short story is here deemed Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon), and he crosses a boggy tarn amid machined fog to approach the cobwebbed and dilapidated home of Roderick Usher (Vincent Price), who is the next to last surviving member of the Usher dynasty, alongside his sister, Madeline (Myrna Fahey). He is greeted by the sole remaining servant, Bristol (Harry Ellerbe), who at first attempts to refuse him entrance but who is entreatied enough to allow Winthrop to speak with Roderick. The titular house of Usher is a spooky place, bedecked almost entirely in red furnishings—candles, drapes, upholstery, everything—and Winthrop is asked to remove his boots and wear slippers which are provided for him. As the master of the house explains once Winthrop enters his chambers, he is afflicted with an intense sensitivity to all sensory input, keeping the sun out through heavy curtains and insisting that he can hear rats scraping within the stone walls, and the sound of heavy footfall causes him great pain. Winthrop wishes to take Madeline away from this place and back to Boston with him so that the two can get married; Roderick forbids this, telling Winthrop that Madeline has the same maladies as he and that it is his solemn duty to ensure that the Usher bloodline ends with the two of them. Madeline finds them in the middle of this conversation, and she seems delighted to see Winthrop and willing to elope with him, and Roderick thus begrudgingly allows Winthrop to stay.

Damon makes for a very pretty protagonist here, but he’s sorely lacking in screen presence, especially in comparison to Price, who acts circles around the younger man. Likewise, Madeline herself is virtually a non-entity, with Fahey given little to do other than put on pretty dresses and faint. That lack of character depth is particularly unfortunate in a film with only four characters (other than the spectral Ushers of yore who appear in a nightmare sequence), but I did rather like Ellerbe’s nonplussed resignation to the inevitability of the collapse of both the Usher bloodline and home. When giving an extemporaneous interview in one of the extra features on a different MGM Corman/Poe DVD, the director mentioned that his modus operandi when working on these adaptations was to take the story he was “adapting” and treat it as the final act of a standard three act screenplay, and then fill in the first two acts with whatever his writing team could come up with. In this case, that screenwriter was Richard Matheson, for whom I have a lot of fondness as he wrote several great Twilight Zone episodes, the novel I Am Legend, the short story on which The Box was based, and the script for The Night Stalker. There’s nothing wrong with this script, but it’s very clear that, even at a scant eighty minutes, Corman was working to pad out the run time. Thus long walks through hallways run just a little too long to be atmospheric and instead become dull, and this isn’t helped whenever the demands of the story mean that Winthrop and Madeline have the occasional romantic scene that’s so characterless and devoid of any kind of magnetism that the mind wanders. 

That means that much of what there is to enjoy here depends on Price’s performance, which is fortunately rock solid, and that he comes to occupy more and more of the screen time as the film goes on is to its benefit. For the first half or so of the film, his scenes are split up by the aforementioned interminable scenes in which Winthrop confesses his love and Madeline equivocates about running away with him. The best scene the two share is when she leads her beau down into the crypts beneath the house and shows him the coffins of her ancestors, as well as the one awaiting her and which is already inscribed with her name, and even that one ends with the arrival of Roderick to stir things up. Price, meanwhile, delivers his verbose monologues with his usual languid cadence, and does so while looking as pale as a ghost and slightly off as a result of lacking his normal glorious mustache. I particularly loved his recitation of the sins and crimes of Ushers past as he gives a little tour of his macabre portraits of his predecessors, which are garish and strikingly modern, and his gentle reminiscence of the days before his time when the land around the manor was fertile and verdant rather than desolate and barren. Price is also very funny at multiple points in this, especially in places in which the film deviates from the text. In the story, Roderick is a fairly gifted guitar player and the narrator even records the lyrics of one of his impromptu songs in the text, while Price’s Roderick strums aimlessly and tunelessly at a lute, which always sounds awful. I also laughed pretty hard at the moment in which Roderick sees Madeline’s hand twitching within her coffin and he rushes to close it before Winthrop can catch on that Madeline is not truly dead. This too is a change, as Poe’s Roderick truly believed that his sister had passed and only became aware of his error when his sensitive ear heard her screaming in the crypts below to be let out. 

Overall, after now having watched three of these (including Masque of the Red Death), there’s an emerging, discernable formula in what manages to make it into these adaptations. All three films have opening scenes in which a matte painting of a house (or castle) is approached across an in-studio “outdoors.” The lead character then explains their neuroses (or their anti-faith) to the recently arrived naive character, often in a dungeon or a crypt, a character has a trippy color-saturated nightmare, and then we wrap things up with the arrival of mortal or spiritual vengeance. Usher easily outperforms Premature Burial in every one of these individual areas, but it rarely does anything that Masque later imitates better than its successor does. That is to say, despite both of them coming after Usher, Premature Burial is derivative in a way that is detrimental to it, while Masque improves on the already pretty-good Usher, by most metrics. (One place that this outshines it, however, is in Winthrop’s dream sequence, which effectively manages to be both spooky and creepy, and which also manages to capture that feeling we have in dreams where we feel sluggish and ineffectual.) Roderick and Masque’s Prospero are very different characters, as the former is characterized largely by his neurotic behavior and shrinking, withering body language while the latter is a self-assured and assertive man. Nevertheless, one can’t help but see the trial run for later Corman/Price/Poe adaptations to come here, as Price shows his chops by fully committing to every line, delivering each of Roderick’s hypochondriacal and self-pitying remarks with utter conviction, which elevates the whole piece. 

If you are interested, you can read “The Fall of the House of Usher” in its entirety online here. This is a pretty good place to try it out, as I remember barely understanding this particular story when I was in my eighth grade Poe phase. There’s an entire paragraph about all of the literature, art, and religious writings that the narrator and Roderick pore over as their discussions about Roderick’s terrified belief that the house is alive and malevolent, and without the handy footnotes in the version linked above, it’s all but impenetrable. (That’s not to say that the choices of what vocab words to highlight and define in the rest of the text make a lot of sense, as they felt the need to provide meanings for “trepidation” and “pallid” but not “prolixity.”) I rather like it now, especially in its subtleties. The story, like the film, ends with the literal collapse of the Usher’s estate, but before it gets there it incorporates two texts-within-the-text in the forms of Roderick’s song and the fictional chivalric romance Mad Trist, which the narrator reads aloud to Roderick in an attempt to calm the latter’s nerves. That the sounds of a door being kicked down and a large shield falling to the floor which the narrator recites are accompanied by similar sounds elsewhere in the Usher house as Madeline rises from her premature burial (ahem) is a strikingly modern literary device, and the reader gets a real sense of the “irredeemable gloom [hanging] over and [pervading] all.” All that it’s missing is Vincent Price.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Americans Under Siege, With and Without Context

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I recently caught a double feature at my local multiplex of high-style, high-tension thrillers about American soldiers under siege in claustrophobic locations. The stories told in Alex Garland’s Warfare & Ryan Coogler’s Sinners are separated by entire genres, decades, and oceans, and yet they both trap American soldiers in tight-space locales by surrounding them with enemy combatants, whittling down their ranks one corpse at a time. That shared Americans-under-siege dynamic puts them in unlikely conversation with each other as two feature films currently in wide release, but what really makes that conversation interesting is the films’ respective relationships with the cultural & historical context around their sieges. Warfare is so hostile to providing context that it borders on experimentation in narrative form, while Sinners is entirely about context, explaining its own supernatural siege’s relation to America’s past, present, and future. Together, they represent the two extremes of contextual explanation in cinematic storytelling, to the point where considering them together is something that would only occur to you if you happen to write movie reviews and catch them both at the same theatre in a single evening.

Assigning Warfare‘s authorship entirely to Alex Garland is a bit misleading, since he shares directorial credit with former U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. In fact, the real-time, true-story siege thriller is most interesting for the battle between its two directors: one who wants to honor the soldiers depicted “for always answering the call” (Mendoza) and one who wants to examine them & pluck their limbs off like bugs he caught in a jar (Garland). An opening title card explains that the film’s reenactment of a failed 2006 American military mission during the Iraq War was made “using only the memories” of Mendoza’s platoon, who experienced the violent episode first-hand. After the reenactment concludes, surviving members of that platoon are shown visiting the film’s set mid-production to provide their insight, contextualizing the movie as an honorable commemoration of their service & sacrifice during the harshest conditions of war. Only, that final moment is undercut by inclusion of a portrait of the Iraqi family who were also present that day and whose home was invaded & destroyed to fit the American military’s needs & whims. Earlier, when the surviving American soldiers have safely escaped the real-time gunfight in rescue tanks, the camera then lingers on that family appearing puzzled & shellshocked in the rubble of their home, as if they were just invaded by space aliens and not fellow human beings.

Garland & Mendoza’s choice to reenact this one specific mission without explaining the larger context of the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq (under false pretenses of seeking weapons of mass destruction) has been hotly debated as a disingenuous, amoral screenwriting choice among the film’s detractors. From the Iraqi family’s perspective, however, that absence of context only makes the unlawful intrusion even more terrifying & cruel. The family is sleeping in their cozy duplex when Americans kick down their doors and sledgehammer their walls in the middle of the night, inviting enemy fire into the home as a makeshift military base while they’re gathered to huddle on a single bed, powerless. There is no warning or preparation for this invasion, nor is their any communication once the fighting ceases. There’s no context whatsoever, neither for that family nor for the audience. All that’s offered is a dramatic reenactment of the gunfight from the surviving American soldiers’ perspective, with the flattering casting of young Hollywood hunks like Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai to help sweeten the deal for those who “answered the call.” The absence of testimony from the Iraqi citizens invaded, shot at, and displaced by those soldiers’ mission becomes glaring by the final credits, though, and the questions that absence raises hang heavy in the air. I like to think that unease was Garland’s main contribution to the picture but, without context, I can only guess.

The political & historical context behind the all-in-one-day siege plot of Sinners is much easier to parse, since Ryan Coogler is much more upfront about what he’s saying through his art. The director’s fifth feature film (all starring career-long collaborator Michael B. Jordan) and his first not adapted from either pre-existing IP or real-life events, Sinners is set in a 1930s Mississippi overrun with bloodsucking vampires. You wouldn’t guess the vampire part in its first hour, though, which is mostly a getting-the-gang-back-together drama about two former soldiers and current booze-runners (twins, both played by Jordan) who return to their hometown to set up a juke joint for Black patrons during Prohibition. After a long stretch of friendly “Look what the cat dragged in” reunions (featuring consistently dependable character actors like Delroy Lindo & Wunmi Mosaku), the juke joint proves to be a communal success, if not a financial one. Unfortunately, the party gets to be a little too lively, which attracts the attention of white, vampiric interlopers (led by the consistently intense Jack O’Connell). The vampires are particularly attracted to the transcendently beautiful blues music played by the juke joint’s youngest employee, Preacher Boy (newcomer Miles Caton), which introduces an unignorable cultural appropriation metaphor to the vampires’ violent desire to be let inside the party. More practically, it also sours the vibe of the evening by trapping the partygoers in a single location, waiting to be drained of their blood and assimilated into the vampire cult.

Sinners is a truly American horror story, a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Every detail of the story that isn’t character-based drama registers as commentary on American identity: the illusion of freedom, the fixation on money, the compulsory Christianity, the lingering infrastructures of slavery & The Klan. The only positive touchstones of American culture are, in fact, Black culture, as represented in a fish-fry dance party that offers a Mississippi farming community a few hours to cut loose before returning to a life of poverty & backbreaking labor . . . until the party attracts vampiric outsiders who want to claim that culture as their own. In one standout sequence, Coogler extrapolates on this idea to visually & aurally lay out how the Delta blues that Preacher Boy is playing in the juke joint is foundational for all fundamentally American music & pop culture, illustrating its connections to funk, rock, hip-hop, bounce, and beyond in a physical, impossible embodiment of the story’s context. It’s a moment that not only accomplishes everything Baz Lurhman’s Elvis picture failed to do across 150 extra minutes of runtime, but it also positions Sinners as one of the most distinctly American vampire stories ever told on screen (among which I suppose its closest competition is Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark).

The only dramatic context Warfare provides before kicking off its real-time siege sequence is a brief moment where all soldiers involved are watching a pop music video on a shared laptop, laughing at its over-the-top sexuality & pelvic thrusts. There’s just enough time allowed to that scene for the audience to discern a few key soldiers’ personalities through body language & facial expressions, before they’re immediately shown breaking into and destroying a sleeping family’s home. In contrast, Sinners spends the first half of its 140min runtime getting to know the gangsters, players, and partiers it eventually puts under vampiric siege, so that they feel like real people instead of walking, talking metaphors. It’s through that sprawling attention to context that we learn that the booze-running twins who open the Mississippi juke joint were WWI soldiers before they became gangster contemporaries of Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago. Even after the siege story is officially over, Coogler can’t help but pile on more context about cultural vampires & the blues, dragging the setting into contemporary times with a surprise guest appearance by blues legend Buddy Guy. Normally, I would say less is more when it comes to a movie explaining its own themes & context, but Coogler overcommits to those explanations to the point of academic scholarship, while still managing to deliver a fun & sexy vampire movie in the process. Meanwhile, Warfare‘s deliberate aversion to context threatens to implode the entire project, with only a few stray shots of Americans viewed from an outsider’s perspective affording it any sense of artistic or political purpose.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Junk Head (2017)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Takahide Hori’s stop-motion-animated nightmare comedy Junk Head (2017).

00:00 Welcome

03:55 Vampire Hunter D (1985)
07:07 Casino (1995)
15:31 Deadwood – The Movie (2019)
22:30 The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)
38:17 The Conformist (1970)
42:32 Times Square (1980)
48:56 Devil Fetus (1982)
55:38 Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

1:01:21 Junk Head (2017)

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

The True-Crime Horrors of The Overlook Film Festival

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The scariest films I saw at this year’s Overlook Film Festival featured none of the ghouls, ghosts, goblins, demons, and vampires that typically populate the screen at the horror-leaning genre fest. I was mostly scared by the dark-sided media consumption habits of my fellow human beings, some of whom were in the audience of the very same theater as me. Personally, I can watch supernatural evil illustrated on the screen all day without being emotionally affected by the darkness & cruelty depicted, but when it comes to turning true-crime documentation of real-world evil into passive, consumptive entertainment, my heart sinks in my chest. True crime documentaries have recently become a hugely popular micro-industry, with a massive audience second-screening 10-hour miniseries about heinous murder sprees while eating dinner & folding laundry, as if they were half-listening to episodes of The Office or Friends. Something about that passive, disaffected viewing habit is even more disturbing than the crimes being dramatized for mass entertainment (and for easy, routine streaming-service profit). So, it’s appropriate that two of the documentary selections at this year’s Overlook focused on general audiences’ insatiable true-crime appetite from a critical distance, asking how, exactly, did we allow our formulaic background entertainment to get this fucked up?

Sometimes, you need a little distance to recognize just how rotted things have gotten. David Osit’s documentary Predators profiles the aughts-era true crime series To Catch a Predator as a reality-TV phenomenon in which Dateline NBC anchor Chris Hansen baited online child-molesters from behind their keyboards to stage sensational on-camera confrontations in the meat space, to great financial success. Deploying “decoy” actors who pretended to be underage, the show would then interview the titular predators in the lowest moment of their lives, watching them to beg for mercy & therapy before promptly being arrested by local cops. I remember finding this premise and the show’s success too grotesque to stomach as a teenager when it first aired, so I spent the first 40 minutes or so of Predators fighting back the urge to vomit, confronted with how deeply evil it was in practice after only being aware of it in the abstract. No one in the To Catch a Predator production—Chris Hansen included—cared about the children they were supposedly protecting by luring these men to a bait house. The show is a seasons-long ratings stunt meant to hook & shock an audience by tapping into our animalistic impulses for violent vengeance. Its legacy is not in making the streets safer; it’s in prompting one of its targets to commit suicide during a taping and in inspiring dipshit influencers to stage their own D.I.Y. versions of the show on YouTube & TikTok, each with their own brand-conscious catchphrases & subscription models. Osit eventually wrestles with his personal connection to the show and how his young mind was shaped by it while it initially aired, but I mostly walked away disgusted with the broader, mainstream audience that made it a hit in the first place.

Charlie Shackleton’s self-deprecating meta documentary Zodiac Killer Project is much more current and much more conceptual in its own examination of true-crime cinema’s popularity. Shackleton’s original pitch was to adapt a book about an unprovable theory on the identity of the titular serial killer into a generic true-crime miniseries, but the rights for the adaptation were pulled at the last minute before production, so he couldn’t legally complete it. Instead, he’s made a movie about what he would have done if he had maintained those rights, breaking down the tropes, rhythms, and attention-grabbing tactics of a formulaic true-crime documentary as he outlines the incomplete project. He illustrates this game plan through four rigidly segmented visual approaches that afford the film a kind of academic distance from the typical straight-to-streaming docs it satirizes. In one approach, he narrates the scenes he cannot legally film over celluloid images of empty Californian landscapes, slowly zooming in on minor background details whenever he gets wrapped up in the heat of the story. In another, he illustrates individual images from that story with “evocative B-roll” in a purposefully artificial sound stage environment, mimicking Errol Morris’s pioneering true-crime doc The Thin Blue Line as it’s been diluted through countless reiterations. He’s also often shown in the recording booth as he’s being interviewed by an off-screen collaborator, making all of this observation & deconstruction of the true crime genre sound casually improvised, as if it’s occurring to him in real time. In the most important approach, he proves his point by inserting scenes from the made-for-Netflix true crime docs he’s describing in a YouTube video essay presentation, demonstrating that he clearly knows what he’s talking about as a self-critical fan of the genre.

Zodiac Killer Project reminded me of a couple post-modern television series I did watch in the early 2000s, while avoiding the amoral cultural rot of shows like To Catch a Predator. I’m thinking of Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed—for how it spoils the magic of how the true crime genre works its audience—and The Soup, for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to get it. Even when breaking down the laziest & evilest aspects of the genre in real time, however, you get the sense that Charlie Shackleton is still a little bummed that he didn’t get to complete his formulaic streaming-service doc as originally conceived. His mourning the loss of that work is even tied to his realization that so many fewer people are going to watch this artful, academic documentary than the audience that would have auto-played his formulaic Netflix slop, if completed. Indeed, only a miniscule fraction of the audience who watched To Catch a Predator as it originally aired are going to reckon with the moral implications of that mass-entertainment character blemish as examined in its post-mortem doc Predators. Hell, I’m sure David Osit would even settle for a fraction of the still-watching audience commanded by micro YouTube celebrity Skeet Hansen, who lamely punctuates his Chris Hansen-impersonating predator exposures with the catchphrase “You’ve just been Skeeted.” The scariest aspect of all of this is how little anyone gives a shit about the exploitation of real-life violence, suffering, and abuse that provides the background noise to our absent-minded chores & scrolling; it’s all comfort watching. The monsters are the audience.

-Brandon Ledet