As it has since 2018, despite being interrupted by the pandemic, the Overlook Film Festival returned to New Orleans for a four-day celebration of all things horror. To be fair, America’s most haunted city probably always looks like a horror film festival in town. From the dungeons-turned-dive bars to Anne Rice vampire tours, the city’s obsession with the macabre is palpable on every street corner. Take a haunted pub crawl, and the tour guide will tell you the city’s ghosts are the result of centuries of trauma, from slavery, from the Great New Orleans Fire, and from the uncontrollable masses that come in for Mardi Gras and leave in a body bag—or, at least, with a killer hangover. The only difference is when Overlook’s in town, the Boulet Brothers slam in the back of their Dragula at the front of a second line parade.
Photo: Matt Schimkowitz
The excitement of the opening night festivities, which included a drag show from the Boulets, carried throughout the weekend. It climaxed with Overlook’s closing night screening of Clown In A Cornfield (B-). A raucous crowd of horror lovers wearing their best Killer Klowns From Outer Space T-shirts crammed into the Prytania Theatre, a cozy 100-year-old single-screen movie house, for Eli Craig’s third feature, and were treated to a surprisingly funny slasher.
Based on a series of young adult novels by Adam Caesare, Craig’s adaptation takes a hard-R approach to the material. Following her mother’s death, Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas) and her doctor father (Aaron Abrams) move from Philadelphia to the decaying town of Kettle Springs, Missouri. Once the corn syrup capital of the Midwest, Kettle Springs has fallen on hard times since the old Baypen syrup factory burned down, forcing most of its residents into the unemployment line. The town’s funereal air leaves the local teens with little to do besides make short YouTube slasher videos starring Frendo the Clown, the company’s out-of-work mascot. So when actual murders start cropping up around town, Sheriff Dunne (Will Sasso) and Mayor Arthur Hill (Kevin Durand) pin the murders on Quinn’s new friends, Cole (Carson MacCormac) and Janet (Cassandra Potenza).
After skewering the genre with his sideways slasher Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, here Craig directs his most conventional slasher to date. But even though it’s played more like a Dimension-era hack-’em-up, with big action scenes and heavy gore, Craig and co-writer Carter Blanchard find plenty of places to indulge their sense of humor. At its best, Clown teases the audience around what is a real murder and what is just another video, sometimes telling that what’s on-screen is fake while still mining a scare anyway. But the humor proves more successful than the horror, with the most memorable elements being those times when the cast punctures scenes with their knowledge of scary movies. Clown rarely ceases to entertain, even though one can spot the ending from a mile away. Furthermore, it offers enough thematic and satirical resonance about the generational divide and mid-American rot to make it a cut above the clown car of circus-themed horror that’s been driving around Hollywood for the last decade or so.
The fun of Clown In A Cornfield gave way to the emotional terrorism of Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy (A-). Perhaps I wasn’t prepared for how strenuous of an ordeal watching a haunted house movie from the dog’s perspective would be. As soon as the camera lands on Indy (played by the director’s actual pup), the urge to protect this little guy at all costs begins to grow. But this film isn’t just a clever conceit or a way to poke at one of cinema’s greatest taboos. Good Boy gets into the dog’s head and evokes the confusion, worry, and stress of an animal sensing a threat outside its human’s purview.
Shot from about 19 inches off the ground, Good Boy follows Indy as he moves with his sickly human Todd (a faceless performance by Leonberg and co-producer Kari Fischer and voiced by Shane Jensen) to a cabin in the woods. Because we’re locked into Indy’s perspective, we don’t know what’s wrong with Todd exactly, but we gather that he received a severe diagnosis, sending him out to the sticks. Mapping a ghost story onto the canine ability to sense illness in humans and spirits in spaces, Good Boy tests the audience’s stomach around how long they can stand dog endangerment. Leonberg says he based the film on the trope of the animals always being the first to know what’s really going on in horror, often barking at an unwelcome offender and paying the price (see: Halloween). And he achieves a technical marvel in his 75-minute first feature, generating both genuine scares and deep stakes. It might be a cheat code to get us on the hero’s side, but Leonberg finds remarkable depth in his animal-based conceit, one that becomes a clear and devastating metaphor.
Going from good boys to chain saws, Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest documentary, Chain Reactions (C+), offered a distinct change of pace from many other festival titles—though there were a few other documentaries represented, including Sundance films Predators and Zodiac Killer Project. An improvement on Lynch/Oz, Philippe’s previous essay film, Chain Reactions takes in five perspectives on Tobe Hooper’s immortal Texas Chain Saw Massacre. With interviews from Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Karyn Kusama, and more, Chain Reactions looks at the influence and persistence of the first family of cannibal cinema.
Spread across five chapters, one for each of the film’s interview subjects, Chain Reactions follows their lifelong obsession with the film. In the film’s most indelible moment, Miike tells of a fateful trip to see City Lights at the theater. When the Charlie Chaplin film sold out, Miike bought a ticket for Texas Chain Saw, setting him on a course to change horror movies forever with his extreme genre entries Audition and Ichi The Killer. Others, like Australian critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, explore how the reproduction of the film, particularly the yellow-tinged and heavily distorted VHS version that proliferated in Australia, connects Hooper’s film to the art and exploitation cinema of Peter Weir and Peter Jackson. Chain Reactions isn’t reinventing the chain saw. It offers several interesting and entertaining readings of the text and makes a strong case for what is already considered one of the most revered movies ever, but it would’ve made a better Blu-ray special feature than a standalone release.
Shorts
In addition to the dozen or so features I watched at Overlook, I saw several shorts by up-and-coming filmmakers, ranging from hilarious to tragic. Here are three worth keeping an eye out for.
Endzgiving (Directed by Tina Carbone)
There was a surge in pandemic-inspired zombie projects this year, and understandably so. One of the best is Endzgiving, a well-played horror comedy set amid the zombie apocalypse that will ring true to anyone who remembers the COVID holidays of yore. When one guest arrives with a fresh bite, the host sets a timer for an hour and hopes to have a nice dinner before they start hungering for brains. Cleverly directed and edited by Tina Carbone, Endzgiving plays up the horror of finding normality in traumatic times, making its point without overdoing it.
Los Muchachos (Directed by Alejandro Artiles)
Zombie attacks are rarely convenient, but they can be downright rude when they arrive the same night a once-in-a-lifetime comet streaks across the sky. In the Spanish short Los Muchachos, this nightmarish scenario plays out for a career-minded astronomer who spends Earth’s final evening monitoring the skies as the undead put teeth to skin. A one-man show from actor Maykol Hernández, the short sees him coming to terms with his decision to work as his wife and son flee the city. Alejandro Artiles finds the tragedy in zombie movies and locks into Hernández’s character as the one night he’s been waiting for becomes the worst of his life.
Destroyer (Directed by Judd Myers)
Judd Myers’ Possession riff Destroyer is as alluring as it is confounding. Like all the greats of cosmic horror, that’s not an insult. It is a slow-moving, atmospheric story about a paranoid and insecure man (Frank Mosley) who believes his girlfriend (Anna Seregina, one of Los Angeles’ best comics in a deathly serious role) is cheating on him. One night, after she leaves for one of her supposed trysts, he follows her to a mysterious house on the edge of town. Revealing what’s inside would ruin the fun, but it’s an ambitious twist that stretches to the cosmos and lingers long after the 20-minute runtime concludes.
