A festival fit for the spookiest city in the world, The Overlook Film Festival returns to New Orleans on April 3 – 6, bringing with it all the finest frights and sounds horror has to offer. Named for Stephen King’s snowbound haunted hotel from “The Shining”, The Overlook Film Festival has established itself as the premiere name brand for horror cinema in the US, from independent features, studio showcases, and even rollicking retrospectives. No matter what flavor of horror tickles your fancy, you’ll find something to curdle your blood and shiver your spine with Overlook’s curated selection and celebration of the bloodiest, scuzziest, brain-bashing, demon-smashing, and most terrifying tales to make you tremble that the movies have to offer; a festival for the fantastic and the macabre. If horror is your religion, Overlook is one of your high holidays, a time of merriment and dismemberment in equal, bountiful measure.
This year, The Overlook Film Festival is featuring a wide assortment of offerings over its four days, with flickering phantoms and legendary luminaries dazzling rabid audiences both on and off the big screen.
Christopher Landon (“Freaky”, “Happy Death Day”) kicks off the fest by bringing his latest fright flick to the Prytania Theater Uptown: a sky-scraping cat-and-mouse thriller of one woman’s date from hell called “Drop”. Meanwhile, renowned musician and filmmaker Flying Lotus brings a sci-fi psychedelia extravaganza in “Ash” while also curating his own retrospective screening series that includes Robert Zemeckis’s “Death Becomes Her”, “The Descent”, and perhaps David Lynch’s most disturbing film “Lost Highway”. Other notable screenings include a 40th-anniversary showing of Stuart Gordon’s “Re-Animator” with special guest, and horror royalty, Barbara Cramptom, and a 30th-anniversary screening of Ernest Dickerson’s Tales From The Crypt: Demon Knight, featuring perhaps one of the greatest performances in a horror film by Mr. Billy Zane (“Titanic”, “Twin Peaks”).
But that’s just a taste of the 56 films (34 features and 22 shorts) from 15 countries, not to mention twelve live events and four immersive experiences, that are descending upon New Orleans all at once, an embarrassment of once-in-a-lifetime riches for all lovers of movies, spookies, and ookies. Look forward to next week’s blog, where I’ll be reviewing and recommending as many films as I can get my peepers on for all you ghouls and ghosties venturing into the dark. And to kick things off…
CHAIN REACTIONS
Directed by Alexandre Philippe
A foundational text in my cinematic education came in the form of “Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue”, a fantastic little documentary that strove to paint a picture of the horror film as a warped mirror that has reflected American ideals, hypocrisies, and atrocities back at us for over one hundred years. Reading film as literature, as worthy of minute discussion and vivisection, was no surprise to me. Doing so with even the most shocking and upsetting horror films certainly was. I find any film that feels like overhearing a late-night drink between great artists going into the weeds on their favorite movies to be borderline intoxicating. To that end, Alexandre Philippe’s “Chain Reactions” readily became my new favorite fix.
Structured around the remembrances and introspections of five unique artists; Comedian Patton Oswalt (Author of “Silver Screen Fiend”), Filmmaker Takashi Mike (“Audition”), Film Critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (Author of “The Cinema Coven” and “The Giallo Canvas”), Writer Stephen King (Do I really need to list them?), and Filmmaker Karyn Kusama (“Jennifer’s Body”, “The Invitiation”), “Chain Reactions” lays out the sobering case that Tobe Hooper’s sun sick video nasty “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is not just a bedrock film to each artist’s own development, but is one of the great pieces of American art ever shorn from the bloated carcass of polite society. Unspooled through the prism of the filmmakers’ and writers’ first time seeing “TCSM”, each artist takes a scalpel to their own impressions of the film, digging through the miasma of memory and revealing the long, lingering tail that great filmmaking can leave on our souls, not unlike the smell of stale gasoline or the stench of rotting meat in a long abandoned abattoir. Often, Alexandre Philippe uses the artist’s remembrances of other films such as “Nosferatu” or “The Picnic at Hanging Rock” as sister stories worthy of counter-dissection, using one film to make the case for another in a Jacob’s Ladder of dueling criticism and appreciation, a veritable Rocky Road of my all time favorite flavors. As a rapt audience member, “Chain Reactions” sprinted by, with each of the speakers spinning an ever-enthralling web that entangled their own life experiences with their lasting impressions of Hooper’s masterpiece. I could have watched for hours more.
It’s no secret that “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is my favorite movie of all time, and I’ll take any opportunity to espouse its glory on this very blog. But what “Chain Reactions” gets to the heart of through its conversational structure, both free-wheeling yet insightful, is that great art doesn’t explode fully formed from the head of Hooper. It has roots in the art both before it and after, with each generation’s artists taking the mantle of divine storytellers, passing down respun legends and ghost stories to better understand a legacy of destruction and pain. I left “Chain Reactions” with a fresh stack of films I need to watch to further my cinematic education and the overwhelming desire to talk about horror movies until the witching hour dawns. If cinema is a cultural memory, then “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is the nightmare from which we may never wake up from. The very least we can do is commiserate in our shared experience and try to learn something new from the blood the past has let spill.
“Chain Reactions” is showing Thursday, April 3rd (6:45 PM), Sunday, April 6th (5:25 PM), and Tuesday, April 8th (7:00 PM) at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
Learn more about ALL the offerings of the 2025 Overlook Film Festival and get your tickets HERE!
Misericordia
Directed by Alain Guiraudie
Losange Production
Death and love find a home, even in the most beatific of locales, in Alain Guiraudie’s quietly devastating erotic thriller “Misericordia”. A Latin word that means ‘to pity’, “Misericordia” offers a tragedy as deliberate and seemingly natural as blood on the fallen leaves of a forest after a murder. “Misericordia” follows the story of Jérémie, an adrift young man who returns to his hometown to attend a funeral for his former employer, only to linger and entangle his life and desires into the mourning of the dead man’s widow and son. I knew little about this movie before watching it, but found myself enraptured with its steady, nearly comic presentation of the small town of Saint-Martial and the quiet, mushroom-picking lifestyle of its locals. It is soon clear that Jérémie, while an outsider, loved his former employer beyond simple affection and mourns in his own lingering way. However, the man’s son Vincent, boorish and overly protective of his mother, believes Jérémie’s intentions to be more parasitic and malevolent, leading to bloody and ultimately pitiful consequences.
That there is bloodshed in “Misericordia” is merely a leaping-off point for the film’s unique spell as the aftermath of violence creates the circumstances for sad people to find solace in secrets and each other. “I don’t want to be alone,” several characters relate throughout the film, and truly, is there any creature more deserving of grace than one in the aftermath of loss? The spiraling interweb of love, desire, and comfort spun by “Misericordia” grows on you like mushrooms from the rotted remains of a poorly buried body, yet offers a flavor unique to itself and desirable to the soul. Fungus, much like ourselves, can only exist within the presence of death in some form, with its black cloud as natural and ambivalent to existence as a kind word from a friend or the blind rage of fratricide. As one character, a local priest with a hidden agenda, opines to Jérémie, “The world is going to the dogs. But that doesn’t stop people going to the movies.” Thank God for that.
“Misericordia” is the kind of oddball cinema Americans rarely get on the big screen, a story that sticks like sweat and leaves a lingering taste in one’s mouth. Check it out and see if you can untangle its moral web, but don’t be surprised if you find the pursuit fruitless, yet satisfying all the same.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Misericordia” is playing at The Broad Theater.
