The Overlook Film Festival is BACK in New Orleans and bringing with it the widest swatch of goopy, gorey, sickening, and enriching cinema you’re sure to see this year. With dozens of film screenings and live events spread across the next four days, horror fans are feasting on new and undiscovered delights of murder and mayhem most macabre.
Let’s get a ROUND-UP going of all the sights and frights I’ve had the pleasure to see so far!
ABRAHAM’S BOYS
Natasha Kermani | 2025 | USA | 89 min
There aren’t many texts as fertile for reinvention and interpretation as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In the last couple of years alone, we’ve gotten “Renfield”, “The Last Voyage of the Demeter”, and most recently “Nosferatu”; all spilling a new vein from Stoker’s original story while retaining their own fidelity to the source material. “Abraham’s Boys”, based on the short story by Joe Hill, takes a different tact than usual. While most Dracula side quests find ways of unleashing The Count on some other population, or in some other time period, the central threat at the core of “Abraham’s Boys” isn’t as overt as vampire bats or legions of rats, it is the corrosive, gnawing certainty of a child who believes their parent might be a monster.
Crafted with adept unease by writer/director Natasha Kermani, “Abraham’s Boys” trades the lamplight of London in the late 1890s for the harsh sun of Southern California in 1915, where noted occultist and Dracula slayer Abraham Van Helsing (Titus Welliver) has crafted a quiet life for his wife Mina (Jocelin Donahue) and two sons, (Judah Mackey and Brady Hepner). Van Helsing, ever-vigilant, knows that the threat of the vampire is ever at hand and has continued his bloody work for decades. Now, it is time to pass that legacy to his sons, sons who have themselves never seen any evidence of vampires even existing and are increasingly concerned that their father might be insane.
Which is simpler to consider: that vampires are real or that your father is a murdering madman? Such is the conundrum at the core of “Abraham’s Boys”, a film with more than a few similarities to Bill Paxton’s “Frailty” that might take a while to get the blood pumping but surely delivers the decapitatory goods once it does.
IT ENDS
Alexander Ullom | 2024 | USA | 87 min
There’s a part in Stephen King’s short story “The Jaunt” where the government tests newfound teleportation technology on a death row inmate. If he survives the process, he’ll be a free man. If he doesn’t, them’s the breaks. Predictably, once the man steps into the portal on one end and emerges through the other, barely a second has passed, and yet he seems decades older, centuries even. “It’s forever in there”, he croaks before dying on the spot.
I was thinking a lot about “The Jaunt” during “It Ends”, a fantastic piece of experiential, borderline minimalist, existential terror that, to my reading, gives literal manifestation to the long winding road of existence stretched onward into forever. A labor of love from writer/director Alex Ullom, crafted over the course of six years, “It Ends” takes audiences on a never-ending road trip when four estranged friends take the wrong turn down a back country road and find there is no turn-off to be found. The road just goes on, without any end in sight. Initial desperation to understand the phenomena turns to sedation, panic, spiritual crisis, and ultimately acceptance over the hundreds of thousands of miles traversed by our wayward travelers.
There is real magic when a movie can conjure universes of torment and horror from a simple empty road or ponder the endless flow of time in flashes of asphalt speeding past in a blur. But the core at the heart of “It Ends” is the unknowability of what lies down the road. Is it a destination or simply more journey? Endless, boundless journey. There’s something touching about the final moments when the title becomes literal in the most upsetting and profound way. After endless miles, we are left with the conclusion we were promised from the title card onward; the conclusion we are all promised from the moment we open our eyes into an alien world we were unwillingly dragged into. It ends. It always ends. Maybe the best we can do is enjoy the journey because, like another poor soul from Stephen King’s “The Jaunt” explains, “it’s longer than you think.”
“It Ends” is playing:
Sunday, April 6th, 12:10 PM, Prytania Theatres at Canal Place
LIFEHACK
Ronan Corrigan | 2025 | United Kingdom | 97 min
It’s nice when Overlook spreads its wings a bit and branches beyond the narrow confines of horror, especially when it’s something as wholly entertaining as “Life Hack”.
Hailing from the UK, this Gen-Z screen-life heist thriller, where everything we see is either shown in Zoom windows, video game streams, or CC TV cameras, side steps the limitations of this incredibly narrow sub-genre to find wholly entertaining and novel ways to dramatize the frantic experience of living and communicating almost exclusively online. “Life Hack” follows a band of teen “hackers”, who appropriately refer to themselves as “The Loser’s Club”, who get their kicks spam bombing and generally tormenting bad actors on the internet until they discover the opportunity of a lifetime; to anonymously scam an “Elon Musk” esque tech demagogue out of twenty-five million dollars in crypto. Our four teen heroes, Georgie Farmer, Yasmin Finney, Roman Hayeck-Green, and James Scholtz, are chaotic while remaining endearing and sweet in their devotion to each other, secure in their naive insistence to outsmart a world that has stacked the deck against them. From an early montage showcasing how this crew met and bonded over the internet onward, it is their friendship that most hangs in the balance as zero hour for the audacious heist draws ever closer. To that end, Ronan Corrigan expertly keeps the audience abreast of the manner and fashion of the heist at all times; ever allowing us to know what SHOULD happen so that when everything inevitably goes wrong we’re locked into the chaos with our characters, something most movies of this ilk that aren’t “Ocean’s Eleven” fail to accomplish. To place “Life Hack” within that lineage, I feel, is more than warranted.
A maximalist piece of genre innovation, Life Hack” feels like a real evolution for these kinds of films, expanding the language of “Screen Time” cinema into new and exciting frontiers. See this small screen flick on the biggest screen you can.
“Life Hack” is playing:
Sunday, April 6th, 2:55 PM, Prytania Theatres at Canal Place
DEAD LOVER
Grace Glowicki | 2025 | Canada | 79 min
A film that announces itself as something wholly original, delightful, and disgusting from frame one, “Dead Lover” is precisely the kind of movie that horror film festivals are all about. A black box fever dream that feels as if John Waters directed the fantasy sequence from “Lisa Frankenstein,” “Dead Lover” follows the unnaturally wholesome story of a young gravedigger who pines to the moon for a lover to sweep her off her feet even though she ever reeks of the dead and damned. A film whose ingenuity I can only equate to last year’s sublime “Hundreds of Beavers,” “Dead Lover” holds audiences in a spell of expressionism that is wholly its own, jet-fueled by the giddiness of the film’s small cast who lovingly craft an experience as fully realized as any Hollywood blockbuster, just with more spit, goo, and whimsy.
“Dead Lover” is certainly an early contender for my favorite flick of the fest!
“Dead Lover” is playing:
THE TRUE BEAUTY OF BEING BITTEN BY A TICK
Pete Ohs | 2025 | USA | 82 min
In the aftermath of a tragic loss, a woman (Zoe Chao) visits her former lover in “the country” for some tranquility and healing, only to discover something sinister hiding behind the beatific calm of the refurbished antiquated homes and tick-infested fields. A disquieting movie that feels like biting into a living worm in your fresh produce from the farmer’s market, “Tick” makes great use of space and silence, entombing us in our lead character’s paranoia as the niceties of friends both old and new are shown to be if not false, at least calculated.
A true testament to what great acting and a simple, upsetting concept can create if given the patience, “Tick” is borderline parasitic with its lingering aftereffects, sticky and yet somehow beautiful.
“The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick” is playing:
THE SHROUDS
David Cronenberg | 2024 | France, Canada | 119 min
A chilly picture of hot-blooded passion and the invasive nature of decay, the legendary filmmaker David Cronenberg (“The Fly,” “Videodrome”) cobbles his latest from the aftermath of his own wife’s death and creates something hopeful and despondent in equal measure. Starring Vincent Cassel (“Black Swan”), the film follows a widower who has turned his morbid obsession with crawling into the grave with his long-dead wife into an innovative business of “Smart Graves” where mourners can watch their loved ones rot in real time. Cronenberg is at his best when the Venn diagram of death, technology, and sex form a morbid circle. “The Shrouds” fits squarely within that dynamic with dual supporting roles from Diane Kruger (“Inglorious Bastards”) and a fantastically sniveling Guy Pearce (“The Brutalist”). Much like the spectral tech robes that enclose the deceased, “The Shrouds” knows that the creeping dread of love long lost is all-encompassing, suffocating, and far more disturbing than any literal desecration of the flesh, either living or dead.
With the old masters shedding this mortal coil in ever-frequent bursts, we are profoundly lucky to live in a world where Cronenberg can casually drop something this weird, heartfelt, and entertaining.
“The Shrouds” is playing:
THE SPIRIT OF HALLOWEENTOWN
Brett Whitcomb & Bradford Thomason | 2024 | USA | 91 min
What I imagined would be a glowing retrospective of a perennial, Millennial classic presents as something far more introspective and challenging with “The Spirit of Halloweentown”, a fascinating journey into the day-to-day life of living in a place that has embraced Halloween as its identity. Featuring a half dozen residents of St. Helens, Oregon, the filming location of the Disney Channel Original Movie “Halloweentown”, we bear witness to the lingering tail of a small town embracing an identity it didn’t seek out and, in some ways, wants to erradiacate. This is a community of folks just trying to find meaning in a chaotic reality; people like the “Queen of Halloweentown” who has watched the yearly event grow from fifty people to fifty thousand, a local queer tavern owner trying to find community in a town where he is inherently othered, a widow whose civic denouncement of “the devil’s holiday” poorly masks her corrosive religious fanaticism, and even a young woman trying to rekindle a sense of artistic freedom by staging a zombie cheerleader routine for the revelers and candy seekers.
A much sadder movie than you’d imagine walking into, The Spirit of Halloweentown” holds within it all the triumphs and challenges of finding joy in the imagined while the real world crumbles down around us. This one hit deeply.
“The Spirit of Halloweentown” is playing:
DROP
Christopher Landon | 2025 | USA | 95 min
The Overlook Film Festival’s opening night movie is always a party, and last night’s screening of Christopher Landon’s latest “Drop” was no exception. A filmmaker known for taking “gimmicky” concepts and spinning them into rollicking, heartfelt horror vehicles (“Happy Death Day”, “Freaky”), Landon takes the idea of a woman plagued by malevolent ‘drops’ on her phone during a first date and expounds it outward into a tension fueled thrill ride crafted around the simple eager desire of two sweethearts sitting across from one another and hoping to find love.
Meghann Fahy (“White Lotus”) holds the beating heart at the center of “Drop” as a formerly abused single Mom being threatened by an invisible force who has her young son hostage. Landon rarely pulls the camera away from her, correctly understanding that the audience is locked in with her throughout. There is pure cinematic joy in the movies technological manipulations and inhernet creativity, yet the true magic of “Drop” is the pure chemistry between Fahy and her beau-to-be Brandon Sklenar (“1923”). For a film so focused on its high concept, Landon lingers on the adorable back-and-forth between Fahy and Sklenar, leaving the audience no choice but to invest as wholly in their burgeoning relationship as in the terror of a single mother desperately trying to save her young son from an invisible abuser.
A wholly satisfying cinematic experience, with a moment in the climax that caused our audience to applaud spontaneously, “Drop” is both intimate and bold in its characterization and bombastic in its thrills. In a perfect world, this one would hit with audiences young and old.
“Drop” is playing:
Fri, Apr 4th, 7:45 PM @ Prytania Theatres at Canal Place D
CHAIN REACTIONS
Alexandre Philippe | 2024 | USA | 103 min
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 stench of stale gasoline. 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.
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 playing:
Check back HERE throughout the weekend for fresh reviews and recommendations all throughout the fest.
Come play!
You’ll be glad you did!
