The Overlook Film Festival 2026 has come and gone, leaving in its wake four days of ghastly celebrations of all things horror. What has become a yearly pilgrimage for those eager to witness everything gory, goopy, and scary, a weekend at Overlook brings with it a wide swath of filmmaking voices from around the world. Nowhere else can you find a micro-budget VHS compilation screening two doors down from a multi-million dollar studio feature, or giddily watch as one of the most celebrated independent filmmakers of all time unfurls his thirty years in the making Monster Quadrilogy over the course of a single day. There is love for cinema seeping through the gaping wounds of each and every film, panel, and immersive experience, the kind that is only born from a horror community as wholesome as it is horrid; a graveyard jamboree in the heart of New Orleans.
While it is impossible to have watched every film featured this year, here’s what I saw: the good, the grim, and the otherworldly.
Buffet Infinity
You have never seen a movie quite like Simon Glassman’s “Buffet Infinity”, though its influences are easily traced. Structured around the rat-a-tat nature of flipping channels in the back reaches of zombie cable networks, Glassman’s metaphysical, track line-streaked tale of cosmic horror overtaking a small town has its roots in the skits of Canadian comedy institution “SCTV”, with a dash of horror classics like “GhostWatch” also thrown in for good measure. A film entirely made up of commercials for a single small town; from the local sandwich shop, to the mattress store, and a new restaurant called “Buffet Infinity”, we are able to witness the slow creep of something insidious slinking its way into the minds, and TV sets, of the populace. As funny as it is unsettling, the film could easily be brushed off as little more than a curiosity; a genre exercise instead of something more impactful, though I beg to differ.
While business owners and residents of this small town begin to go missing, the titular Buffet Infinity, a Golden Corral-style eatery that seems to be swallowing up the surrounding businesses and evolving to become some monolithic entity, leads a charge of other small businesses in an effort to quell the uprising of concerned locals. Commercials paid for by a coalition of hapless small business owners rising against the “tyranny” of the city council would be hilarious if they didn’t feel just a twinge too real for their own good. Ignore your eyes and ears, the commercials tell us. Simply consume. Do not worry about your neighbors being taken; they probably did something to deserve it. Continue feeding your minds into the wood chipper of media to better fill the insatiable hunger of commerce.
There is an inherent remove brought about by a life lived through screens; we witness it every day. We see people, but we don’t actually see them; we see images of them and believe that they are real. It’s funny how sometimes the silliest of art can speak the loudest, a Trojan Horse built on goofy antics and laughter that holds an audience’s feet to the fire of their own impending destruction, forcing them to contend with its ramifications. “Buffet Infinity” weaponizes not only the distance wrought by existence via the cold blankness of a TV screen, but also the easy manipulation of regular people by powers of unimaginable resource lying long and loud enough, so that they believe that nothing can hurt them and that nothing is wrong, when in fact everything is wrong.
There’s a special sauce that simmers behind the innate absurdity of “Buffet Infinity”, one that makes that black screen feel more and more like a mirror the further you stare into it’s abyss.
American Dollhouse
John Valley’s “American Dollhouse” might very well be my favorite film of the festival. As a grimy, low-budget, Christmas-time blood fest that shares more than a bit of DNA with the bleak Americana of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”, “American Dollhouse” lays on the unease and amplifies it to a brain bashing degree in short order; taking what feels like an artful, if tempered, stalker story and launching it into the depths of madness born from the scars parents inflict upon their children. A movie about “trauma”, though not in the manner often mocked in modern horror, what Valley is getting at is harder to pick out of the inner wedges of your fingernails, a feeling that someone might always be watching from outside your window, and you will never know what chasms they’ve had burrowed into the deep hollows behind their eyes.
“American Dollhouse” follows Sarah (Hailley Lauren), a punk rock burnout who has inherited her deceased mother’s home against the best wishes of her put-together, bespectacled brother (Richard C. Jones). There are ghosts that haunt the back corridors of this home, formed from lies, death, and disbelief. Sarah hopes to conquer those skeletons in her closet and maybe regain a life she once lost as a child in this house. Yet she can’t quite shake the feeling that someone is watching through the wide windows that look out into her yard. As it turns out, there is. Sandy (Kelsey Pribilski) is watching her, a slouched and dour-looking woman in a pink tracksuit who seems eager, nay desperate, for Sarah to like her. You see, Sandy says that Sarah looks like her long-dead mother, who died in a self-started fire that killed everyone in their family. Sarah was the one survivor and lives in the same house where it happened. Wanting nothing to do with this stalking weirdo, Sarah tells Sandy to leave her alone, finding solace in the local pizza guy and her friend from the city. But…there’s more behind Sandy’s eyes than pain and loss. There is purpose and an insatiable need, much like Sarah, to reclaim a youth left immolated by tragedy. Sarah doesn’t know who she’s messing with, but she will, once she herself witnesses what lies behind the boarded-up windows of Sandy’s childhood home.
The less said about the mid-point turn and climax of “American Dollhouse,” the better, but rest assured that fans of Tobe Hooper’s films, and especially “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2,” will delight in the mean bloody final act that holds within its gore glee, a lingering stench of a star spangled dream left to rot in a shallow grave. We all hope to combat the ills of our past, to face them head on and, perhaps, reclaim some small bit of ourselves in the process. But beyond the bounds of time, that’s where the goblins lurk; skulking in their own filth, waiting for the unsuspecting to tread where they do not belong. Sadly for Sarah, the path she tread was one bookended by fire and blood, with nowhere else but to flee but home.
Trauma, or Monsters All
Larry Fessenden’s “Trauma or Monsters All” is a unique creation; a culmination of three decades of quietly constructing a private universe of monsters ripped from the pages of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” that have taken root within the unique sensibilities of a filmmaker whose style belies easy explanation. As part four of his self styled “Quadrilogy”, the previous entries being “Habit”, “Depraved”, “Black Out”, Fessenden continues his streak of incepting his monster-verse with the prejudices and joys of reality; painting a canvas where monsters are merely a reflection of the ills that cannibalize polite society and a symptom of a much larger, more corrosive evil.
Seen in a four-movie marathon on the final day of the festival, Fessenden’s films are idiosyncratic in the sense that they are crafted for the delights of one person, himself. His monster movies are political; delving into the malaise of 90’s pre-war sludge, the after effects of the War on Terror upon a good doctor gone mad, and the ills of a community that prefers to blame an immigrant scapegoat instead of an American werewolf. For “Trauma or Monsters All”, Fessenden brings each of these flavors in red, white, and blue and stirs them together into a pestilence of kaleidoscopic sludge, tying the strings of history with fingers that touch the life of George Washington Carver, the experience of being the one black person in a city of suspicious whites, and even the value of eternal life if it is meant to be spent killing. Fessenden is eager to upend the toybox and smash the typical archetypes to pieces, using their base natures as a jumping-off point for stories that feel less scary than painfully earnest, and perhaps all the more lingering for their eagerness to be so.
While I would not suggest leaping into “Trauma or Monsters All” without priming yourself with the three films previous, I highly recommend slipping headfirst into the soup that Fessenden has served up for horror audiences over the course of a storied career. Here there be monsters, but also so much more.
Hokum
Damian McCarthy’s “Hokum” is a spook house feast, which is not surprising for anyone familiar with his work. His previous film, “Oddity,” is one of the scariest films I have ever seen, with a jump scare that I rank among the most effective and lasting in the genre. Though “Oddity” might be the king of jump scares, “Hokum” is no slouch and actually features a finer story than its predecessor, one as impactful as it is dread-inducing within McCarthy’s nightmare miasma.
Author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) intends to visit the place where his mother and father honeymooned deep in the countryside of Ireland. He finds solace in the same hotel they stayed in, meeting the eclectic staff who seem to believe that a witch lives in the cordoned-off honeymoon suite. An ill-tempered alcoholic, Bauman spends his time swilling whiskey and being rude to those with the poor sense to compliment his books, alienating everyone around him as if eager to be left alone. As it turns out, that’s precisely correct, as the kindly bell boy and bartender are shocked to find him hanging by the neck in his room, near dead. Bauman wakes up weeks later to find that his savior, the bartender Fiona, has gone missing. Feeling a need to repay her kindness to him, Bauman begins to interrogate what might have happened to her, where she could have gone, and what actually happened in the haunted honeymoon suite.
There is little more that I can say about the film without spoiling not just a good story but also several excellent scares. Needless to say, Scott is pitch-perfect as our eager purveyor into the wilds of folklore, hallucination, and witchy business. Left by his lonesome among the dead and the damned for much of the film, his eyes are ours as we are enraputed by an unnatural world of specters who leap and lurk about us. McCarthy, in fine form, finds fruitful scare potential in the faintest hint of light or the teensiest bit of sound from far along a darkened corridor. While jump scares are often cheap, McCarthy seems to have honed the practice into an art form, leaving our audience leaping from their seats and screeching more than a few times. My wife has spent every evening since spooked, even within the comforts of our own home. If that’s not a sterling endorsement, I don’t know what is.
So far as genres go, an alcoholic author stumbling into a hotel that holds a something supernatural secret might be one of my favorites; with notable inclusions to the canon being “The Shining” but also “1408”. Add Hokum to the list and watch it with the lights off if you dare.
The Restoration at Grayson Manor
Glenn McQuaid’s “The Restoration at Grayson Manor” is a delight until it’s a slog; a playfully queer blood bath that soars when it’s allowed to wallow in grotesque tangibility and plummets when tiptoeing too far along the road of CGI-steeped science fiction.
The film follows Chris Colfer as Boyd (“Glee”), a delectably bisexual piano player who delights in bringing back men to his palatial home, to the disdain of his overbearing mother. After a restoration disaster involving a broken pane of glass leaves his hands sliced off at the wrist and his date with a shard in his skull, Boyd becomes bed-bound as his mother hires the finest scientists in the world to not only heal him, but also provide experimental, synthetic hands. Trapped in the one place he would prefer not to be, Boyd is made a victim of his mother’s machinations of sex, companionship, and science to not only coerce him into living the straight and narrow life of his forefathers, but yielding an heir to pass along the family line. While he, his mother, the doctor, and two nurses are trapped in the house, a madness begins to take hold that is only exacerbated when the synthetic hands begin to crawl around the halls with murderous intent, seemingly bidden by Boyd’s own subconscious need to decimate his captors.
A somewhat arch, yet pleasantly so, representation of the worst people you can imagine being stuck in an ancestral home with, “Restoration” thrives when it allows the characters’ desires, both monetary and sexual, to lead them down paths of self-destruction. I could have done without the crawling murder hands, though, but that’s just me.
Drag
Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer’s “Drag” knows well that the key to making a genre film that punches above its weight class is by aiming for the heart. Anyone with siblings knows that sometimes making a brother or sister do the right thing, or even the sane thing, requires them to be yanked and prodded incessantly, kicking and screaming. “Drag” makes this literal, as during a petty robbery, a younger sister (Lucy DeVito) must physically drag her older sibling (Lizzy Caplan), who has thrown out her back mid-crime, from the home of an art-obsessed serial killer before they are discovered.
Bridging the gap between obscene comedy, incessant sibling bickering, and body horror, “Drag” hauls the audience through a squirmy, wild ride that nestles at its core the evisceration and later healing of a lifetime sisterly grudge. Caplan and DeVito make for a fantastically entertaining tag team of snide remarks and bristling resentment, while Stamos is allowed to let his inherent charm run pell-mell into the tropes of a psychopathic killer who brutalizes women for his art. As a locked room, single location thriller, “Drag” is as close to a crowd pleaser as a movie where a woman’s back gets sliced from neck to tail bone by a stray nail in the floor can be. One that, impossibly, also offers a good deal of hope and love to slither from between a smile laced with shattered, bloody teeth.
Obsession
Curry Baker’s “Obsession” is a movie I wish I liked more. Its premise is an interesting one; what if a young man, friend-zoned by his crush, accidentally utilizes a cheap wish-granting tchotchke to make her love him more than anyone else in the world? There are questions worth exploring here. What lies beyond the event horizon of affection? As the soon-to-be supernaturally infatuated Nikki (the incredible Inde Navarrette) tells sad boy Bear (Michael Johnston), there is a distinct difference between love and romance; one that perhaps sad young men are incapable of conceptualizing. This is a movie that, in its most wrenching moments, certainly feels achingly honest about the scars that last from a lifetime spent pining. If only it were equally honest about the real-world harm of a one-sided wish come true, where the sad-eyed “nice guy” is shown to be little more than a Golum-like bottom feeder ready to take advantage of any emotional, or supernatural, opportunity to make themselves feel loved and seen.
Bear wants to tell Nikki how he feels, that he has loved her for their entire friendship. He even practices how to best tell her with his friends. But he can’t make himself do it, either for fear of rejection or from a chronic lack of backbone. Still, almost by accident, he is granted his most desperate wish, that he would become the entire world to Nikki. Suddenly, as if a light switch had been flipped, she is desperate to sleep with him, insatiable in her need to see him and please him. While at first Bear seems suspicious, he is certainly willing to go along with these proceedings; perhaps able to lie to himself that her love was as true as his all along. So he accepts her cuddles and her eager sexual favors, ever ignoring the way she weirdly spider walks against the corners of the bedroom at night and how every once in a while she screams that the person pretending to love him isn’t actually her. All the while, Bear forces himself to believe that things are normal, that she is perhaps having a mental episode, that her love, her obsession, is pure. But we know better, don’t we? And so does he.
This thing, this person, is not Nikki, or certainly not one who is within her own right mind, which makes every action Bear takes not simply one of willful ignorance but one of assault, no less vile than drunkenly forcing oneself on another intoxicated person who doesn’t have the capacity to say no. That he requires her to become a cackling, floor urinating, dead cat eating ghoul to understand this is an inherent failing of the film and of a story that, while eager to bask in the shallows of nihilism, can never find a point for all its perversity. Bear is the villain, that much should be abundantly clear, though I’m not so sure the movie sees things so succinctly as if it frames him instead with a sympathy that he has not earned simply for being a hopeless romantic (i.e., an obsessive).
While “Obsession” offers its fair share of jolts and scares, many clearly cribbed from some of the greatest horror movies of all time, most notably “Get Out”, “Hereditary”, and “The Exorcist”, it’s the smoldering culpability, it’s papering over of violence, physical and psychological, committed against women whose only crime was being nice to man, that keeps it from becoming something more.
Faces of Death
Daniel Goldhaber’s haunting, New Orleans filmed, “Faces of Death” is less a remake of the original movie from 1978, a pseudo-snuff documentary that plagued video stores for decades, than it is a wholly immediate interpretation of a modern mechanized world gone mad with algorithmic zeal, where videos of murder are as commonplace as TikTok dances and just as popular. Growing up in the twenty-first century, death on our screens is not only a regular occurrence but expected, and in that commonality, an emotional remove manifested, one that has, in ways both large and small, desensitized us all to the humanity of violence. You see, Millennials didn’t need a “Faces of Death” to fascinate us; all we had to do was flip up our laptop screens and fall headfirst into a wonderland of blood, exploitation, and degradation. Videos of murders, fatal car accidents, suicides, and self-mutilations were shared for sport, hosted along the fringes of a wild west internet on websites like rotten.com or 4chan. Free from the context of who was being killed or why, literal children were daring themselves to grow desensitized to the horrors of a world merely glimpsed on the nightly news, one click at a time. I remember distinctly being shown by a classmate Saddam Hussein’s execution, taken off a blotchy cell phone video, during an ordinary American History lecture. This was the internet, unregulated and unbound by the guide rails of good taste or sensitivity. Just as generations before us flocked to “Faces of Death”, so did we huddle around school-issued laptops to watch decapitations taking place a thousand miles away. And while the impact of these unholy .mov files on an entire generation can be debated, their effect on not just the making of “Faces of Death (2026)” but our modern media-obsessed culture is undeniable, where you are just as apt to find the video of a dead child half a world away while scrolling as you are an ad for Old Navy.
“Faces of Death (2026)” follows a young woman named Margot (a fantastic Barbie Ferreira) who works a monotonous, mind-numbing day job at a social media start-up as a content moderator. Her job is to scroll through video after video, flagging content deemed inappropriate, ranging from violent threats to advice on how to put on a condom, and moving on to the next one without much thought. Her place is not to judge but to keep the content flowing and engagement up, feeding the gluttonous maw that is the social media industrial complex. But one day, she sees something that she can’t quite shake. A video of a decapitation, or what looks like one. There are mannequins standing around a man shaking on his knees while ominous narration says that this is some kind of ritual from a far-off land. The man begs to be freed before his head is summarily lopped off. If these are special effects, they’re damn good ones. Margot ultimately lets it slide, probably some student film looking for clout. But the videos keep coming, over and over again, until she is certain that she is watching something monstrous. That monster, Arthur, is in fact recreating sequences from “Faces of Death”, yet whereas the original film staged its beheadings, monkey brain feasts, and electrocutions, he’s doing them for real and reaping the rewards of a gore-hungry public in the process.
Holding the center of the film is Barbie Ferreira as a woman haunted by her own tragic past on the internet and desperate to unplug herself from a subculture that nearly ruined her life. Known mostly from her role in “Euphoria”, Barbie captivates from the opening frame of the movie as a character that it is not only easy to care for but also to understand. Her choices throughout, her desperation to find someone who might believe her story of an internet killer, are often counterproductive and actively place her in danger, yet are never misunderstood. This is a caring person looking to perhaps redeem the blood on her hands by any means necessary, whether that be risking her job by sneaking files that are off limits or blindly seeking the assistance of the internet to find the source of the “Faces of Death” killings. Throughout, Barbie’s performance never wavers in its commitment to the tears and the blood, the screaming and the righteous vengeance; crafting a hero that it’s easy to cheer and be concerned for, a potent combination and a key reason for the film’s effectiveness.
On the flip side of the cosmic coin, watching as Arthur, his eyes demonic behind red contact lenses hidden by a silk stocking and white mask, while he stalks and trusses up his performers for their blood drenched finale’s, I was struck with similarities between his sadism and that of other cinematic killers; Dollarhyde from “Manhunter”, Frank Zito in “Maniac, or even Karlheinz Böhm’s voyeuristic camera killer in “Peeping Tom”. There seems to be an artistry to what Arthur is doing, and intent of purpose through his use of “Face of Death”, a catalyst for his crimes and expression. He is essentially remaking the film in his own image, recasting the falsities of the original for a modern audience who respects authenticity. But, while the psychotic fandom of the killers of, say, “Scream (2018) might draw apt comparisons, Arthur is far more complex, more sadistic, and more vain than most psychotic clout-chasing killers of his ilk. In that way, keeping with the harsh reality of Goldhaber and Mazzei’s fantastic screenplay, he is most like internet killers from not too distant past; Elliot Rogers, The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs hammer killers, or even the original school shooters of Columbine. Clout is their nectar, fame is their catalyst, and they will be granted the attention they so desperately require, no matter how many people have to be slaughtered in the process. And slaughter he indeed does, with a brutality that, much like the original “Faces of Death,” does not shy away from the emotional weight that death brings along with it. While many modern horror films have begun to shy away from killing off their casts, Goldhaber and Mazzei embrace the impersonal death of innocents as textually imperative and foundational to the whole point of the movie itself.
“Faces of Death (2026)” is a film that has only grown in my estimation since its credits rolled; a hyper-interpretive, highly thrilling, social media slasher that somehow sidesteps all the tropes you might come to expect from a similar premise. This is not especially surprising, as Goldhaber and Mazzei’s previous films (“Cam” and “How To Blow Up A Pipeline”) are equally as effective in their own introspective ways. For my part, “Faces” is their finest film yet, a slasher born from the empathy of good people and the inherent fascination of school children ignoring class to watch murder videos. Death’s face is ever changing, kaleidoscopic and legion; though I imagine its visage is far more reflective than we might care to admit, our own damnation regurgitated back upon us by our inherent need to gain dominion over our impending demise. It’s human nature, the most deadly face of all.
Until next year, Happy Overlook everybody! Now go out there and watch yourself a horror movie.
You’ll be glad you did.
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