Scary Scenes from the 2024 Overlook Film Festival

This year's installment of the annual horror festival, held each year in New Orleans, offered everything from creepy German resorts to journeys into the dark web to a legendary singer/songwriter.

Evolving from the Stanley Film Festival, an independent horror film festival held for two years in Colorado, the Overlook Film Festival made its proper debut in 2017. The festival’s first year took place at Oregon’s Timberline Lodge, famous to horror fans for its use as the exteriors of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but it moved the next year to New Orleans, where it’s been held ever since (apart from two COVID-19-interrupted years when it partnered with other horror fests as apart of the remote Nightstream event). I was lucky enough to attend that appropriately snowbound and claustrophobic first installment and have wanted to go back ever since, but life kept getting in the way. Until, that is, this year.

From the start, the Overlook has been about more than just horror films, offering immersive experiences and other on-theme events. But because interactive performances might be my ultimate nightmare—the thought of attending a performance of Tony ’n Tina’s Wedding chills me, never mind an event whose performers are actively trying to scare you—I decided to pack in as many movies as I could. Here, too, the Overlook takes a big-tent approach. Where some films I saw squarely fit into the traditional confines of the genre—Killer spiders! Vampires!—many did not, which made for a richer and more compelling fest. At the Overlook in 2024, horror felt like a nebulous sensibility rather than a genre with strict rules.

In whatever form it takes, horror can be a barometer for the times, though the films a single attendee can squeeze in over a long weekend clearly aren’t enough to create an accurate sample size for the fest as a whole, much less the state of horror in 2024. That said, it’s hard not to see some connections, however broad. As I rolled from one screening to another at the Prytania Theatres at Canal Place, the third-floor mall multiplex where the lion's share of the movies screened, I found myself thinking about the common ground between some seemingly disparate films. So what’s scaring, unnerving, upsetting, and otherwise concerning us in 2024? Can any other trends be discerned from the Overlook’s offerings? Here’s what stood out.

Still from Infested (they’re looking at spiders).

Plagues and Pestilence

None of the films I saw made explicit reference to COVID-19, but its echoes could still be felt. As stand-ins for pandemics go, the French thriller Infested proves deadly, mutating spiders work pretty well. The first feature from Sébastien Vanicek, the film depicts the dire consequences visited on the multicultural residents of an apartment building on the outskirts of Paris when Kaleb (Théo Christine) decides to make an unusual addition to his homemade animal sanctuary. Nothing good comes of it, of course, and Vanicek smartly spends time developing the film’s characters before letting loose the spiders. Though the finale gets a bit chaotic, the well-staged action keeps the scares coming and the scenario allows the film to explore both the confinement of lockdowns and the abuses visited by the police on immigrants and other less privileged members of French society.

In John Rosman’s New Life, another first feature, Haley Erin plays Jessica, a woman on the run from government agents for reasons that only become apparent as the film goes along. Rosman parallels her flight with scenes of her no-nonsense pursuer Elsa (Sonya Walger, good as always) attempting to track her down while adjusting to the early stages of ALS. Playing a bit like a cross between The Fugitive and the early chapters of The Stand, the film freely mixes genres and takes a while to reveal why it would end up in a horror festival in the first place. Though a bit poky at times, it’s a promising and heartfelt first effort.

Still from Red Rooms (you don’t want to know what she’s looking at).

Who Needs Genres?

Like New Life, Michael Felker’s Things Will Be Different has a few horrific elements without really being a horror movie. With notes of Primer and Looper, Felker’s feature debut (yes, there was a lot of emerging talent at the fest this year), follows a pair of siblings (Adam David Thompson and Riley Dandy) as they hide out after stealing a massive sum of money. Their shelter of choice? A deserted farmhouse somewhere in the not-so-distant past. What could go wrong? A lot, as it turns out. Felker fills the film with compelling ideas and neat tricks, like a handheld cassette recorder that allows the characters to communicate across the years, though it feels like some of those concepts get away from the film as it goes along. Still, the clever touches are quite memorable, like one sibling’s creeping madness as they try to piece together clues as to where and when they are, and Felker makes good use of the single location where most of the action takes place.

French-Canadian director Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms starts as a courtroom drama before evolving into a psychological thriller as disturbing as any of the more overtly horrific Overlook offerings I saw. Juliette Gariépy plays Kelly-Anne, a model with an “edgy” image who’s fixated on the trial of a man accused of torturing and killing young teen girls for the amusement of the highest bidder in online dark web “red rooms.” How fixated? As the film opens, she’s begun sleeping in an alley near the courtroom in order to score a seat at the trial each day. Plante balances the lurid material with a cool, controlled approach, establishing early on that the film won’t show us anything overly graphic except in fleeting glimpses, then rattling viewers in ways that burrow deeper than mere shocks. It’s one of the fest’s true standouts.

Similarly, Abigail, a new film from the team known as Radio Silence (Ready or Not, the last couple of Scream movies), begins as a Tarantino-inflected heist movie in which a group of kidnappers (played by Melissa Herrera, Dan Stevens, and the late Angus Cloud, among others) who don’t know each other’s names make away with Abigail (Alisha Weir), the ballerina daughter of a wealthy man. There’s a twist, however, one half-spoiled by the marketing material (and thoroughly spoiled by the film’s original name and origins as part of Universal’s interest in its classic monster films). Alternately clever and exhausting, it’s a go-for-broke effort that begins in quips before giving way to a flood of bodily fluids.

What business did a new short from Don Hertzfeldt have appearing at a horror movie festival? Not much, but who cares? Any new film from the solo-act Texas animator behind It’s Such a Beautiful Day and “World of Tomorrow” is worth watching wherever you can find it. That includes the new “ME,” a tuneful, surreal, and (as usual) sneakily moving 20-minute short. Wordless and driven by music, it’s a bit of a departure for Hertzfeldt, who suggested in the Q&A that followed the screening that if he’s a cult director this is likely to be a “cult within the cult,” but it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s liked his past work not digging this one, too.

Still from I Saw the TV Glow (they’re seeing the TV glow).

The Art That Reshapes Us

Irish filmmaker Paul Duane’s All You Need is Death follows a powerful idea into some pretty dark places. Simone Collins and Charlie Maher star as a pair of song collectors who need an edge to stand out from others in their field. When they hear a rumor of a song so rare it’s never been documented—one sung in a language even older than Irish and passed from one generation of women to the next as it’s unfit for the ears of men—they pursue it despite some pretty strong hints that it holds a destructive power. Clearly a labor of love made with a modest budget, it’s elevated by strong performances and an obvious desire to explore the powers of music—and the sometimes dark truths it can contain.

Swap in television for music and you’ll find the same impulse at the heart of I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun’s haunting follow-up to their 2021 break-out We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Justice Smith stars as Owen, a twentysomething whose memories of his teen years are inextricably entwined with episodes The Pink Opaque, a supernatural series Owen watched with his misfit older teen friend Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) in the 1990s. (Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer if it were a half-hour show on Nickelodeon.) As with World’s Fair, Schoenbrun hauntingly depicts teen isolation and the sometimes perilous search for comforts and escape as Owen sees in The Pink Opaque a vision of the sexual identity that he’s not sure whether to embrace or flee.

Still from Cuckoo (someone is looking for someone else with ill intent).

Keeping Traditions Alive

A post-apocalyptic family drama that would fit neatly beside A Quiet Place, Arcadian casts Nicolas Cage as a father trying to raise two boys in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by strange creatures who only come out at night (and who look a bit like a cross between werewolves and the Dark Crystal’s Skeksis). Familiar but quite solid, it’s helped by strong work from Jaeden Martell and Maxwell Jenkins as teens who’ve only known a world filled with nighttime horrors.

Harder to classify but clearly inspired by classic giallos and vintage Euroweirdness, Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo takes place at a remote, underpopulated German resort overseen by the suspiciously accommodating Mr. König (Dan Stevens, employing an unforgettable German accent). It’s there that the teenaged Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) starts to suspect something odd might be happening (getting chased by a bizarre woman with glowing eyes will make you do that). It’s best not to say too much more and, honestly, I’m not sure I could truly explain the movie if I tried, but it’s a gas.

Still from In a Violent Nature (he’s looking at a violent nature).

Tweaking tradition, Canadian director Chris Nash’s In A Violent Nature offers an alternate take on the slasher film by (mostly) sticking by its hulking killer as he makes his way through a group of campers. Eschewing a score in favor of the ambient sounds like crackling branches (and occasionally gushing blood), it immediately establishes what it’s going to do with opening scenes that let the standard slasher movie character business play out in the distance before the killing begins then repeats that joke for the length of an entire feature. This feels like a your-mileage-may-vary experience and it lost me pretty quickly, in spite of the obvious technical skill on display (though a truly audacious ending sort of won me back).

Despite the temptation of stepping away from new movies in favor of the Overlook’s impressive revival slate, which included a 10th anniversary screening of Oculus with Mike Flanagan in attendance followed by Lucio Fulci’s Louisiana-set The Beyond, there was one classic film I could not ignore. I ventured from the Prytania multiplex to the classic New Orleans theater that gave it the Prytania name—an Uptown institution for over a century that can be found in the pages of A Confederacy of Dunces—for a 50th anniversary screening of Brian DePalma’s Phantom of the Paradise followed by a Q&A with songwriter/star Paul Williams conducted by John Cameron Mitchell. It was a predictably memorable conversation, filled with behind-the-scenes stories and other tales from the height of Williams’ variety show-era stardom (including an anecdote about visiting New Orleans with Lee Majors while wearing a dog collar). The film remains as thrillingly weird as ever, but it also felt fitting to close out the Overlook’s 2024 incarnation with a film that defied categorization then and now and helped inspire those that followed to do the same.