There is a Haus in New Orleans

by Tallulah Ghoul

I sank my fangs into the gory, haunted heart of NOLA for four days, living on popcorn and po’ boys while taking in the sights and shrieks of the 2025 Overlook Film Festival.

Though it began at Timberline Lodge, the Overlook found a better home in the bayou. And while the thought of driving an hour to watch horror movies in a snowbound cabin has a lot of merit, I’m happy it went to the swamp instead. For an Oregonian, something about 90% humidity makes the terror real.

I packed 12 features, three documentaries, live panels and Q&As, experimental theatre, parties, and tourism into my dance card, leaving little room for human concerns like sleep or proper nutrition. But when you’re willing to fly across the country to watch scary movies, Maslow’s theory ceases to apply. The human body can run on screams alone.

Some festival highlights:

Due to its central theme, The Ugly Stepsister, Emilie Blichfeldt’s fairy tale body horror romance will inevitably be compared to The Substance. Still, this film approaches toxic beauty standards in a way that seems even more real and somehow even funnier. It also pairs them with a bright synth soundtrack, heightening the fairy tale feel. Like if Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was set in a vomitorium. Who doesn’t want that?

40 Acres finally definitively answers the question, “What if The Walking Dead was good?” In a post-apocalyptic Canada lousy with cannibals, Danielle Deadwyler defends her family by being a stone-hard badass in every scene. The whole cast pulls their weight, but Danielle is the movie. This production has some outstanding debts with local staff, which is disappointing. Hopefully, getting into distribution will fix what should never have happened.

Good Boy is shot entirely from a dog’s perspective. And I’m telling you, this dog’s got star power. Many highly paid actors lack the emotional palette this fucking dog serves up in every scene of the film. Larry Fessenden also has a small role as one of the only human faces you see. Good Boy is the rare movie that feels like it will inspire imitators on release day. So, if it does get a wider release, we’ll see a new wave of pet-based horror and be better for it. There’s not even a trailer cut yet, so I don’t know where this one stands in the pipeline.

Chained Reactions is a documentary built from five artists’ lasting impressions of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama. Each take is very different, but Patton Oswalt gives the deepest dive. “Leatherface is trying to kill the Sun” is the kind of thing you hear at a Halloween party and think about for the rest of your life.

Predators is a highly effective, deeply disturbing look at NBC’s To Catch A Predator. It’s the best form of documentary in that it chases one story but tells a much deeper truth. Is it possible to empathize with men who commit truly reprehensible crimes? Is it ethical to turn the lowest moment of an offender’s life into entertainment? Is anyone learning anything, or are we just, as usual, making bad things even worse? I had to take a long walk after this one.

Other hits:

A live appearance from Barbara Crampton for the 40th anniversary, 4k restoration of Reanimator. I’d previously had the privilege to see this film presented by Jeffrey Combs and the great Stuart Gordon, so completing this trinity felt like reaching across time to high-five my VHS-renting teenage self. Swoon.

Horror author Grady Hendrix gave a one-hour presentation on witches at the nonstop delivery speed of John Mulaney when he was still on coke.

Museum of Home Video presented us with a video cutup of VH1's The Pickup Artist that made me even dumber and even more depressed. This is no easy feat, and I respect the effort to wrangle what had to feel like an avalanche of the grossest footage imaginable to me. Learning about negging is the stuff of true horror.

Ernest Dickerson received the Master of Horror award. Being in a theatre with the guy who shot Do The Right Thing and Krush Groove had me nerding out even more than his work on Tales From the Darkside and Demon Knight.

Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover is strictly for the freaks and was my festival closer. More staged play than film and made with complete disdain for commercial conventions, this story about a horny, stinky gravedigger has more in common with Meatcake comics than traditional movies. The audience for this is probably 30 people wide, and I am proudly among them.

Beyond the programming, the Overlook is an excellent experience in itself. Genre festivals tend to be either nonstop parties or too stiff. The Overlook is a third option that runs exceptionally well while also feeling anti-corporate. I’ve attended enough festivals to have some insight into the stress of running one, but I never saw anyone’s mask slip. The volunteers were fantastic, the show ran like a top, and every conversation felt like making friends on the first day of camp.

I’ll be back.

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Oh, and I didn’t only watch horror movies. In the late nights and early mornings, I ventured out into the even more chilling streets of the French Quarter, braving puke puddles and broken strings of Mardi Gras beads, frat boys, hat dads, and church youth groups, digging beneath the spiritual grime of tourism to seek the spooky history of the colony. I saw the apartment where Faulkner wrote his first novel. I stood at the door of the house where Louis, Lestat, and Claudia lived. I took holy water from a particular fountain and anointed myself before the Comte de Saint Germain’s house. I browsed a half dozen voodoo shops that merge spiritual belief with a carny spirit. I visited Anne Rice’s mansion, a bar where Crowley drank absinthe circa 1916, and St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

When I first stepped onto the cobblestones of the Quarter, I questioned if the gothic mysticism of the city still existed or if Katrina had washed all those ghosts away. After wandering the streets for days, I finally found my answer, scrawled on a brick wall just feet from Marie Laveau’s final resting place: