Although New Orleans is a frequent filming location for movies and television because it's cheaper to work in than other major cities — offering a tax incentive for productions that, after threat of being eliminated, has been secured at a lower cap of $125 million (down from $150 million) — it's a city that still gets passed over when it comes to major premiere events, except for when it comes to horror premieres, which is delightfully on the nose.
Since 2018, The Overlook Film Festival has set up base in New Orleans to showcase the best new horror films and shorts from around the world, with big-budget premieres thrown into the mix each year such as the world premiere of Universal Pictures' "Abigail" in 2024 and a pre-release screening of "Drop," starring Meghann Fahy, in 2025. As a transplant from New York by way of California by way of Illinois, I jump at the chance to attend the festival each spring as a way to remain tapped into the glitz and glamour that only a laminated press pass dangling from a lanyard can bring, bragging rights that create a tickle in my brain pushing me to shout, "I saw that before it came out!" whenever someone mentions a film I forced myself to leave the house to attend — making it feel like even more of an achievement — and the thrill of encountering a whole new ensemble of eccentrics from near and far who gather for the same purpose four days in row: watching as much horror as possible and reacting to things in the weirdest possible way they can, like the guy who was so afraid I was trying to cut in front of him in the line to enter the theater for "Drop" that he double-timed it in front of me with his arms out like a bird.
Each year, I comb through the festival schedule the second its announced and make an ambitious list of everything I want to see, which gets shorter and shorter depending on how humid it is outside, if it's raining, if my dog looks like maybe she'd prefer I stay home, or if I just flat out decide to stay home and pray for a screener link to appear in my inbox. I managed to catch four films this year and, you know what, I think that's a nice round number. Next year, I may try to really push myself and go to one of the parties or special events the festival organizes around the screenings, like whatever event it is I keep seeing photos of where people find occasion to put spiders on their faces. That will be a fun one to add and then cross off my list. I'm already looking forward to wishing I had actually gone!
From the worst first date you can possibly imagine to a horror movie from the perspective of a dog, here's everything I caught this year and why you should make a point to catch them too.
Meghann Fahy as Violet in "Drop" (Bernard Walsh/Universal Pictures)
"Drop"
You would think that a screening of a film that builds on the anxiety-inducing AirDrop function on Apple devices would be the perfect opportunity to pull pranks on the theater-goers around you by delivering photos of, I don't know, your cat throwing up or an image of your voter ballot from the 2024 primary election to unsuspecting people's phones, but I heard no gasps from anyone around me that weren't timed with what was playing out on the screen in front of us. But this may be the result of the warning we were issued prior to our pre-release viewing of Christopher Landon's thriller instructing us to leave our phones locked, lest Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions come for our heads.
With a script written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, who share writing credits on the 2018 Blumhouse supernatural horror film, "Truth or Dare," "Drop" is one of those limited location films that uses setting to create a claustrophobic tension, making it so that whatever is happening, it feels like it's happening too close and you find yourself clocking possible emergency exits that do not exist, same as the actors onscreen as they try to strategize their way out of threats of danger and, in the case of this film, bad date etiquette.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Viewer's are introduced to the film's main character, Violet (Meghann Fahy), by being thrown into her horrifying backstory in the first frame, as she's beaten and threatened at gunpoint by her abusive husband who also threatens to shoot their young son, in fits of tears as he watches the violence just feet away. Setting up the inner strength that we'll come to see more of in Violet as the film progresses, we see her put an end to the abuse and protect the life of her child by way of an off-screen bang that serves as an open-ended question: Did she kill her husband? Intended to be as such, this didn't feel very up for interpretation to me because she's referred to as a killer later on in the film and, yeah, she totally did that.
Flash to the not-too-distant future, Violet is now a single mom with a five-year-old who she's understandably nervous to part with for a few hours — even in the care of her sister, "Truth or Dare" star, Violett Beane — as she goes on a first date with a handsome photographer she's been chatting with online for several months named Henry (Brandon Sklenar). Before their hors d'oeuvres even arrive, Henry has the first of about 100 "What the hell is wrong with this lady?" moments when Violet becomes overly preoccupied with her phone, but for good reason. Someone is AirDropping her messages that start off just strange and then escalate to threatening, instructing her to kill her date or — if she refuses, signals for help, or leaves the high-rise Chicago restaurant they're in for any amount of time — her son and sister will be killed.
Apart from comedic relief supplied by Jeffery Self as Violet and Henry's waiter, Matt — who makes their already calamitous first date worse by annoying them with his goofy banter and frequent reminders of how it's his first night working at the restaurant — the bulk of the film is a steady upward build of suspense as both Violet and the viewer puzzle through who is sending her these messages and how she's going to get out of this mess without having to kill a guy . . . again. Entertaining as it is, and effective in both pacing and story, what really sells it as a win is that rather than take the easy setup of Violet's date "saving the day," she steps up again, post trauma, to save herself. Well, sure, Henry does prevent her from falling to her death from a blown out window, but he needed to have his moment too. Aside from that one bit of action, momma was the hero here.
Watch the official trailer for "Drop" here, and see it when it hits theaters in the U.S. on April 11, distributed by Universal Pictures.
Vincent Cassel as Karsh and Guy Pearce as Maury in "The Shrouds" (Courtesy of Prospero Pictures/Saint Laurent Productions)
"The Shrouds"
If there's one thing David Cronenberg's gonna do, it's conure up the most upsetting scenario he can, and then be horny about it. A master at body horror, he has somehow managed to follow up symphorophilia (sexual arousal from watching car crashes), as seen in his 1996 film "Crash," with surgery pervs, evidenced in "Crimes of the Future" in 2022, and now this, "The Shrouds," which has all the makings of a riveting psycho-sexual veneration of the dead but, in actuality, comes across more like a really long Tesla commercial.
In 2017, Cronenberg lost his wife Carolyn to cancer and the effects of her loss are felt in this film, undoubtedly — making it a project to respectively sit with, even though it leaves something to be desired, what with all its mismanaged potential. Centering on a businessman named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) who, in his grief after the loss of his own wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), develops a chain of cemeteries equipped with technology that allows mourners to view the decaying corpses of their loved-ones on high-definition screens embedded in their tombstones, accessed via the GraveTech app on their phones, the message of the film gets tripped up by all the other elements hovering around it, clouding the narrative.
Karsh drives a white Tesla and it somehow becomes a key character in the film, off-puttingly so. He zips around in it, navigating from one location to the next. And in one scene, Maury (Guy Pearce), the ex-husband of Becca's twin sister, Terry (also Kruger), pre-programs a clandestine meeting location into Karsh's navigation, instructing him to let the car drive itself there — demonstrating one of Elon Musk's developments in a film that should be so far removed from even the thought of him it would take another whole feature-length film to detail all the reasons why.
The synopsis of "The Shrouds" is the most interesting thing about it and the first 30 minutes or so are gripping enough that it's worth just seeing it through to the end, but if you carved away the bizarre Tesla drops, the crammed in conflict of a GraveTech hacking, and the slow build to a lackluster and almost silly ending, you'd be left with what this film should have been — a disturbingly heartbreaking 30-minute short about the inevitability of grief.
Watch the official trailer for "The Shrouds" here, and see it when it hits theaters nationwide on April 25, distributed by Sideshow and Janus Films.
Indy in "Good Boy" (Courtesy of Good Boy )
"Good Boy"
Anytime I see an animal in a horror movie, it makes me incredibly nervous because, as a genre rule, it usually means something terrible is going to happen to them. But in "Good Boy," the feature directorial debut of Ben Leonberg, the dog is the only one out of two main characters to make it out relatively unscathed.
A haunted house film from the perspective of a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever named Indy, who is not only a fantastic actor but a nepo baby (he's the director's dog), "Good Boy" tells a simple story by horror standards — there's a guy and his dog, something is clearly wrong with this guy, he makes things worse for himself by going to stay in a family-owned haunted cabin . . . and then.
Shot primarily knee-high, framing shots as a dog would see them, we follow Indy through various scenes of creeping and then crashing dread as though we're hanging from his collar. As Indy's owner in the film, Todd (Shane Jensen), falls further and further under the influence of the malevolent forces within the cabin, the fear we feel is Indy's fear at watching his favorite person unwell and inexplicably turning mean toward him.
Indy is put in harm's way by the person he loves most in the world, but rather than run to safety, he keeps returning to Todd's side, trying to help guard him from evil that only he can see. A good boy till the end, Indy leaves the cabin only when he knows his job is done there and that Todd can no longer be saved. As the credits roll, we watch Indy sniffing the breeze with his face turned toward the sun and can't help but feel heartbroken — not, as a whole, because of what takes place in the shocking ending, but because Indy did all that he could to keep evil at bay, but evil won out in the end.
Keep an eye on the "Good Boy" website for an official trailer and distribution updates.
"The Ugly Stepsister" (Marcel Zyskind/Shudder/IFC Films)
"The Ugly Stepsister"
Writer and director Emilie Blichfeldt's gross-out masterpiece "The Ugly Stepsister" jumps off the premise: "What if the story of Cinderella was really really gross?"
In her director's note for the film, Blichfeldt writes, "I dreamed of being Cinderella, laughing at the stepsisters’ clumsiness. But rereading Grimm as an adult, particularly the scene where one stepsister cuts off her toes to fit the glass slipper, changed my view. For the first time, I empathized with her desperation. The mockery and cold laughter at her expense felt unjust. I, too, have longed to be chosen—whether by a prince or simply a boyfriend—and felt the sting of failing to fit impossible standards. No matter how hard I tried to conform, I could never fit into Cinderella’s shoe because I am a stepsister too."
A Norwegian body horror film shot in Norway, Poland, Sweden and Denmark, "The Ugly Stepsister" is uterly void of cartoon whimsy and helpful, singing mice, but it does have plenty of tapeworms and maggots. If the tapeworms and maggots had burst into song, I would not have been surprised because everything else in the world takes place in this film, but it didn't take anything away from the movie that they did not.
In this version of a fairy tale, Cinderella (Agnes), played by Thea Sofie Loch Næss, is a tramp and a brat, demoted to grunt work around the estate after being discovered having sex in the barn with a hired hand. Competing with her to win the affections of the local prince is Cinderella's "ugly" stepsister, Elvira (Lea Myren), who is encouraged by multiple women at the estate to undergo brutal surgeries to make herself more beautiful. She has cocaine shoved in her eyes to numb them while eyelashes are sewn into her skin, her nose is broken and molded into new shape with the help of a metal mask, and for her last ditch effort, she swallows a tapeworm egg that, in the finale, gets barfed back up five times it size. It's perfect. Just perfect. They should screen this film at high schools.
Watch the official trailer for "The Ugly Stepsister" here, and see it when it's released in the U.S. on April 18, distributed by IFC.
Shares