To round out our Overlook Film Festival coverage, here are five more films that we caught in New Orleans – three of which are heading to Shudder later in the year.
Pictured above: Christine Ko in Drag, about to drink something – a misstep in more than one sense, imho.
Drag
A botched home robbery leaves two amateur burglar sisters trapped inside a palatial home as the clock runs down on them.
Drag has a nasty, tightly-wound premise: a reluctant amateur burglar (Lucy DeVito, also in producing duties with Danny DeVito and seemingly half of her family) is roped into a break-in by sister Lizzy Caplan, and then has to try and drag that sister back out of the house when she throws her back out, while dark, farcical complications ensue. It’s carried by committed performances and a willingness to push its central indignity further than most films would dare. It leans into a queasy, irreverent tone, full of horrible slapstick violence, and chases laughs right up to the edge – and over, as one recurring thread turns a roofie into a punchline, and that joke doesn’t land. A woman acting goofy because she’s been drugged just doesn’t work for the flippant tone the film is going for. What should feel transgressive collapses into something flat and uncomfortable. A shame, because in other areas its willingness to get bleaker than expected is refreshing. Also, your tolerance for Lizzy Caplan hollering in pain may be higher than mine, but for me it quickly wore thin.
Parasomnia
A woman plagued by lifelong night terrors suspects the entity haunting her dreams has followed her into the waking world.
This is an efficient slice of dream horror that does a lot with a restrictive budget, and knows how to stage a nightmare. It lands some decent scares, and smartly constructs its narrative logic – although halfway through it pauses to explain itself a little too clearly. The players commit to the premise just enough to sell some odd character decisions (Where would the horror genre be without odd decisions? Don’t go in that house, you fool!) I particularly enjoyed Stephen Barrington in what turns out to be [minor spoiler] one of the smaller roles. Parasomnia is tightly-written dream-horror fun, sharp enough to stick around in the brain afterwards, and I’m glad someone got funding for a Black-led horror that’s not an extended metaphor for race. We all love Get Out. But Black horror can be other things!
Goody Goody
A home birth during a blizzard turns into a contained nightmare as something unnatural takes hold inside the house.
This slow-burn home-birth horror understands the value of withholding, even if it never quite converts that into a decent payoff. It takes us through one night with a couple who’ve opted to have a water birth in a cabin in the woods – a great example of a Stupid Horror Decision. When the lights go out and something starts howling outside, will anyone call 911? The performances do a lot of the heavy lifting, particularly Colleen Foy as the hesitant midwife. Towards the end Samantha Robinson, as the mother Goody (is that a Crucible reference?), delivers some resonant screams. Goody Goody has a lot of confidence, right down to a perfectly judged late title card drop, but settles into a groove that never really deepens or complicates what’s already on the table. Sadly the ending is dark, but not in a good way. I was waiting for a big reveal, but did I receive one? In all the visual murk, I don’t think so. It delivers a handful of wriggling tentacles and a bunch of loose ends. This is one for fans of ambiguity, shadows, and implausible choices.
New Group
A clique spreads through a high school, drawing students into a hive-like collective as individual identity begins to blur and subsume into irrational groupthink.
In the Japanese high school horror New Group, a familiar contagion premise (think zombies, bodysnatchers, The Faculty…) is given a more overtly satirical edge. This film leans hard into questions of conformity and identity, as kids are slowly drawn into gymnastic formations such as pyramids and circles. Will our plucky heroine and her new-kid-in-school friend be able to resist this Junji Ito-esque compulsion to climb up on each other’s shoulders? It doesn’t always trust those ideas to speak for themselves, underlining them with insufficiently connected cutaway shots of schoolyard bullying and populist politicians. Every single zombie movie already carries this theme implicitly, and bodysnatcher movies explicitly, but New Group absolutely hammers it home where a lighter touch might have carried it further. However there’s enough strangeness in the imagery to keep it from feeling entirely second-hand. The overall oddness, and references to signals from outer space hint at something bolder just out of reach. This is material that might have thrived in animation, where its exaggerations could fully take hold and get seriously bonkers, but even in this form there’s just enough here to keep things watchable.
Trauma, or Monsters All
A visiting writer probing a town’s past stirs up a convergence of monsters, each dragging their own history into the present.
Less a monster mashup than a thematic car crash, Larry Fessenden’s conclusion to his monsterverse quadrilogy lurches from idea to idea without ever getting a decent fix on its themes. You need the sure touch and earned good will of a Lady Gaga to start comparing LGBTIQ+ folks to monsters, but Fessenden’s interest in identity politics lands with all the grace of Frankenstein’s monster conducting a symphony orchestra or the Wolfman doing needlepoint. Fessenden’s indie can-do attitude has been a source of inspiration for many people in the horror community, but here he tries to stitch together his vampire movie Habit, his Frankenstein take Depraved, and his wolfman-needs-therapy flick Blackout, and like a botched experiment the result is awkward, flailing, and fatally lacking control. It’s frustrating, because the spark is there, and there are a couple of good performances – Alex Breaux returning from Depraved as Frankenstein’s Creature analogue Adam, Fessenden himself bringing back his Habit vampire. In fact, Habit still looms large as proof of what this mode can do in the right hands. Here, though, the compositions and editing feel like a step down from Depraved and Blackout, which were already a creative step down, and the script – an author staying in upstate New York notices there are a bunch of gothic monsters around, and causes chaos by blabbing about it – is simply appalling. Go and see Habit instead of this woefully misconceived misfire.
All these films played at the Overlook Film Festival. Parasomnia, Goody Goody and New Group are all heading to Shudder for release on that streaming service later in 2026.
Whitlock&Pope 