Debating the horror genre’s artistic value is tacky. Measuring its success by the box office can be just as boring. But I’d bet you a head-start in a chase sequence that those metrics still steer how Hollywood talks about its longest-surviving obsession at many prestige events.
Not so at The Overlook Film Festival: a community-minded summit that fundamentally reinforced my belief in scary movies and the types of people who make, critique, promote, and protect them.
Co-founded by Landon Zakheim and Michael Lerman in 2013, the annual event started out of Colorado as The Stanley Film Festival, honoring Kubrick before expanding to encompass the horror genre more generally. After a brief stint in Oregon (the exteriors for “The Shining” were shot there,) The Overlook Film Festival made its permanent home in New Orleans, Louisiana. That’s “the most haunted city in America” if you ask event organizers, but only the third most haunted if you’re going by Google (*).
(* Do with this what you will, but one anonymous filmmaker in attendance did report to IndieWire having their iPad thrown to a hotel floor… when they were standing in another room.)
Each spring, organizers celebrate not just horror features but also a stacked shorts program (curated this year by Katie Rife) as well as various other experiential art-forms that go bump in the night. From April 4 to 7, the 2024 French Quarter festivities included a humid whirlwind of screenings, social meetups, and immersive experiences that pushed far past promo or gimmick. (You can read a complete list of The Overlook Film Festival’s award winners here.)
As “In a Violent Nature” director Chris Nash told me of his deconstructed slasher for A24, which screened to multiple packed theaters throughout the weekend (but got a “C” from IndieWire’s David Ehrlich out of Sundance…), “Horror is in a cool-down period.” So too was The Overlook — simultaneously serene and hectic — with volunteers, filmmakers, and “campers” settling into a groove best likened to the pre-shitstorm cool you usually pick up from blissed-out slasher victims relaxing near a lake.
“What’s your favorite fear?” an immersive performer asked me and “Birdeater” producer Steph Troost in a shadowy corner of The Prytania Theaters at Canal Street.
On the festival’s final evening, the Australian filmmaker and I were paired for a spooky, scent-driven experience known as Tales by Candlelight. Troost and I had been mutually losing our minds over a special screening of Brian De Palma’s “Phantom of the Paradise” earlier in the day and were all but destined to end up chatting at a bar later that night. Still, when the prompt was posed, it struck and bonded us: This was one horror question Troost nor I had heard before — and with good reason. Most people fear their fears, only Overlook-types pick their favorite ways to be made afraid.
The Overlook Film Festival will remain a singular memory for me in no small part because it was the first film festival I attended for IndieWire. In a further stroke of fate, the 2024 programming specifically offered a concentrated and complex lineup that highlighted my specific horror interests. As someone who watches scary content year-long in an almost self-consumptive vacuum, I was particularly impressed by a curation that presented a fresh perspective on what’s still scary to contemporary filmgoers while celebrating established horror formulas. (Yes, I am still talking about the refreshing Brian Crano and David Craig’s black comic horror rom-com “I Don’t Understand You.”)
This year screened existentially terrifying works of the digital age — including Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw the TV Glow” and Don Hertzfeldt’s “ME” — before challenging audiences in a different way with the divisive world premiere of Radio Silence’s “Abigail” for closing night. The vampire ballerina portrait, which got a “C- from IndieWire, doesn’t question the purpose of human connection or existence itself. But Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett spurred a worthwhile discussion about the limits of Universal Monsters franchising at an event that also sweetly honored 70 years with “Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
For cinephiles who are earnestly invested in the longterm success of films that actively encourage us to imagine horrible new ways to die, horror isn’t so much a promotional peg as it is a bone-deep philosophy. The genre community is a living-breathing thing. Two tarantulas crawled across my face to drive home what I really loved — and hated!! — about the French creature feature “Infested.” And I may have reviewed “Oddity” from a digital screener out of SXSW, but its wooden centerpiece was lurking around The Overlook much to my delight.
Yes, I’ve seen those types of creative brand activations done at genre conventions and Halloween-themed entertainment events before; and you don’t need a nuanced appreciation of horror or festivals to understand why they help promote movies. But in the context of a lovingly crafted and appreciably challenging four-day event (which also offered authentic turn-of-the-century séances, by the way), these silly moments reminded me what it means to be a person picking fears for favorites.
The Overlook Film Festival takes place every spring in New Orleans, Louisiana.You can find a list of the staff members who worked on the 2024 event here; publicity manager Jason Berger is objectively great.
