I had a plan. It was a cunning plan, but it didn’t come to pass. Well, two plans. The Gutter’s own Sachin Hingoo and I were fortunate enough to receive press accreditation to attend the Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans again this year. I can see it now, me and Sachin careening down the 401, I-94 then I-75 in a fire engine red Camaro Z28 like a goddamn cinema emergency. Our vanity license plate reading NOFILMBROS, we’ll stop on the way to solve crimes the cops won’t touch  and help the youth. We’ll refuel the car at service plazas and ourselves at brewpubs, Punjabi truck stop restaurants, college town pizzerias and bbq shacks in the towns on the way. We’ll stare too deeply into the Mississippi and wait 20 years before we tell anyone else what we saw there. We’ll befriend the Fouke Monster and take a Rougarou out for beignets. At the Prytania Theaters at last, we’ll wear sunglasses in screenings and take notes on spiral bound reporter notebooks with chewed up Staedtler pencils we keep in our hat bands like cool film guys. 

Of course, America interfered with that plan. The worst of America rubbing out the best like a shitty eraser smearing it into an ugly gray splotch. But we had a back-up plan. A high tech plan where we attended Overlook remotely–jacked in like Johnny Mnemonic. Still wearing sunglasses and press hats, but this time with long black pvc coats as film data flows down our screens while Sachin and I furrowed our brows and write down copy on tablets. In this plan, I was going to do a round up of movies from this year’s festival here at the Gutter after writing some capsule reviews here and longer reviews at Monstrous Industry. But I only received one screener by my deadline. I am tremendously grateful for the accreditation and getting to see even one movie, but in my foolishness, I had planned for more. Just so we’re clear here, the Overlook Press Office and the publicists who kindly send me films with are consistently amazing and professional and I have nothing but good things to say about them.

While we do not generally do promotional or speculative articles on stuff we haven’t watched, read, or played here, I have done it before when I did some promotional work. So let’s bring some of that energy to the Gutter just this once. In the spirit of the Cultural Gutter’s Switcheroo Month, the month where we do things a little differently, here’s one film I saw and four others I planned to write about this week. It’s likely I’ll write about them later because screeners will probably arrive right after I post this piece. That’ll teach me. 

The One Film I saw at Overlook 2025

Chain Reactions (USA, 2024) written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe

Lately, I’ve really been enjoying documentaries about horror. I recently watched a short documentary about Val Lewton, Shadows In The Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (USA, 2005). I also received a blu-ray for Jon Spira’s The Life & Deaths of Christopher Lee (UK, 2024) and plan to rewatch it soon. And it’s not a documentary, but I have been listening to House Of Psychotic Women (Tantor Audio, 2023), Kier-La Janisse’s half memoir / half horror film history. In its focus on film history and personal experience of film, Chain Reactions fits right in. 

Chain Reactions is not a standard documentary about the making of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (USA, 1973). Instead, genre film documentarian, Alexandre O. Philippe put together a film seminar with actor / comedian / ubiquitous nerd vivant Patton Oswalt, filmmaker Takashi Miike, film critic and historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, author / actor / raconteur Stephen King, and filmmaker Karyn Kusama, providing a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the same film. This is great for me, because while The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a film I struggle with, I enjoy reading about it, or, in this case, watching people share their thoughts about it. 

Each interviewee has a chapter to talk about their first experience of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and their thoughts about the film. I found Patton Oswalt’s segment the least interesting, but that is absolutely going to be a personal thing. Every segment had thought-provoking elements. As the film progresses, ideas and points overlap and Philippe tacitly ties together some others, not only with editing and the order of the interviews, but with clips from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and films mentioned in discussion.

There is some archival material in Chain Reactions–behind the scenes photographs and footage. And the segments are set in a recreation of an abandoned house and shot with some of Tobe Hooper’s favorite techniques. But otherwise, Chain Reactions is five people talking about a film and how much you enjoy that depends on how much you enjoy discussing and thinking about film. I enjoyed it. I like thinking about art, especially different perspectives on art and different ways of looking at a given work. Chain Reactions creates some space to think about a film that’s so immediate, powerful, raw and visceral it’s sometimes hard to see as a film, as art, as something people made at all. And I appreciate that space to think about it.

There is a longer review of Chain Reactions at Monstrous Industry. You can read it here. 

Four Films I Didn’t See at Overlook 2025

Clown In A Cornfield (USA, 2025) directed / co-written by Eli Craig

I don’t hold with clowns. I don’t like them. I never have. I don’t care for their squeakings and squirtings, their giggling and capering. I don’t know which is worse–their painted on manic happiness or their mawkish sentimentality. Both seem a mockery of human emotion. I have avoided films, series and books involving clowns. I have not read and currently do not plan to read Adam Cesare’s Clown In A Cornfield (New York: HarperTeen, 2020), the basis of Craig’s film.

I know that all this makes me a target for clowns in daily life. I have seen more than one clown driving a non-clown car. One was driving a station wagon full of groceries in a Harding’s Friendly Market parking lot. I have been friendly acquaintances with someone who feared clowns so deeply, he created a performance art project where he became an evil clown. I have been tormented by the sheep/clown Pietro in Animal Crossing New Horizons, until Gutter Editor Emeritus Angela Englert invited him to move to her horror-themed island. Friend of the Gutter Kate Laity found it amusing to send me a Christmas tree ornament decorated with Pietro’s visage that came complete with an amiibo card allowing me to “invite” Pietro to my Animal Crossing island at any time. 

It was therefore both inevitable and insane that I requested a screener for Clown In A Cornfield. It was me inviting more clown into my life, because I loved Eli Craig’s earlier horror-comedy, Tucker & Dale vs Evil (USA, 2010). I am excited to see Clown In A Cornfield because of him. And I figured I could at least get an amusing piece out of it. This is how curses operate. As always, somehow, you do it to yourself. 

And so here I am, excited to watch a horror comedy about a corn syrup company’s clown mascot–a clown named “Frendo”–terrorizing a rural community dependent on that company. Or could it be that the community has been terrorizing the clown this whole time? Will the real horror of A Clown In A Cornfield not be the clown but the fact that I was forced to sympathize…

No, I must say it clearly:  Will the real horror be that I am forced to empathize with a clown? 

We may never know. But it is not unlikely that when I have mostly relaxed my vigilance, I will receive a review copy of A Clown In A Cornfield. Then I will know true horror. Perhaps we all will. 

Dead Lover (Canada, 2025)  directed / co-written by/ starring Grace Glowicki. 

You know what I like? Stories about ladies who love their sweethearts so much that they resurrect them from the dead. Sure, it almost always goes wrong. It’s generally a bad idea to re-animate a dead lover or to fall in love–or lust–with the dead. Most of the time this goes wrong. When it does, I spend a film’s runtime muttering, “You don’t want to do that” and “This is a bad idea” as desperate people re-animate, draculize or transfer the souls or consciousness of their beloveds.

Maybe this time will be different. The protagonist of Dead Lover is a gravedigger, after all. She should be familiar with the idiosyncrasies and potential unpleasantness of the dead. Maybe she has what it takes to animate the man she loves responsibly. Maybe she can accept not only the consequences of what she has wrought, but learn to accept and love the quirks of her now undead partner. For his part, maybe he will appreciate a fresh start and won’t scream in horror at his new existence and the dreadful knowledge that he has no choice about his reanimation or the new course of his interrupted afterlife. At least I hope so. No one wants a Victor Frankenstein or Bride situation here. Story aside, the stills from Dead Lover look fantastic. I love how low budget films can get some effects or focus on film elements that films with titanic budgets have a hard time achieving. 

Fréwaka (Ireland, 2024) written and directed by Aislinn Clark

Fréwaka is an Irish language horror film contesting the status of first Irish language horror movie with John Farrelly’s An Taibhse / The Ghost (Ireland 2024). From the trailer and press kit, Fréwaka looks like it makes spooky use of Irish folk tradition. I have been excited to see it for a while now. I have a longstanding interest in Irish mythology and, lately, Irish horror movies. I like a good harrowing now and then and Fréwaka looks potentially harrowing. Siobhan (Claire Monnelly) is dealing with the death of her estranged mother while she begins a new career as a live-in eldercare worker for Peig (Brí Ní Neachtain). Peig could be declining or there could be something folk horror-ish going on with her home. In fact, some of the folk horror looks a bit sidhe-ish to me–you know, the Good Folk–with added classic adult horrors like dementia diagnoses, the death of an estranged parent, long term care, and past societal wrongs that turn out to not really be past at all. 

Once I finally see Fréwaka, I look forward to pondering how it sits alongside movies that address many of these same elements: Hereditary (USA, 2018), She Will (UK, 2021), You Are Not My Mother (Ireland, 2022), I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House (USA, 2016), All You Need Is Death (Ireland, 2024), and, of course, An Taibhse. I also noticed that Fréwaka’s score is provided by the Irish band, Die Hexen, who also provided the excellent soundtrack for All You Need Is Death. 

Update: I have seen Fréwaka! You can read my thoughts here.

Monster Island / Orang Ikan (Indonesia, 2024) written and directed by Mike Wiluan

It’s not surprising that Monster Island is not being released using a direct English translation of the Indonesian title: Fish Man. Audiences might expect more horror comedy and the trailer does not look like horror comedy.  Unfortunately, the title Monster Island reminds me of Godzilla movies–not so much of kaiju in particular, but that there will be an island with a whole ecosystem of monsters. Instead, it appears there is one fish man and two soldiers on opposite sides of World War II trapped on an island with it. This makes the monsters of Monster Island the metaphorical monsters of war, intra-human strife, perhaps fascism, and one cryptid. While the Indonesian title makes me think of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water (USA, 2017), The Creature From The Black Lagoon (USA, 1954), and even the Water Cyborgs in Hajime Sato’s Terror Beneath the Sea (Japan, 1966), the glimpses of the orang ikan in the trailer do not seem romantic or even generally minding its own business like the Gill-Man. And the monster doesn’t seem to be a human transformed into aquatic super soldiers by a mad genius in his underwater lair, like in Terror Beneath The Sea. But I can’t rightly say till I watch the film. 

Two men–Dean Fujioka and Callum Woodhouse–chained together and trying to survive? That reminds me of The Defiant Ones (USA, 1958). And two soldiers, one British and one Japanese, trapped on an island together, forced to work together to survive? Well, that screams Hell In The Pacific (USA/Japan, 1968) to me–a film where Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune play an American GI and a Japanese Imperial soldier trapped on a Pacific island and forced to rely on each other to survive. But Monster Island does John Boorman one better because it’s two enemies trapped on an island with a fish man. Sure, Wolfgang Petersen did something similar with Louis Gossett, Jr. and Dennis Quaid, but that was in space and not a historical period piece. Plus, there was a baby. But regardless, we need more monsters and cryptids in more historical period pieces. It could be the future of cinema. It sounds like a helluva good time.

Update: I have seen Monster Island / Orang Ikan! You can read my thoughts here.

And with that, I hear Sachin revving the engine of the parking lot. That’s my cue to put my shades back on and drive off to more cinematic adventure. 

Thanks to Sachin Hingoo and Ed Glaser for their help with our road trip adventure.

~~~

Carol Borden will see you around, kid.