April means going to New Orleans for one of the best genre film festivals in the world and one of our favorites: The Overlook Film Festival. This year was a challenge for the festival as the 2023 SGA and WGA strikes had a diminishing effect on studio releases, the fest managed to pull in some terrific foreign films, and the short films shined too.
Overlook isn’t the biggest festival. By comparison, it is significantly smaller than SXSW, Sundance, and Tiff. Fantastic Fest and Fantasia also may have more attendees. But, when it comes to getting quality horror films, few can compete with the quantity AND quality of the offerings at this festival, year in and year out.
The hardest part of the festival for an attendee is to develop a schedule to figure out what movies you are going to catch. Every year I manage to see about 2/3 of the films. Inevitably, there will be one or two that sneak past me. That was the case for me this year as well. Liz had to work through some of the festival, and so wasn’t able to see as many films at Overlook, but she is reporting back from SXSW that took place two weeks prior.
As usual, we aim to do a recap of what we saw, and here is a list of the movies we caught:
- Oddity (the grand prize winner of the festival, and hands down the scariest thing showing.)
- Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Human (The Runner Up)
- Red Rooms
- I Saw the TV Glow
- Dead Mail
- New Life
- In a Violent Nature
- Exhuma
- Kill Your Lover
- Abigail
- Infested
- Cuckoo
Plus, there were three short blocks. We will update the site with the impressions from those terrific short films soon! So listen to The Overlook Film Festival Overview and keep your eyes open for these movies. Abigail is already out in theaters. Many of these other films will be out soon. You can trust Overlook. Not a dud in the bunch!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
