The fantastic Good Boy sniffs out the ghosts of the 2025 Overlook Film Festival
Clown In A Cornfield, dog-led horror, and some creepy short subjects haunted New Orleans in April.
Photo: Good Boy, courtesy of The Overlook Film Festival
As it has since 2018, despite being interrupted by the pandemic, the Overlook Film Festival returned to New Orleans for a four-day celebration of all things horror. To be fair, America’s most haunted city probably always looks like a horror film festival in town. From the dungeons-turned-dive bars to Anne Rice vampire tours, the city’s obsession with the macabre is palpable on every street corner. Take a haunted pub crawl, and the tour guide will tell you the city’s ghosts are the result of centuries of trauma, from slavery, from the Great New Orleans Fire, and from the uncontrollable masses that come in for Mardi Gras and leave in a body bag—or, at least, with a killer hangover. The only difference is when Overlook’s in town, the Boulet Brothers slam in the back of their Dragula at the front of a second line parade.
Photo: Matt Schimkowitz
The excitement of the opening night festivities, which included a drag show from the Boulets, carried throughout the weekend. It climaxed with Overlook’s closing night screening of Clown In A Cornfield (B-). A raucous crowd of horror lovers wearing their best Killer Klowns From Outer Space T-shirts crammed into the Prytania Theatre, a cozy 100-year-old single-screen movie house, for Eli Craig’s third feature, and were treated to a surprisingly funny slasher.
Based on a series of young adult novels by Adam Caesare, Craig’s adaptation takes a hard-R approach to the material. Following her mother’s death, Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas) and her doctor father (Aaron Abrams) move from Philadelphia to the decaying town of Kettle Springs, Missouri. Once the corn syrup capital of the Midwest, Kettle Springs has fallen on hard times since the old Baypen syrup factory burned down, forcing most of its residents into the unemployment line. The town’s funereal air leaves the local teens with little to do besides make short YouTube slasher videos starring Frendo the Clown, the company’s out-of-work mascot. So when actual murders start cropping up around town, Sheriff Dunne (Will Sasso) and Mayor Arthur Hill (Kevin Durand) pin the murders on Quinn’s new friends, Cole (Carson MacCormac) and Janet (Cassandra Potenza).
After skewering the genre with his sideways slasher Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, here Craig directs his most conventional slasher to date. But even though it’s played more like a Dimension-era hack-’em-up, with big action scenes and heavy gore, Craig and co-writer Carter Blanchard find plenty of places to indulge their sense of humor. At its best, Clown teases the audience around what is a real murder and what is just another video, sometimes telling that what’s on-screen is fake while still mining a scare anyway. But the humor proves more successful than the horror, with the most memorable elements being those times when the cast punctures scenes with their knowledge of scary movies. Clown rarely ceases to entertain, even though one can spot the ending from a mile away. Furthermore, it offers enough thematic and satirical resonance about the generational divide and mid-American rot to make it a cut above the clown car of circus-themed horror that’s been driving around Hollywood for the last decade or so.
The fun of Clown In A Cornfield gave way to the emotional terrorism of Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy (A-). Perhaps I wasn’t prepared for how strenuous of an ordeal watching a haunted house movie from the dog’s perspective would be. As soon as the camera lands on Indy (played by the director’s actual pup), the urge to protect this little guy at all costs begins to grow. But this film isn’t just a clever conceit or a way to poke at one of cinema’s greatest taboos. Good Boy gets into the dog’s head and evokes the confusion, worry, and stress of an animal sensing a threat outside its human’s purview.
Shot from about 19 inches off the ground, Good Boy follows Indy as he moves with his sickly human Todd (a faceless performance by Leonberg and co-producer Kari Fischer and voiced by Shane Jensen) to a cabin in the woods. Because we’re locked into Indy’s perspective, we don’t know what’s wrong with Todd exactly, but we gather that he received a severe diagnosis, sending him out to the sticks. Mapping a ghost story onto the canine ability to sense illness in humans and spirits in spaces, Good Boy tests the audience’s stomach around how long they can stand dog endangerment. Leonberg says he based the film on the trope of the animals always being the first to know what’s really going on in horror, often barking at an unwelcome offender and paying the price (see: Halloween). And he achieves a technical marvel in his 75-minute first feature, generating both genuine scares and deep stakes. It might be a cheat code to get us on the hero’s side, but Leonberg finds remarkable depth in his animal-based conceit, one that becomes a clear and devastating metaphor.