Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley on "Room Temperature"

"As directors Cooper and Zac Farley note below about their Room Temperature, while there are plenty of horror movies set in amusement parks and in movie theaters, there has never been one set in a home haunt. (Shout out here, however, to the artist Cameron Jamie, whose 2003 Spook House captures one long night in such a homemade Detroit fright den.) But don't mistake Room Temperature for standard-issue lo-fi indie horror."

"For one, the film's measured editing rhythms make the concept of a "jump scale" completely implausible. More relevantly, though, Cooper and Farley pursue in Room Temperature - which is about a family staging a home haunt in their California desert home - latent, hazy traumas embedded within familial structures. For the film's obsessive father, the annual home haunt is a kind of enduring ritual, one that his kids, who include the live-in French teenager Extra, become alienated by as they grow older."

Home haunts convert suburban houses into personalized horror installations that function as outsider art and reframe iconic cinematic terrors within everyday neighborhoods. The film Room Temperature centers on a California desert family that stages an annual home haunt as an enduring ritual led by an obsessive father. The children, including a live-in French teenager named Extra, grow increasingly alienated as the ritual persists. A local janitor named Paul joins the home-haunt crew and gradually perceives the anxieties and obsessions beneath the spectacle. The film employs measured editing rhythms that resist conventional jump-scare mechanics.

Read at Filmmaker Magazine