Room Temperature

Sat, April 5, 8:00 p.m., @ 2220 Arts + Archives

World Premiere with directors Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley in person

Sun, April 6, 1:00 p.m., @ Vidiots MUBI Micro Cinema

Directors: Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley
United States, 2025, 92 mins, DCP

One night every year a family transforms their home and yard into a haunted house and invites their neighbors to walk through it. What used to be a group effort has increasingly become the dad’s obsessive fantasy that his family is expected to enact.

The new film from legendary underground novelist Dennis Cooper and visual artist Zac Farley is a side-eyed, tonally unpredictable portrait of a family-run haunted house in the California desert, with an undercurrent of menace that evokes the early films of Bruno Dumont. In the lead-up to Halloween, a family transforms their home and yard into a haunted house and invites a local high schooler (Chris Olsen) to walk through it, but it appears the father’s (John Williams) increasingly obsessive fantasies are taking a toll on the family. Willfully eccentric, full of left turns but always controlled and precise, Room Temperature marks an exciting creative breakthrough for one of America’s living masters of regional transgression and surrealism.

Cast: Charlie Nelson Jacobs, John Williams, Chris Olsen, Ange Dargent, Stanya Kahn, Virginia Adams

Producers: Stefan Kalmár, Raoul Klooker, Charles De Meaux, Luka Fisher, Nicolas Brévière, Marcus Chang, Cara Braglia, Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley
Writers: Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley
Director of Photography: Yaroslav Golovkin