The Overlook Film Festival is four days of contemporary horror cinema contained entirely in the frosty confines of Mt. Hoodâs Timberline Lodge. âOh, âOverlook!ââ you say. âLike the hotel in The Shining, right?â Please donât interrupt, but yes. âAnd Timberline is where they shot The Shining, right?â Well actually, only the exteriors. The interiors were built on a British sound stage! And the part with the car driving up the hill was shot in Montana. âSo....â So donât expect a creepy haunted mansion when you get up there, dummy. Itâs a very nice ski lodge that probably isnât even haunted.
As for Overlookâs films, the schedule is a well-curated, impressively diverse selection from a wide range of horror sub-genres. I talked to festival co-directors Landon Zakheim and Michael Lerman, who told me they were looking for a âwell roundedâ program, which theyâve achieved. Along with films from circuit favorites like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Nightâs Ana Lily Amirpour (her Overlook contribution is the cannibal-filled The Bad Batch) and Alex de la Iglesia (The Bar), there are strong offerings from first-time feature directors, like Nicholas Versoâs Donnie Darko-ish Boys in the Trees and Dominic Bridgesâ Kafkaesque parable Two Pigeons. That said, only seven of the festivalâs 37 films were screened for critics, so I canât exactly give you a comprehensive guide.
What you definitely should see (although probably not in a row, and absolutely not if you are triggered by sexual violence) are Hounds of Love, M.F.A., and Killing Ground. Each presents a single, shattering incident (the abduction of a teenager, a rape in a dorm room, a family murdered at a campground) and then spins outward to chronicle the aftermath. These three films depict and contextualize the sexual violence central to each story differently, but the results are uniformly harrowing. In a genre that too often uses the violation of womenâs bodies as a cheap form of dramatic escalation, these films feel like they have important stories to tell.
In a genre that too often uses the violation of womenâs bodies as a cheap form of dramatic escalation, these films feel like they have important stories to tell.
So why Timberline? Lerman and Zakheim tell me they were being pragmatic. Mt. Hood is âjust close enough [to Portland] that itâs not a nuisance, and itâs just far enough that itâs a little bit isolated, a little bit of its own world,â Lerman explains. The festival also boasts a number of what they describe as âexperiences,â ranging from a live audio play, to an extremely distressing VR demo about getting cremated, to a weekend-long interactive horror game that appears to be a mixture of an escape room, geocaching, and dudes screaming in your face when you least expect it. So that should be interesting.
If all this sounds familiar, itâs because Lerman and Zakheim programmed the Stanley Film Festivalâwhich, from 2013 to 2015, offered a similar slate of programming at a spooky old hotel in Colorado (where they shot the TV miniseries adaptation of The Shining, for the record). When the Stanleyâs owner shut that fest down, Lerman and Zakheim started up Overlook, which is thematically similar, but otherwise unaffiliated.
âThe whole idea is to create a genre summer camp,â Zakheim says, and that mentality is reflected in the price. Full packages that include accommodations at Timberline start at $1,300âalthough, if you donât mind driving, festival passes can be had for $175-$350. Individual ticketing is available for most screenings, parties, and events, and grabbing one of each could offer a practical way for most people to experience the festival.
But even if you canât make it up there, Iâll be checking it out and posting afterward about all the gory details on for the Mercury. Because Iâve got your back, even if you donât know where The Shining was filmed.