Swallowed & The Summoned: Two World Premieres from The Overlook Film Festival

The 2022 Overlook Film Festival took place in New Orleans earlier this month and hosted the world premiere of two exciting new indie horror movies. The Summoned is being fast tracked for a July release and stay tuned for a release date for Swallowed. For now, here's some quick reactions from BGH.

Swallowed

Swallowed is a queer movie in every sense of the word. It opens with two best friends, Benjamin and Dom, who are spending their last night together before Benjamin heads off to LA to get his start in gay porn. Dom knows some people who can hook Benjamin up with some quick and easy cash to fund his move to LA and all he has to do is smuggle a package over the border. To say what Benjamin is smuggling and the manner in which he is expected to smuggle it dips into spoiler territory and Swallowed is a movie that delights in twists and fakes outs. It starts and ends as a horror-tinged crime drama with a surprising and squirm-inducing dip into body horror in the middle.

The revelation of Swallowed is definitely the triumphant return to horror by Mark Patton, who genre fans will recognize as the star of the much-maligned but recently-reclaimed A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. After Patton’s appearance as the subject of the documentary Scream Queen: My Nightmare on Elm Street, The Ruins director Carter Smith wrote the lead baddie role of smuggling kingpin Rich for him and reached out via Instagram to offer the role to him. With this performance, it’s clear that we’ve been missing out on an incredible character actor all these years. Alternately charismatic and terrifying, Patton’s performance alone makes the movie worth seeking out. Hopefully we won’t have to wait so long to see him in another movie.

The Summoned

Elijah and Lyn, the couple at the center of The Summoned are a bit of an odd couple. He’s a salt-of-the-earth mechanic and she’s a famous musician. We don’t get much of a sense for how this works or how it came to be because the film takes place entirely at a self-improvement retreat that mostly seems to consist of a house in the woods. It’s a very exclusive retreat because the other attendees include an influencer and a business bro, who the movie assures us are also very famous, although again we do have to take their word for it because we never see them outside this setting. Elijah begins having strange experiences and eventually learns the Faust-ian secret behind these successful people and the role they expect him to play in their continued success.

If The Summoned feels familiar, it’s because it’s a low-budget riff on two of the more notable horror movies of recent years, Ready or Not and Get Out, with maybe a twist of HBO’s Lovecraft Country. It’s too plodding to reach the heights of any of those and it’s lacking in the kind of set pieces or performances that such a familiar, well-worn story needs to be interesting in 2022. The only actor who is given anything fun to do is Angela Gulner, whose influencer keeps the audience guessing and gets the cleverest line in the movie. All in all it’s a bit of a lukewarm effort, a decent but unremarkable retelling of a story you’ve heard many times before.