Special Event: Room Temperature

A special event co-presented by The Bijou Film Board. Dialogue: Filmmakers Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley in person   “A purposely tedious and tender poetic head-scratcher of a film focusing on a family setting up their neighborhood home for a Halloween horror house. Just when you begin hating this film, you’ll suddenly realize—huh? I love it. It’s weird, creepy, and maybe … just maybe, great.”— John Waters, Vulture 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. Dennis Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle of five novels consisting of Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. He is also the author of My Loose Thread, The Sluts, God Jr., The Marbled Swarm, I Wished, and most recently Flunker. Cooper’s other works include story collections, poetry, and the essay collection Smothered in Hugs. Zac Farley studied fine arts at California Institute of the Arts and Northwestern University. He is a visual artist who works primarily in film, video and installation. In 2015, he co-directed and co-wrote the feature film LIKE CATTLE TOWARDS GLOW, together with Dennis Cooper. They collaborated again for PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT (2018), which premiered at IFFR, and ROOM TEMPERATURE (2025). Both Cooper and Farley live in Paris.