Room Temperature + Q&A

Set against the barren sprawl of the California desert, Room Temperature follows a family’s annual tradition of transforming their home into a DIY haunted house—an increasingly unhinged ritual now hijacked by the father’s obsessive vision.
Rejecting the tropes of traditional horror while steeped in its atmosphere, Room Temperature builds its haunted house from plywood, grief, and quiet despair. The cast, comprised of artists, non-actors, and one possibly spectral French teen known only as “Extra,” wanders through the film like costumed ghosts in a stage set they didn’t design. Shot in muted tones and marked by deadpan performances and disorienting emotional shifts, the film lingers in the liminal space between artifice and collapse.
Hilarious, uncomfortable, and deeply strange, this is haunted-house cinema as poetic autopsy, a slow, disquieting meditation on control, longing, and the fantasies we force onto others.

Q&A’s with Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley following both screenings.