Guests: Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley - Room Temperature (Premiere)

A special evening with Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley, in conversation with Arno Van Vlierberghe & Obe Alkema

Room Temperature is the third and most hauntingly realized collaboration between cult author Dennis Cooper (The Sluts, The George Miles Cycle) and filmmaker Zac Farley. Set against the barren sprawl of the California desert, the film 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.

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. 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 (1953) is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and director. Since the seventies, Cooper has in many shapes & voices been at the forefront of anything interesting & transgressive going on in contemporary American literature. Best known for the iconic and broadly translated George Miles Cycle, Cooper has written or composed more than a dozen novels, some of them existing purely in the form of GIFs. His blog is probably one of last beating hearts of the internet, a treasure trove of culture, arts, pornography and anything in between.

This is the third collaboration between Dennis Cooper and visual artist and filmmaker Zac Farley. In the past they’ve created the films Like cattle towards glow (2015) and Permanent Green Light (2018). Zac Farley is also featured in Steve Finbow’s Anthology, together with other avant-garde & transgressive writers as Eugene Thacker, Audrey Szasz and Karolina Urbaniak. Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley also contributed an afterword to Derek McCormack ultra-dark & ultra-salacious book Castle Faggot.

• A program by bookshop Paard van Troje

• After the film, there will be a conversation between Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley, Arno Van Vlierberghe and Obe Alkema.